70 



Rev. George L. Gleason, of Manchester, extcncled 

 greeting to the members of the Institute. Natunil His- 

 tory was out of his line and he had never given much 

 attention to local history. He referred to Mr. John Lee 

 and jNIr. Lewis N. Tappan, both of Manchester, as more 

 acquainted with the history of the town. 



The President then called upon the Rev. James Free- 

 man Clarke, who was present and responded as follows : 



I am much obliged, Sir, for the honor you do me, but 

 I feel like one who finds himself among a race whose 

 language he does not understand. I should be very glad 

 instead of using my own voice to hear more from Prof. 

 Morse about the voice of the grasshopper. Little was 

 knoAvn in my younger days about these things of science. 



We were taught at Cambridge something of chemistry, 

 and a very little about geology and mineralogy. But I 

 remember when I first went to live near the Falls of the 

 Ohio, I one day found what I supposed to be a petrified 

 wasp's nest or enormous honeycomb ; but I was surprised 

 afterwards to learn that it was a fossil. In botany we 

 were taught, at Cambridge, only the Linntean system ; 

 and it amounted to learning the names of orders, genera, 

 etc., and we found it not very interesting. Professor 

 Nuttall was there then, but we never had any teaching 

 from him. 



I was reminded while listening to Mr. Putnam's ac- 

 count of the evidence of the movements of races on this 

 continent, derived from the characteristics of the Indian 

 skulls found in different parts of the country, of that 

 collateral branch of knowledge, comparative philology, 

 by which we study the linguistic characteristics of races. 

 Perhaps some of you may not know how much light has 

 been thrown upon the history of the human race by that 



