90 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



long biography might deter them. By the permission of Dr. 

 Fisher, free use will be made of his material, for which this 

 general acknowledgment is gratefully made. 



I have besides read over afresh the appreciation of Professor 

 A. W. Wright, the affectionate estimate of President Dwight, and 

 the six volumes of Silliman's Travels, three on Europe as seen 

 by him in 1805-06; two on Europe visited forty-five or six years 

 later; and one on Canada in 1810. 



For the sake of a personal flavor, may I be allowed to add that 

 during my college course I attended, with my classmates, his 

 lectures on Geology, Mineralogy and Chemistry, and I had also 

 the privilege of being a frequent and informal visitor in his house, 

 where I learned to love and admire his noble qualities, as I 

 enjoyed his fund of anecdotes regarding the men whom he had 

 met and the events of which he had been a witness or in which 

 he had taken part. Hearing Silliman and Kingsley, friends of 

 half a century, cap each other's stories as they sat together in the 

 parlor, after the tea-cups, is a delightful and ineffaceable memory. 



I remember him at that time, when he was not far from seventy 

 years old, six feet in height, broad-shouldered, of elastic step, 

 with thin, grayish well-trimmed hair and a smooth chin, never 

 hurried and never worried, entirely self-possessed before an 

 audience, successful in his demonstrations, graceful in his ges- 

 tures, fluent and sometimes discursive in his speech, loving to 

 hear or to tell appropriate anecdotes, welcomed everywhere in 

 private or in public, a reverent worshiper in the college chapel, 

 where in his turn he conducted prayers, never troubled by reli- 

 gious doubts, an unquestioning believer. While his pecuniary 

 resources could not be called affluent, he was always able to live 

 like a gentleman in constant unostentatious hospitality. Among 

 college professors I have never known one who bore his self- 

 conscious dignity with so much ease and affability, and who 

 extended his courtesies so naturally and so acceptably to supe- 

 riors, inferiors and equals. Among hoary headed men, I have 

 never seen a finer example of conservatism without senility and 

 of never failing enthusiasm, enriched by experience, always 



