SKETCH OF PROFESSOR J. P. LESLEY. 693 



SKETCH OF PKOFESSOE J. P. LESLEY. 



THE subject of this sketch, Professor J. P. Lesley, this year Presi- 

 dent of the American Association for the Advancement of Sci- 

 ence, was born in Philadelphia, September 17, 1819. He is of Scotch 

 extraction, his grandfather, Peter Lesley, having emigrated from 

 Aberdeenshire in Scotland. From his sixth to his twelfth year he was 

 under the instruction of William Tucker, and showed a marked pre- 

 dilection for mathematics and geography. His father, a cabinet-maker, 

 was an accurate draughtsman and an intelligent lover of architecture, 

 and that he was in advance of his age in the matter of education is 

 shown by the fact that he placed the pencil in his children's hands 

 before they could write, and daily exercised them during the dinner- 

 hour in the precise use of language for describing places and things, 

 while obliging them to test the accuracy of their descriptions by draw- 

 ings and sketches, which he mercilessly criticised. A good foundation 

 was thus laid for those logical, linguistic, and artistic pursuits which 

 young Lesley followed up throughout his academical years, and at the 

 University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1838. The 

 acquisition of French and German, music, painting, and the construc- 

 tion of toy machinery of all kinds in his father's workshop, were his 

 recreations out of school-hours, and led him afterward into the ardent 

 study of the classical and Oriental languages, and finally to that of the 

 Egyptian hieroglyphics, those fossils of comparative philology, while 

 occupied with the mechanical problems of geology, to which subject 

 his life has been mainly devoted. From 1839 to 1841 Mr. Lesley was 

 engaged on the Geological Survey of the State of Pennsylvania, under 

 Professor Henry D. Rogers. Early interested in religious subjects, 

 in the autumn of 1841 he entered the theological seminary at Prince- 

 ton, Kew Jersey, and in 1844 was licensed as a minister by the Pres- 

 bytery of Philadelphia. He devoted himself for a year or two to 

 religious teaching among the German population of Pennsylvania, and 

 in 1847 became the regular pastor of a Congregational church in Mil- 

 ton, Massachusetts ; but his theological views soon underwent such 

 expansion that he left the pulpit and settled in Philadelphia, to devote 

 himself to work in the field of science. He was married, in 1849, to 

 Miss Susan Lyman, of Northampton, Massachusetts. 



In the spring of 1844 he sailed for Europe, and walked with knap- 

 sack and blouse through the western and southern provinces of France, 

 through Savoy, Switzerland, and Germany to Halle, where he attended 

 the lectures of Tholuck, Erdmann, Leo, and Ulrici, and returned home 

 in the spring of 1845. In 1863 he was sent by the President of the 

 Pennsylvania Railroad to examine the methods of hardening the sur- 

 face of rails, and to report on the success of Bessemer's invention. In 



