THE SILLIMAN FOUNDATION 



In the year 1883 a legacy of eighty thousand dollars was left to the 

 President and Fellows of Yale College in the city of New Haven, to be 

 held in trust, as a gift from her children, in memory of their beloved and 

 honored mother, Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman. 



On this foundation Yale College was requested and directed to estab- 

 lish an annual course of lectures designed to illustrate the presence and 

 providence, the wisdom and . goodness of God, as manifested in the 

 natural and moral world. These were to be designated as the Mrs. Hepsa 

 Ely Silliman Memorial Lectures. It was the belief of the testator that 

 any orderly presentation of the facts of nature or history contributed to 

 the end of this foundation more effectively than any attempt to empha- 

 size the elements of doctrine or of creed ; and he therefore provided that 

 lectures on dogmatic or polemical theology should be excluded from the 

 scope of this foundation, and that the subjects should be selected rather 

 from the domains of natural science and history, giving special promi- 

 nence to astronomy, chemistry, geology, and anatomy. 



It was further directed that each annual course should be made the 

 basis of a volume to form part of a series constituting a memorial to 

 Mrs. Silliman. The memorial fund came into the possession of the Cor- 

 poration of Yale University in the year 1901 ; and the present volume 

 constitutes the fourteenth of the series of memorial lectures. 



