824 ELIAS LOOMIS. 



was genial and companionable. He had reached middle life before 

 he was freed from the load which poverty imposes on one who has 

 a family to support, but, struggling along as best he could, he made 

 himself a leader among scientific men. His gentle manner and deli- 

 cacy of feeling, joined with a cheerful, even sprightly disposition, made 

 him beloved by his associates and the friend even of those who differed 

 with him in opinion. Few have been permitted to enjoy so many 

 years of unremitting mental activity. Lesquereux was over eighty 

 before the warning came that his work must be relaxed. Two years 

 before his death he suffered a stroke of paralysis, and he grew grad- 

 ually more and more feeble, until he died at his home in Columbus, 

 October 25, 1889, nearly eighty-three years old. 



ELIAS LOOMIS. 



Elias Loomis was born in Willington, Connecticut, on 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 con- 

 siderable scholarship, of positive convictions, and of a willingness to 

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

 might lead. 



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 when many bright boys are still struggling with the readiug 

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

 Testament in the origiual Greek. He prepared for college almost 

 entirely under the instruction of his father. At the age of fourteen 

 he was examined and was admitted to Yale College, but owing to 

 feeble health he waited another year before actually enteriug a class. 

 In college he appears to have been about equally proficient in all of 

 the studies, taking a good rank as a scholar, and maintaining that 

 rank through his college course. He graduated in 1830. 



The next year was spent in teaching. In 1831 he entered the 

 Andover Theological Seminary with the expectation of becoming a 

 preacher. This purpose was, however, changed, when a year later he 

 was appointed Tutor in Yale College. Here he remained for three 

 years and one term. In the spring of 1836 he received the appoint- 

 ment to the Chair of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in Western 

 Reserve College, at Hudson, Ohio. He was allowed to spend the first 

 year in Europe. He was, therefore, during the larger part of the 

 year 1836-37, in Paris, attending the lectures of Biot, Poisson, Arago, 



