14 The Pennsylvania-German Society. 



acknowledged and chronicled hereafter, but this brief 

 historical sketch is restricted to those who have al- 

 ready finished their labors, and of these, the foremost 

 representative, the one who has accomplished most 

 and achieved the greatest fame, a fame that will grow 

 clearer and brighter as the years roll by, is, beyond 

 doubt, Joseph Leidy. His great-grandfather, Carl 

 Leidy, came from Rhenish Germany, early in the 

 eighteenth century, (about 1724) and settled in that 

 part of Penn's province which included Montgomery 

 and Bucks counties. He was born in Philadelphia 

 in 1823. His parents and kinsfolk, all German and 

 speaking the German language, belonged to the 

 Lutheran Church. When quite young he displayed 

 an extraordinary interest in natural objects. Miner- 

 als and plants first attracted him, but his mind soon 

 turned to the animal kingdom, the study of which as 

 a whole, from the human body and vertebrates in 

 general, both living and fossil, down to the minutest 

 microscopic organisms, was pursued with a rare and 

 simjle-hearted devotion and with marvellous success 

 up to the period of his death in 1891.* 



Now, the peculiar qualities which so admirably 

 fitted Dr. Leidy for his splendid career were evidently 

 derived from his German ancestry. And they are 

 manifest also in all the others who have been named 

 in this paper. Over them, however, he had the ad- 



*A full account of his life and labors can be found in a memoir by W. 

 S. W. Ruschenberger, M. D., printed in the Proceedings of The Ameri- 

 can Philosophical Society and distributed by him in a separate pamphlet 

 form. 



