NOVEMBEE 1, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



667 



tianity was to be promoted without the rule 

 of hierarchy. The business of a college 

 was to train two sets of leaders, those who 

 would develop and administer republican 

 government under new conditions, and 

 those who would be ministers of the word 

 of God among a Christian people separated 

 from the Establishment. For scholastic 

 discipline the books and methods approved 

 in the mother country and adopted in Har- 

 vard were the only instruments. Such 

 words as letters and science were not in 

 their vocabulary. Eeligion and law, or as 

 they said, the church and state, were the 

 dominant concerns of patriot and sage. 



Days of privation, anxiety, dispute, ap- 

 prehension and experiment, introduced a 

 time of stability, prosperity and union — 

 years of plenty after years of want^and 

 the second century opened with courage 

 equal to opportunities. It is true that the 

 ideas of original research, of experiment 

 and observation, now so familiar, were 

 hardly perceptible, but science had begun 

 its triumphal march, and the humanities, 

 in a broad sense, were destined to engage 

 more and more the attention of educated 

 men. 



In the first decade, our record of ' the 

 noble living and the noble dead ' includes 

 the name of one who was trained by alma 

 mater for more than provincial usefulness 

 and fame. Dr. Jared Eliot, who like the 

 sages of antiquity, had the cure of souls and 

 the care of bodies. A physician as well as 

 a presbyter, living in a country town, 

 preaching constantly, traversing a wide 

 district on errands of mercj'^, he showed the 

 qualities of an original investigator. He 

 could ask hard questions and proceed to 

 search for their answers ; he would make 

 no assertions that were not based upon ob- 

 servation or experiment, and he submitted 

 his conclusions, by the printing press, to the 

 scrutiny of the world. These are his say- 

 ings : " Entering on the borders of terra 



incognita I can advance not one step for- 

 ward, but as experience, my only pole-star, 

 shall direct. I am obliged to work as poor 

 men live, from hand to mouth, and as light 

 springs up before me, as I advance." 

 Again : " As all theory not founded upon 

 matter of fact and that is not the result of 

 experience, is vague or uncertain, therefore 

 it is with great diffidence that I have offered 

 anything in way of theory which is only 

 conjectural and shall always take it as a 

 favor to be corrected and set right." 



It is not too much to claim that he made 

 the first contribution from this land of 

 iron and gold to the science of metallurgy 

 in a memoir entitled, 'The art of making 

 very good if not the best iron from black sea 

 sand ' ; and he was a century or more in 

 advance of his times in the promotion of 

 scientific agriculture, as any one may see by 

 looking up the six tracts, which he pub- 

 lished in quick succession, and afterwards 

 collected in a volume, on ' Field Husbandry 

 in New England.' His science did not 

 drown his humor, and he has left this short 

 biography of his laboratory assistant, who 

 was skeptical about results and needed 

 stimulus : " He being a sober man (says 

 Eliot) who could use strong drink with 

 moderation and temperance, I promised 

 him if he could produce a bar of iron from 

 the sand, I would send him a bottle of 

 rum. " Such in colonial days was the spirit 

 that promoted research. 



No wonder that Benjamin Franklin found 

 Eliot out and wrote him affectionately, " I 

 remember with pleasure the cheerful hours 

 I enjoyed last winter in your company, and 

 I would with all my heart give any ten of 

 the thick old folios that stand on the 

 shelves before me, for a little book of the 

 stories you then told with so much pro- 

 priety and humor. " Poor Richard, when he 

 ranked ten folios below the wit and wisdom 

 of his friend in Guilford, paid a compli- 

 ment to the collegiate school of Connec- 



