6 CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE ACADEMY. 



him especially to-day to crown a faithful service of many years by pronouncing our 

 centennial oration. But, my friends, I have a great disappointment to announce to 

 you at this moment, and one to which it requires all the philosophy which may have 

 been accumulated by this Academy in a whole century, individually or collectively, to 

 be easily reconciled. Our excellent president, no longer on the sunny side of three- 

 score years and ten, and with whose infirmities in this respect I have a right to feel a 

 special sympathy, has found himself, within the last twenty-four hours only, so 

 oppressed by the heat of the weather, by the responsibilities of this occasion, and by 

 positive ill health, as to be absolutely unable to be with us. The loss is as irreparable 

 as it was unexpected. It would be quite impossible for any one at a day's notice to 

 prepare a worthy address for such an occasion as this. Our story would have been 

 told by him amply, aptly, admirably. You would have had the detailed account of our 

 original organization as an Academy, and of the excellent men who were foremost in 

 its early proceedings. He would have done full justice to every one of them, except, 

 perhaps, to his own venerated grandfather and father ; and our grateful memories 

 would have been sure to supply in that respect whatever his modesty might have 

 omitted. All our other eminent presidents would have received their merited tribute 

 at his hands. For, indeed, there has been a noble succession of admirable men in our 

 chair, — Bowdoin and the Adamses ; Holyoke, the eminent physician and sur- 

 geon, who was permitted to round out a full century of life ; Nathaniel Bowditch, 

 known as a young man upon all the seas by his Navigator, and afterward known to 

 science throughout all lands by his translation of the Mecanique Celeste of La Place ; 

 good Dr. James Jackson, whom old Thomas Fuller might have had in mind and 

 taken as a pattern in his portrait of the beloved physician: John Pickering, 

 h his vocabularies and lexicons and orthography of the Indian languages of 



wi 



North America, — one of the chief founders of American Comparative Philology ; 

 Jacob Bigelow, with his manifold and marvellous acquirements, his sterling common 



his quick wit and abounding humor, and his consummate med 



wi 



and, lastly, our great botanist, Asa Gray, of whom I dare not say, in his living 

 presence,— which we all welcome, — what all of us know and appreciate without its 

 being said by any one, — whose recent Lectures at Yale College, on " Natural 

 Science and Religion," would alone be enough to secure for him the respect and 



gratitude of every Christian reader. 



But it is not for me to attempt to do justice to these and other eminent presidents 

 and fellows of our Academy by such undigested utterances. Their names, however, 

 even if it be nothing but their names, must not, and shall not, be lost to our centen- 

 nial commemoration. 



