402 Memorial of George Bi'ozvn Goode. 



The first instruction in botany was given in Philadelphia in 1768 by 

 Kuhn, who began in May of that year a course of lectures upon that 

 subject in connection with his professorship of materia medica and botany 

 in the College of Philadelphia. Adam Kuhn [b. in Germantown, Penn- 

 sylvania, 1741, d. 18 17] was educated in P^urope, and had been a favorite 

 pupil of Linnaeus. He did not, however, continue his devotion to nat- 

 ural history, though he became an eminent physician. William Bartram, 

 son of John Bartram, was elected to the same professorship in 1782. In 

 1788 Professor Waterhouse, of Harvard College, read lectures upon nat- 

 ural history to his medical classes, and is said to have subsequently claimed 

 that these were the first public lectures upon natural history given in the 

 United States. This was doubtless an error, for we find that in 1785 a 

 course upon the philosophy of chemistry and natural history was deliv- 

 ered in Philadelphia. "People of every description, men and women, 

 flock to these lectures," writes a contemporary. "They are held at the 

 universit}^ three evenings in a week.'" 



The first professor of chemistry was Doctor Benjamin Rush, who 

 lectured in the Philadelphia Medical School as early as 1769. Bishop 

 Madison was professor of chemistry and natural philosophy at William 

 and Mary College from 1774 to 1777; Aaron Dexter, of chemistry and 

 materia medica at Harvard, 1783 to 1816; John Maclean, at Princeton, 

 1 795-18 12, being the first to occupy a separate chair of chemistry. 

 Before the days of chemical professonships, the professor of mathematics 

 seems to have been the chief exponent of science in our institutions of 

 learning. 



John Winthrop [b. 1714, d. 1779], for instance, who was Hollis pro- 

 fessor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Harvard from 1738 to 

 1779, was a prominent Fellow of the Royal Society, to whose Transac- 

 tions he communicated many important papers, chiefly astronomical. 

 We read, however, that Count Rumford imbibed from his lectures his 

 love for physical and chemical research, and from this it may be inferred 

 that he taught as much of chemistry as was known in his day. William 

 Small, professor of mathematics in William and Mary from 1758 to 

 1762, was a man of similar tastes, though less eminent. He was the 

 intimate friend of Erasmus Darwin. President Jefferson was his pupil, 

 attended his lectures on natural philosophy, and got from time to time 

 his ' ' first views of the expansion of science and of the system of things 

 in which we are placed. ' ' 



Doctor Samuel I^atham Mitchill [1). 1764, d. 1831] was the first man 

 to hold a professorship of natural history, lecturing upon that subject, 

 together with chemistry, in Columbia College in 1792. Doctor Mitchill 

 was eminent as a zoologist, mineralogist, and chemist, and not only 

 published many valuable papers, but in 179S established the first Amer- 

 ican scientific journal. 



' Darlington, Memorials of John Bartram and Humphrey Marshall, p. 535. 



