130 
and keeping abreast and in some respects ahead of the ad- 
vancing age. 
Such was Edward Hitchcock, one of the fathers of Ameri- 
can Geology, and one who continued to the close of a long 
life to be an original investigator. A man of ardent fancy, 
impulsive, curious and. credulous; docile and teachable be- 
yond any adult man of science I ever knew; modest to a 
marvel; yet, with all this, a man of sufficient self-reliance 
and determination for the most important practices of life, 
patient of difficulties, persevering and industrious for final 
success in any undertaking, sound in judgment and disci- 
plined in temper, a friend to all, and the friend of all, his 
whole career laid claims to eminence, which would have been 
pre-eminence in American Theology, had it not been for the 
interference of his science, or in American Science, had it 
not been for his devotion to the ecclesiastical and financial 
interests of the College, which he saved from premature de- 
eay, and refounded upon the deliberate sacrifice of his own 
ambition. 
Edward Hitchcock was born in 1793. His father was @ 
small farmer who had learned the trade of a hatter, had 
fought in the Revolutionary war, and was a deacon in a 
congregational church, a man of strong mind and steadfast 
piety; a genuine New England Puritan. 
mother was a high-bred New England woman, one of 
those perfect creations of divine skill by which the develop- 
ment of our race is guaranteed, —a woman of quick intelli- 
eens pure heart, and exquisite sensibility. The som was 
the born both to religion and to science. The keys of 
__ the spiritual and of the physical worlds were hid beneath his 
os pillow. He heard told every morning the tremendous 
: dreams of the Church, and became a poet. The Unitarian 
versy made him a thinker. The Comet of 1811 made 
