PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 29 



u He has denied that shells found on the mountain tops are parts 

 of the great flood. He has declared that if the contents of the 

 whole atmosphere were water, the land would only be overflowed 

 to the depth of fifty-two and a half feet. He does not believe 

 the Indians emigrated from Asia. 



; Every mail from the South brought accounts of rumblings and 

 quakes in the Alleghanies, and strange lights and blazing meteors 

 in the sky. These disturbances in the natural world might have 

 no connection with the troubles in the political world ; neverthe- 

 less it was impossible not to compare them with the prodigies all 

 writers of the day declare preceded the fatal Ides of March." 



X. 



In New York, although a flourishing medical school had been 

 in existence from 1769, there was an astonishing dearth of natu- 

 ralists until about 1790. Governor Golden, the botanist and 

 ethnologist, had died in 1776, and the principal medical men 

 of the city, the Bards, Glossy, Jones, Middleton. Dyckman, 

 and others, confined their attention entirely to professional 

 studies. A Philosophical Society was born in 1787, but died 

 before it could speak. A Society for the Promotion of Agri- 

 culture, Arts, and Manufactures, organized in 1791, was more 

 successful, but not in the least scientific. Up to the end of 

 the century New York State had but six men chosen to mem- 

 bership in the American Philosophical Society, and, up to 1809, 

 but five in the American Academy. Leaders, however, soon 

 arose in Mitchill, Clinton, and Hosack. 



Samuel Latham Mitchill, the son of a Quaker farmer [b. 1764. 

 d. 1831], was educated in the medical schools of New York 

 and Edinburgh, and in 1792 was appointed Professor of Chem- 

 istry, Natural History, and Philosophy in Columbia College. 

 Although during most of his long life a medical professor and 

 editor, and for many years representative and senator in Congress, 

 he continued active in the interests of general science. He made 

 many contributions to systematic natural history, notably a His- 

 tory of the Fishes of New York, and his edition of Bewick's 



