DISCOURSE OF DR. J. C. WELLING. 15 



couch he was as observant as ever of all the "small sweet courtesies" 

 which marked consideration for others rather than for himself 

 even in the supreme moment of his dissolution. The disciples of 

 Socrates recalled, with a sort of pathetic wonder at the calm and 

 intrepid spirit of their dying master, that as the chill of the fatal 

 hemlock was stealing toward his heart, he uncovered his face to ask 

 that Crito should acquit him of a small debt he owed to ^Escula- 

 pius ; and so in like manner I recall that our beloved chief did not 

 forget in the hour of his last agony to make provision for the due 

 dispatch of a letter of courtesy, which on 'the day before he had 

 promised to a British stranger. 



And so in the full possession of all his great mental powers in 

 his waking hours filled with high thoughts and with a peace which 

 passed all understanding; in his sleep stealing away 



"To dreamful wastes where footless fancies dwell,'' 



and talking even there of experiments in sound on board the steamer 

 Mistletoe, or haply taking note of electric charges sent through im- 

 aginary wires at his bidding,* the soul of Joseph Henry passed 

 awav from the earth which he had blessed and brightened by his 

 presence, f 



From these imperfect notes on the life of Professor Henry I 

 pass to consider some of his traits and characteristics as a man. 



He was endowed with a physical organization in which the ele- 

 ments were not only fine and finely mixed, but were cast in a mould 

 remarkable for its symmetry and manly beauty. The perfection of 

 his "outward man" was not unworthy of the "inward man" whom 

 it enshrined, and if, as a church father has phrased it, "the human 

 soul is the true Shechinah," it may none the less be said that the 

 human body never appears to so much advantage as when, trans- 

 figured by this Shechinah, it offers to the informing spirit a temple 

 which is as stately as it is pure. AVhen Dr. Bentley was called to 

 write the epitaph of Cotes, (that brilliant scholar of whom Newton 



* Professor Henry took great delight in the acoustical researches which, during 

 the closing years of his life, he made at sea on board the steamer Mistletoe, while it 

 was in electricity that he won his first triumphs as a scientific man. That his first 

 love and last passion in science still filled his thoughts in his dying moments was 

 attested by the words which even then fell from his lips, in sleep. 



tHe died ten minutes after twelve o'clock, on -the 13th of May, 1878. 



