PROCEEDINGS OF THE REGENTS. 197 



I will gladly resume the work in accordance with my original plan, and with 

 renewed hopes of success. 



Trusting to hear from you on the subject, I am, respectfully and truly 

 3'ours, 



J. S. HUBBARD. 



Professor Henry. 



The investigations to which the foregoing communication relates are of a 

 highly interesting character, and well worthy the assistance of the Smithsonian 

 Institution. The prosecution of the work has, however, for the present been 

 suspended. 



West Chester, Pa., October 31, 1862. 



Dear Sir: For the last two or three years I have been employing and 

 amusing the leisure hours of my old age in collecting materials for brief notices 

 of men and events in my native county of Chester, in the State of Pennsylvania. 

 I obtained imperfect accounts of about one hundred and thirty men of the 

 county, who, in their day and generation, had acquired some character and 

 consequence among their contemporaries of the province from its first settle- 

 ment, under the auspices of William Penn, down to the present time. Those 

 materials were, indeed, very defective, owing to the culpable indifference and 

 negligence of our ancestors in preserving them. But, such as they were, I 

 endeavored to make the best use I could of them, and caused them to be printed 

 in numbers, under the title of Notae Cestrienses, in a newspaper of this 

 village. I cut the articles from the paper as they were published, and arranged 

 copies of them, in numerical order, in three several scrap-books for preserva- 

 tion and convenient reference. One of these scrap-books I shall deposit in the 

 library of the Chester County Cabinet; another will be deposited in the library 

 of the Pennsylvania Historical Society, at Philadelphia; and the third I pro- 

 pose, with your permission, if you can allow it the space it may occupy, to 

 put in the library of the Smithsonian Institution, at Washington, with the view 

 and hope that in each of those depositories, the said Notae may be accessible 

 to any and every one who may have curiosity enough to wish to refer to them. 



My humble memorials of the men of Chester are very meagre ; yet, when I 

 review them, and consider how careless and indifferent our people have been in 

 such matters, I am surprised even at my own success in gathering my inade- 

 quate materials for the undertaking, scattered as they were over so extensive a 

 district. 



I am, dear sir, your feeble yet faithful octogenarian friend, 



WILLIAM DARLINGTON. 



Prof. Joseph Henry. 



The foregoing letter is from our much respected and esteemed correspondent 

 the venerable Dr. William Darlington, of West Chester, Pennsylvania. It 

 relates to a work performed in the evening of a long and laborious life, devoted 

 to the advance of science and the practice of Christian love and charity. Its 

 publication may induce others to render a like service to their neighborhood, 

 and thus increase the inducements to well doing through the desire inseparably 

 connected with our instincts of a future — to live favorably in the memory of 

 those who may succeed us. (Since this letter was presented to the board Dr 

 Darlington has departed this life. He died on his eighty-first birth-day, April, 

 1863.) 





