300 LIFE OF BENJAMIN SILLIMAN. 



persons would not be very adroit adepts in scientific em- 

 ployments. A few of them, however, having acquired some 

 degree of skill, became very useful assistants, but others 

 were clumsy, heavy-handed men, and the glass vessels suf- 

 fered not a little in their hands. During this period, and 

 at subsequent times also, I was aided by private pupils who 

 worked in the laboratory for the sake of obtaining a knowl- 

 edge of practical chemistry. Among the most distinguished 

 of these were Prof. Denison Olmsted, Prof. George T. 

 Bowen, and Prof. Edward Hitchcock, giving them the 

 titles which they afterwards bore. Prof. Olmsted had been 

 appointed to the chair of chemistry in the College of 

 Chapel Hill, North Carolina ; and with a view to render 

 himself more fit for the duties of the office, he passed a 

 year with me at the expense of his College, and became 

 familiar with chemical manipulations and with the various 

 duties of all my departments. When departing in the au- 

 tumn of 1818, from New Haven, for his destination in 

 North Carolina, Mr. Olmsted feelingly expressed to me his 

 sense of the advantages which he had enjoyed in the course 

 of preparatory labor and instruction through which he had 

 passed, without which he said that he should not have dared 

 to enter upon the duties of his station. In that station, 

 during the seven or eight years of his professorship at 

 Chapel Hill, he bestowed important advantage on the Col- 

 lege there, and acquired deserved honor for himself. In 

 addition to his duties of instruction and the necessary labor 

 of preparing his experiments, he explored extensively and 

 successfully the geology of North Carolina, whose territory 

 is rich in valuable minerals, and in facts illustrative of 

 geological theory, which were presented by him to the 

 public in a small but valuable volume, an interesting 

 early record of American Geology. He deposited, also, 

 duplicate specimens in Yale College Cabinet. From my 

 successive classes, and especially from my private pupils, I 

 withheld no important fact with which my experience had 



