BENJAMIN SILLIMAN, THE ELDER. jjjj 



republished in the Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of 

 Arts and Sciences, and read before the Philosophical Society 

 of London and the Academy of Sciences in Paris. His two 

 visits to Europe (the second one was in 1851) were followed 

 by books of travels, both of which were received with great 

 satisfaction, while the earlier one (1810) was highly commend- 

 ed, abroad as well as at home, as one of the best works of its 

 class. He was the first to obtain potassium in this country, 

 and the first to notice and record the effect of a powerful bat- 

 tery in volatilizing carbon and transferring it from the posi- 

 tive to the negative pole in a state of vapour. An account of 

 his experiments with the oxyhydrogen blowpipe was published 

 in the Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sci- 

 ences in 1813. He published an account of a journey between 

 Hartford and Quebec in 1820, an edition of Bakewell's Geology 

 in 1829, and a text-book on chemistry, in two volumes, in 

 1830. It was largely through his influence that the Scien- 

 tific School, started by the younger Prof. Silliman in 1842, 

 which was afterward endowed by the gentleman whose name 

 it bears as the Sheffield Scientific School, was adopted by the 

 college as one of its departments, in 1846 and 1847. Prof. Sil- 

 liman was for many years in regular correspondence with 

 the most eminent scientific men of Europe, among whom may 

 be named Berzelius, Robert Bakewell, Humboldt, Carl Ritter, 

 Lyell, Sir R. I. Murchison, Richard Owen, Daubeny, Herschel, 

 ana Dr. Mantell. Some of these he never knew personally, 

 but was brought into communication with them through a 

 common interest in science. 



