LIFE OF JAMES DWIGHT DANA 



the lights of the institution. The library was small, and 

 could not have been very stimulating to a student of 

 science. There was, however, an excellent cabinet of 

 minerals, collected by Colonel George Gibbs, chiefly by 

 purchase during his residence in Europe. This had been 

 brought to New Haven twenty years before, at the in- 

 stance of Silliman, and was bought by the college, through 

 his instrumentality, in the year 1825. It requires no 

 stretch of the imagination to believe that this noteworthy 

 collection exercised a strong influence upon Dana's future 

 studies. It afterwards came under his supervision, was 

 carefully rearranged by him, and now constitutes the 

 nucleus of the mineralogical department of the Peabody 

 Museum of Natural History. 



Several of Dana's classmates acquired distinction, and 

 among them Rev. George E. Day, D.D., afterwards a 

 Professor of Hebrew in the Theological Seminary of Yale 

 College, who occupied the same rooms as Dana during 

 their undergraduate course. General William H. Russell 

 spent his life in New Haven as the head of an important 

 Military School, and many of the boys whom he trained 

 took an honorable part in the defense of the Union 

 in the recent civil war. Another classmate, Rev. Dr. 

 Samuel W. S. Dutton, was for many years the pastor of 

 the North (Congregational) Church in New Haven. Be- 

 sides these residents of New Haven, his class included 

 Hon. Alphonso Taft, a distinguished lawyer who became 

 Governor of Ohio and Secretary of War; Dr. E. K. 

 Hunt, a well-known physician in Hartford (after whom 

 the Hunt Memorial building was named); Josiah Clark, 

 a teacher of unusual ability in Williston Seminary ; Prof. 

 E. A. Johnson, the Latinist of the New York University ; 

 and Dr. Silas Holmes, who was one of the medical staff 

 of the Wilkes Expedition. 



Nothing has come to light which shows that any one 

 of the faculty discovered in their undergraduate pupil the 



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