22 Kansas Academy of Science. 



THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



SILLIMAN, HARE AND COOKE, AND THEIR RELA- 

 TION TO AMERICAN SCIENCE. 

 By F. B. Dains, Topeka. 



rPHE first two hundred years of American history is strik- 

 ingly bare in the annals of science. Such a condition of 

 affairs is not strange, when we consider the conditions that 

 obtained. The early emigrants to this country were not, as a 

 rule, from the class that produced scholars, and their exist- 

 ence here was a struggle for things material and political. 



Two men only had demonstrated that the New World 

 could produce men of the keenest scientific mind; and they 

 were the "many-sided" Franklin, whose discoveries in elec- 

 tricity had brought him unsought membership in the Royal 

 Society, and whose advice, pregnant with results, had encour- 

 aged Priestley in his classic researches; and Benjamin Thomp- 

 son, Count Rumford, who, casting his lot with the mother 

 country in the war of independence, did his scientific work in 

 England and on the continent, but whose influence in the Rum- 

 ford Foundation extends its material aid to American science 

 to the present day. 



As was natural, the early scientific efforts of this country 

 were directed along the descriptive lines of botany, natural 

 history, geology and mineralogy, and the names of Cutlar, 

 Wistar, Mitchell, Hosack, Bartram and Trooste all deserve 

 grateful remembrance for their labors. 



Chemistry, the science whose course I wish to follow more 

 especially, was, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 

 little more than a name in the new republic. The latter 

 decades of the eighteenth century in the Old World had wit- 

 nessed an unparalleled advance in chemical knowledge. When 

 we recall the names of Black, Bergman, Scheele, Lavoisier, 

 Priestley, Cavendish and Klaproth we realize that "there were 

 giants in those days." The era of quantitative measurements, 

 of a true theory of combustion and of exact analytical meth- 



