17 



do not need to interpret the figures presented this evening by our 

 Treasurer ; they speak a language unmistakable. The Academy is 

 in pressing want of what this city can give. There are those among 

 us who need return but a tithe of the wealth which Chicago has 

 given them, to place the institution upon a basis strong and endur- 

 ing. There is no monument one can raise to perpetuate his mem- 

 ory, so enduring, so honorable, so beneficent, as connection with 

 such an organization. You need not journey to the distant cem- 

 etery to find his name upon an isolated shaft, you find it here 

 in a Building, Library, Museum, Lectureships perennial sources 

 of intellectual cultivation and power, which will cause it to be 

 spoken with reverence and affection, as the years roll on. 



IN MEMORIAM. 



Fellow Members of the Chicago Academy of Sciences : 



In closing an official connection to which your partiality has a 

 second time called me, allow me to give a few moments to the mem- 

 ory of those gone from us ; whose feet tread no more these mortal 

 paths, but whose power is present to-day, and will remain a perpet- 

 ual legacy. 



First would I recall him whose face looks down upon us from 

 yonder wall ; whose youthful enthusiasm furnished the inspiration 

 of the earliest efforts for the Academy, and who, at last, in distant 

 Arctic regions sacrificed his life, a martyr to science ROBERT 

 KENNICOTT. There are some here, and among them one whose 

 means, generously supplied, rendered it a success, who have not 

 forgotten that first Arctic American Expedition. Novel in its in- 

 ception, and in the mode in which it was conducted, through his in- 

 domitable energy did KENNICOTT secure to the Smithsonian and our 

 own Academy, for the first time, a fair representation of the fauna of 

 the lower Arctic latitudes. We well remember, too, the second expe- 

 dition, in the spring of 1865, undertaken under the auspices of the 

 Western Union Telegraph Company, to Northwest America, into 

 which, in spite of delays and complications, unw r orthy opposition 

 and disappointments, he threw himself with all his wonted ardor, 



