ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE. 437 



achievement in a class from which four cadets were assigned 

 to the Engineer Corps, when only one or two members attained 

 this honour in most classes. Moreover, he went through the 

 whole four years without receiving a demerit mark equally 

 remarkable in view of the rigid discipline of the academy, and 

 the only instance on record. Students are generally none too 

 prone to admire one of their fellows who is noted only for stu- 

 dious habits and correct deportment, but young Bache had the 

 personal qualities that win esteem. Prof. Joseph Henry, in his 

 memoir read before the National Academy of Sciences, relates 

 of cadet Bache that " his superiority in scholarship was freely 

 acknowledged by every member of his class, while his unassum- 

 ing manner, friendly demeanour, and fidelity to duty secured 

 him the affection as well as the respect not only of his fellow- 

 pupils, but also of the officers of the institution. It is also 

 remembered that his classmates, with instinctive deference to 

 his scrupulous sense of propriety, forbore to solicit his partici- 

 pation in any amusement which in the slightest degree con- 

 flicted with the rules of the academy. So far from this, they 

 commended his course, and took pride to themselves, as mem- 

 bers of his class, in his reputation for high standing and ex- 

 emplary conduct. His roommate older by several years than 

 he was, and by no means noted for regularity or studious habits 

 constituted himself, as it were, his guardian, and sedulously 

 excluded all visitors or other interruptions to study during the 

 prescribed hours. For this self-imposed service, gravely ren- 

 dered as essential to the honour of the class, he was accus- 

 tomed jocularly to claim immunity for his own delinquencies 

 or shortcomings. 



" But whatever protection others might require on account 

 of youth and inexperience, young Bache needed no guardian 

 to keep him in the line of duty. Impressed beyond his years 

 with a sense of the responsibility which would devolve upon 

 him as the eldest of his mother's family, entertaining a grave 

 appreciation of the obligations involved in his education at the 

 national academy, he resolved from the first to devote his ener- 

 gies to the utmost in qualifying himself for the duties which he 

 might be called upon to discharge, whether in professional or 

 private life. Nor was he uninfluenced in this determination 

 by a consciousness that, as a descendant of Franklin, he was 

 in a certain degree an object of popular interest, and that on 



