November 1, 1901.] 



SCIENCE 



611 



machine which enabled the young tutor, 

 Ezra Stiles, to perform the first electrical 

 experiments tried in New England. A 

 Fahrenheit thermometer was a subsequent 

 gift, and his influence led the University of 

 Edinburgh to confer upon Stiles a Doctor's 

 degree. 



At the dawn of scientific activity in New 

 England we see the commanding and at- 

 tractive figure of our elder brother, Manas- 

 seh Cutler, storekeeper, lawyer, soldier, 

 statesman, pastor, preacher, physician and 

 naturalist, member of the Legislature and 

 of Congress, appointed to the federal bench, 

 advocate of the ' homestead ' policy, and a 

 pioneer among the settlers of the wilder- 

 ness of Ohio. His greatest distinction is 

 the part that he took in drafting and pass- 

 ing the ordinance of 1787, by which slavery 

 was excluded from the Northwest Territory 

 and a grant of the public domain was se- 

 cured for the promotion of education. That 

 is a record to be proud of, brethren of the 

 Alumni, but it does not include the whole 

 story. Cutler, a man of the true scientific 

 spirit, an observer of the heavens above 

 and of the earth beneath, is the father of 

 New England botany. He made a note- 

 worthy contribution to the memoirs of the 

 American Academy, collected and described 

 between three and four hundred plants of 

 New England, and left seven volumes of 

 manuscript notes, which are now in the 

 Harvard herbarium, awaiting the editorial 

 care of a botanical antiquary. Franklin 

 and Jefferson valued him as a friend, and 

 his correspondents in Europe were among 

 the chief naturalists of the dsij. 



About the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century, Dwight and his three professors, 

 who only uttered sotto voce the word univer- 

 sity (though Stiles had written it in 1784), 

 lest they should be regarded as pretenders, 

 introduced a new era in which the progress 

 has been constant and of increasing rapidity. 

 In this new era, classical studies have been 



promoted by.Kingsley, the lover of antiquity, 

 whose keen sword defended the study of 

 classics ; Woolsey, the lover of letters, who 

 introduced to us Plato and the dramatists 

 of Greece ; Thacher, the lover of students ; 

 Hadley, the lover of lore ; Packard, the 

 lover of learning — and by the accom- 

 plished standard bearers still living ; and 

 science likewise had its skilled promoters : 

 Silliman, leader in chemistry, mineralogy 

 and geology, the alluring teacher, the cap- 

 tivating lecturer, unsurpassed by any, 

 equalled only by Agassiz ; Olmsted, the 

 patient, inventive instructor, whose im- 

 pulses toward original investigation were 

 not supported by his opportunities ; Loomis, 

 interpreter of the law of storms and mas- 

 ter of the whirlwind ; Dana, the ocean- 

 ographer, [who wore the tiara of three 

 sciences ; Newton, devoted to abstract 

 thought, who revealed the mysteries of me- 

 teoric showers and their relation to comets, 

 not before suggested ; and Marsh, the in- 

 land explorer, whose discoveries had an 

 important bearing on the doctrine of evo- 

 lution — these all with the brilliant corps of 

 the Sheffield Scientific School were men of 

 rare ability who expounded and illustrated 

 the laws of nature with such clearness and 

 force that the graduates of Yale are every- 

 where to be counted as for certain the pro- 

 moters of science. 



Two agencies are conspicuous in the ret- 

 rospective of this second era, the Ameri- 

 can Journal of Science, and the Shefl&eld Sci- 

 entific School. Benjamin Silliman showed 

 great sagacity when he perceived, in 1818, 

 the importance of publication, and estab- 

 lished of his own motion, on a plan that is 

 still maintained, a repository of scientific 

 papers, which through its long history has 

 been recognized both in Europe and in the 

 United States, as comprehensive and accu- 

 rate ; a just and sympathetic recorder of 

 original work ; a fair critic of domestic and 

 foreign researches ; and a constant promo- 



