BENJAMIN SILLIMAN 109 



mous platform, but only one has spoken so often, Professor 

 Louis Agassiz, and he alone equalled Silliman in the presenta- 

 tion of a scientific theme to a public audience. 



It appears that he began his career as a public lecturer as early 

 as 1831, when James Brewster of New Haven, a manufacturer 

 of carriages, persuaded Silliman and his colleague Olmsted to 

 give courses of lectures to mechanics and others who could not 

 attend instruction in the day. It is said that this was the first 

 time in our country when college professors went out to lecture to 

 the people upon natural and mechanical science. In following 

 years, we hear of this popular exponent of science in Hartford, 

 Boston, Lowell, New York and Baltimore. Still later, he went 

 to Mobile, New Orleans and Natchez. In 1852 he lectured 

 before the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and in 1855, 

 when he was seventy-five years old, he acceded to a repeated 

 request and lectured in St. Louis. 



Silliman regarded the Lowell lectures as the crowning success 

 of his professional life and this was doubtless true of his appear- 

 ance in public. His real distinction, however, did not rest on 

 these transient victories, but on his career at home as a pro- 

 fessor in Yale College and on his long service in maintaining the 

 American Journal of Science. 



In these days when scientific periodicals are numerous, and 

 when every branch of investigation has its special journal, it 

 requires some effort of the imagination to appreciate the state 

 of things in the early part of the last century. Three learned 

 societies, the American Academy in Boston, the American 

 Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and the Connecticut Acad- 

 emy in New Haven, were engaged in the publication of memoirs. 

 The American Journal of Mineralogy, edited by Dr. Archibald 

 Bruce in 1810, died in early childhood at the age of one year. 

 As Silliman was traversing Long Island Sound one day, in 1817, 

 he met Colonel George Gibbs who urged upon him the estab- 

 ishment of a new journal of science, "that we might not only 

 secure," he says, " the advantages already gained, but make 

 advances of still more importance." After much consideration 



