LOUIS F. DE POURTALfcS. 435 



valuable improvements for facilitating the education of the blind, but 

 much of the school apparatus now in use is liis invention. 



In 1838 he resigned his position at the Perkins Institution, and 

 from that time devoted himself to his inventions. These included im- 

 proved forms of printing, stamping, and punching presses; machines 

 for cutting paper, cards, and sheet metal, for planing stereotype plates, 

 and for laying out the teeth of gear wheels ; improvements in hand- 

 stamps, couplings for shafts, a new form of steam generator, a register- 

 ing dynamometer, a gas regulator, etc. For these inventions he has 

 received no less than nine medals of bronze, silver, and gold from 

 different corporations in recognition of his extraordinary mechanical 

 achievements. 



Mr. Ruggles earnestly advocated the establishment by the state, city, 

 or by an endowed corporation, of what he called " Developing Schools 

 and School Shops," in which a boy after leaving the common school 

 should be taught that trade, art, or calling for which he is best fitted 

 by nature ; the object of the developing school being to ascertain by 

 actual experiment, in a series of miniature workshops, the occupation 

 best adapted to the capacity of the pupil. 



Mr. Ruggles also advocated the establishment of a " Museum of 

 ]\Iechanism " for the use of students and inventors, which should contain 

 a complete collection of kinematic models, as well as types of important 

 machines. These two projects occupied him exclusively for the last 

 years of his life up to the time of his death, which took place at 

 Keene, N. H., May 28, 1880. 



Mr. Ruggles was always greatly interested in technical education, 

 and was ever ready to aid in perfecting the apparatus for instruction 

 in aj)plied science. 



LOUIS F. DE POURTALES. 



Loris F. DE PouRTALES was born in Xeuchatel on the 4th of 

 March. 182-i, and died at Beverly Farms, on the 17th of July, 1880, 

 in the fifty-seventh year of his age, sinking after a severe illness under 

 an internal malady. The blow fell the more heavily upon his family 

 and friends and upon his scientific colleagues, because his fine constitu- 

 tion, combined with a manly vigor of body and mind, had seemed to 

 defy disease and to promise years of activity. 



Educated as an engineer, he showed from boyhood a predilection 

 for natural history. He was a favorite student of Professor Agassiz, 

 and when only a lad of seventeen had shared bis labors on the glacier 



