324 PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



any and Agriculture ; third, General Zoology of the State." At 

 first he planned to do no more than collate and arrange such 

 material as had been accumulated by his predecessors ; but he 

 soon found this very unsatisfactory, and, abandoning this plan, 

 he undertook to go over the whole ground anew. He had for 

 years been unknowingly preparing for just this task, and he 

 threw himself into it with his accustomed energy and devotion, 

 and suspended all other work; but ere long his overtaxed 

 strength gave way, and his last illness was upon him. At first 

 he seemed unwilling to lay aside a task so congenial, and 

 which he so greatly desired to finish; but soon his naturally 

 quiet and trustful disposition overcame all discontent, and in 

 full acquiescence in the will of the God in whom he had always 

 trusted and whom he had tried to serve, he came to the end in 

 peace, on January 19, 1856. At this time he also held the pro- 

 fessorship of Natural History in the University of Vermont, to 

 which he had been appointed in 1852. 



His friend for over a score of years, Dr. Thomas M. Brewer, 

 editor of the Boston Atlas, and himself a naturalist of no small 

 ability, thus referred to Prof. Thompson's death : " His loss, 

 both as a citizen and a public man he has not left his superior 

 in science behind him in his own State is one of no ordinary 

 character. We have known him long and well ; and in speak- 

 ing of such a loss we know not which most to sympathize with, 

 the family from whom has been taken the upright, devoted, and 

 kind-hearted head, or that larger family of science who have 

 lost an honoured and most valuable member. Modest and 

 unassuming, diligent and indefatigable in his scientific pur- 

 suits, attentive to all, whether about him or at a distance, and 

 whether friends or strangers, no man will be more missed, not 

 merely in his immediate circle of family and friends, but in 

 that larger sphere of the lovers of natural science, than Zadoc 

 Thompson." 



When his death was announced to the Boston Society of 

 Natural History, of which he was a member, Prof. William B. 

 Rogers took occasion to express the high respect in which he 

 had held him as a thorough and persevering worker in geology, 

 saying that he possessed a larger amount of accurate practical 

 knowledge than would have been supposed from his modest 

 and retiring manners, and exhibited a great natural sagacity 

 in those departments of science which he loved. 



