Professor Blake was twice married, and his sec- 

 ond wife, Elizabeth Ellery Vernon, survives him. By 

 his first wife, Helen M. Rood, who died in 1869, he 

 leaves a daughter, Alida Gouverneur, married in 1881 

 to Barclay Hazard of Santa Barbara, California, and 

 a son, Eli Whitney Blake, now of Syracuse, N. Y. 



Professor Blake inherited exceedingly strong me- 

 chanical and scientific tendencies, and was an inde- 

 fatigable worker in the laboratory. His experiments 

 extended into all departments of physics, and were 

 generally made with apparatus designed and con- 

 structed by himself. It has been deeply and widely 

 regretted that the excessive routine duties of his po- 

 sition prevented his following the marked bent of his 

 genius toward scientific investigation and invention. 

 The little that he had leisure to do in this direction 

 was of such quality as to make his name known and 

 esteemed in the scientific world, both in this country 

 and abroad. His beautiful device for photographing 



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