A MEMOIR OF ELIAS LOOMIS.* 



Bj H. A. Newton. 



The President aiul Fellows of Yale College have requested that in 

 this i^iiblic place and mauner, I should give au accouut of the life, 

 scientific activity, and public services of our late colleague, Prof. 

 Elias Looiuis. It is a pleasure to perform the duty thus laid upon me. 

 Tile hours of intercourse I have had with him, and his generous confi- 

 dences, are precious treasures of my life. And I hope you will find it 

 worth your while to have turned away from other thoughts for a single 

 hour, to listen to the account of what, during near three score years of 

 mature life, our colleague was doing for science, and through science 

 for man. 



Elias Loomis was born in the little hamlet of Willington, Connecti- 

 cut, August 7, 1811. His father, the Rev. Hubbell Loomis, was pastor 

 in that country parish from 1804 to 1828. He was a man possessed of 

 considerable scholarship, of positive convictions, and of a willingness 

 to follow at all hazards wherever truth and duty, as he conceived them, 

 might lead. He had studied at Union College, in the class of 1799, 

 though apparently he did not finish the college course with his class. 

 He is enrolled with that class in Union College, and he also received, 

 in 1812, the honorary degree of Master of Arts from Yale College. At 

 a Inter date he went to Illinois, and there was instrumental in founding 

 the institution which afterwards became Shurtleff College. 



Although the boy inherited from his father a mathematical taste, yet 

 his love for the languages also was shown at a very early age. At an 

 age at which many bright boys are still struggling with the reading of 

 English, he is reported to have been reading with ease the New Testa- 

 ment in the original Greek. He prepared for college almost entirely 

 under the instruction of his father. He was, for a single winter only, 

 at the Academy at Monson, Massachusetts. Owing in part to feeble 

 health he was more disposed, in those early years, to keep to his books 

 than to roam with other boys over the Willington hills. Jn later life 



* A memorial address, delivered in Osborn Hall (Yale Collej^e, Now Haven, Con- 

 necticut), April 11, 1690. (From the Amencan Journal of Science, June, 1890, vol. 

 XXXIX, pp. 427-455.) 



r4i 



