34 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHItfGTOK 



the three kingdoms of nature in our land. In France his visits 

 to the museums and other establishments, with the inquiries of 

 Academicians and other men of science and letters respecting 

 this country, and their encomiums on the Philosophical Society 

 of Philadelphia, suggested to him the idea of engaging his native 

 State to do something in the same good but neglected cause."* 



The Academy, from the first, was devoted chiefly to the physi- 

 cal sciences, and the papers in its memoirs for the most part 

 relate to astronomy and meteorology. 



Among its early members I find the names of but two natural- 

 ists : The Rev. Manasseh Cutler, pastor of Ipswich Hamlet, one 

 of the earliest botanists of New England,! and William Dan- 

 dridge Peck [b. 1763, d. 1882], the author of the first paper on 

 systematic zoology ever published in America, a " Description 

 of four remarkable fishes, taken near the Piscataqua in New 

 Hampshire," published in 1794^ Peck, after graduating at 

 Harvard, lived at Kittery, N. H., and first became interested in 

 natural history by reading a wave-worn copy of Linnets " Sys- 

 tem of Nature," which he obtained from the ship which was 

 wrecked near his house. He became a good entomologist, and 

 communicated much valuable material to Kirby in England, and 

 was also one of our first writers on the fungi. He was the first 

 to occupy the chair of natural history in Harvard University, to 

 which he was appointed in 1800. 



The Rev. Dr. Jedediah Morse [b. 1761, grad. Yale, 1783, 

 d. 1826] was the earliest of American geographers, and appears, 

 especially in the later gazetteers published by him, to have printed 

 important facts concerning the number and geographical distribu- 

 tion of the various Indian tribes. 



The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded 



*KIRTLAND: Mem. Amer. Acad. New Series, vol. i, p. xxii. 



t See previous address, p. 95. 



J Mem. Amer. Acad. Sci., ii, Part ii, p. 46. 1797. 



