72 
and crowned with gray hairs. The years of our eldest and 
youngest member differ by more than half a century. Yet 
the first summons came, not to any of the great masters in 
science who give its lustre to the new gem with which an ° 
afflicted but regenerate land would fain crown her aching 
brows ; not to those who might well claim to have finished 
the work on earth, which their talents and opportunities 
seemed to mark out for them;—it came to one of the 
youngest in our ranks, — the forty-sixth of the original fifty 
in order of age, — to one whose work seemed chiefly in the 
future, and from whom we expected bright laurels for the 
Academy and for America. 
When in April, 1863, we assembled for the great work of | 
founding a National Academy, none was more hopeful, none 
more buoyant, none more impressed with the magnitude and 
import of our new duties, than he. It was the realization of 
the dream of his maturer years, the new Atlantis of his sci- 
entific aspiration, and his heart was full of bright anticipa- 
tions, tinged with all the hues which a noble enthusiasm 
could bestow. 
“A better Three Days for science were never spent,” he 
wrote to his brother ; and to his pastor in Washington, “The — 
inauguration of this Academy marks the most important 
epoch ever witnessed by Science in America ; — we say iD 
the world.” 
In less than four months after that meeting in New York, 
his generous, fervid heart had ceased to beat. He died 
1863, August 16, twenty-one days before the completion of 4 
his fortieth year. 
The custom has always seemed to me an eminently proper 
one, which prefaces the history of a life by some mention 
and notice of ancestry. For, — whether we adopt the Euro- 
pean notion that the ancestor ennobles his descendant by : 
