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PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



have attended my own academic funeral, and many were the 

 mourners on the occasion." The corporation requested him 

 to continue as a professor emeritus, with the right to vote in 

 the academical and medical faculties. His professorship was 

 divided, and he had the satisfaction of seeing his son placed 

 in the chair of Chemistry, and his son-in-law, Prof. James D. 

 Dana, in that of Geology and Mineralogy. The name of Silli- 

 man was given to both chairs. 



Prof. Silliman was still to continue a prominent figure be- 

 fore the public, kept so by other events than those connected 

 with science and the affairs of the college. A few months 

 after his resignation the Kansas-Nebraska controversy rose 

 to its height, and the Republican party was born amid the 

 convulsions it excited. Prof. Silliman had always abhorred 

 slavery, and he saw in these disputes great moral issues, and 

 the question of the equal rights of citizens of all the States to 

 settle in the Territories and defend themselves there. His 

 active interest in these matters, and the works by which he 

 showed it, called out bitter partisan reprobation, and this in 

 turn invoked eloquent and deserved eulogies of his pure char- 

 acter and his attainments irt science from Senators Foster and 

 Dixon in the United States Senate. 



Prof. Silliman kept even pace with the progress of sci- 

 ence and scientific ideas as they were developed through all 

 his career, and let his religious faith shine at the same time 

 with a light of even brilliancy. The possibility that there was 

 a conflict or could be a conflict does not seem even to have 

 occurred to him. From his earliest college days, piety and a 

 firm devotion in religious faith seem to have formed a promi- 

 nent side of his character ; yet he never hesitated to accept 

 the most startling discovery, when it proved deserving accept- 

 ance. " Now, at eighty-two and a half years of age," he says, 

 March i, 1862, "I can truly declare that, in the study and ex- 

 hibition of science to my pupils and my fellow-men, I have 

 never forgotten to give all the honour and glory to the infinite 

 Creator, happy if I might be the honoured interpreter of a por- 

 tion of his works, and of the beautiful structure and benefi- 

 cent laws discovered therein by the labours of many illustrious 

 predecessors. For this I claim no merit. It is the result to 

 which right reason and sound philosophy, as well as religion, 

 would naturally lead. While I have never concealed my con- 



