Forty-second Annual Meeting. 27 



were years of enormous value to American science, not only for 

 the men who were trained in the old laboratory at Yale — men 

 like Dana (the great mineralogist) and Johnson (the pioneer 

 in agricultural chemistry) — not only for the publication of the 

 American Journal of Science, which ''was for two-thirds of a 

 century the most prominent register of the scientific work of 

 the continent," but also for what these years meant in the edu- 

 cation of part at least of the American people into an appre- 

 ciation of the value of scientific work and investigation as it 

 relates to the welfare of the state. Unless we consider the con- 

 ditions in America seventy-five or one hundred years ago, we 

 can hardly appreciate the services of Silliman, Hare, Griscom 

 and others in their efforts toward popular scientific instruction. 

 The educative value of it cannot be directly estimated, but its 

 results were far-reaching, and to-day we are reaping its bene- 

 fits. 



Silliman was a man of broad interests and literary skill. 

 His accounts of a journey to Canada, of his year in England in 

 1805-'06, and of his travels on the continent fifty years later, 

 are still worth reading. One phase of his civic activity relates 

 directly to our own state. He was instrumental in furnishing 

 with rifles one of the New England colonies which made its 

 way to Kansas, and later he signed a remonstrance which was 

 forwarded to President Buchanan protesting against the use 

 of the United States troops in enforcing the slave laws. For 

 this stand he was bitterly assailed in the press and in the senate 

 of the United States. In the latter body a defense and eulogy 

 of Professor Silliman was pronounced by Senator Foster and 

 Senator Dixon. In other fields also Silliman showed the wide 

 range of his interests. 



Robert Hare was born in Philadelphia in 1781, and in the 

 same city spent the seventy-seven years of his long and fruit- 

 ful life. His early training differed from that of Silliman and 

 Cooke, in that it lacked the rigid classical drill they had both 

 passed through. His predilection toward chemistry manifested 

 itself at an early age and was fostered by his membership in 

 the Philadelphia Chemical Society, where his associates and 

 teachers were Priestley, Woodhouse and Seybert, the latter 

 being a product of the School of Mines in Paris. From 1818 

 to 1847, Hare was professor in the University of Pennsylvania, 

 where like Silliman he exercised a great influence as a teacher 

 and exponent of scientific truth. He had, however, what Silli- 



