March 9, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



363 



lections of considerable value were pur- 

 chased. From these, before the opening of 

 the school, he formed a very fair working 

 collection of minerals and a smaller geo- 

 logical collection. 



An assay room, with a furnace for every 

 four students, and a chemical laboratory 

 were fitted up in one of the cellars. As 

 one of the first students writes: " Though 

 the actual state of these necessary aids to 

 study was not good, the collections were all 

 planned on a great scale and as far as pos- 

 sible the work was done thoroughly. The 

 assay laboratory was the best in the coun- 

 try, the crystal models for every day use 

 more abundant and complete than in any 

 other school in the world. The best design 

 was sought in tables and cabinets, and with 

 all its shortcomings the new institution not 

 only gave full promise of its present state 

 of perfection, but was in fact superior in 

 some respects to any existing at the time." 



On November 15, 1864, the school opened 

 with fifteen students, which by the end of 

 the month had risen to twenty-nine and a 

 little later to forty-three, the list including 

 graduates of common schools and colleges, 

 business men and civil engineers in full 

 practice. 



Early in 1865 the trustees recognized the 

 success of the experiment and definitely 

 made the School of Mines a coordinate 

 branch of Columbia College. It has stead- 

 ily developed, widening by the addition 

 of courses in civil engineering, chemistry, 

 architecture, electrical engineering, sani- 

 tary engineering and mechanical engineer- 

 ing into the existing cluster of schools in 

 applied science under one faculty, with 

 1300 graduates and over 2000 others who 

 have attended partial or special courses. 



In the first four years of the School of 

 Mines Dr. Egleston devoted himself to the 

 preparation of lectures in mineralogy and 

 metallurgy, to the accumulating and bring- 

 ing into shape the mineralogical collection 



and to the preparation of needed text-books. 

 All his publications prior to 1872, with the 

 exception of a report upon a ' geological 

 and Agricultural Survey of the first hun- 

 dred miles of the Union Pacific Railroad,' 

 which he conducted in 1866,were text-books, 

 tables and catalogues for the use of stu- 

 dents of the School of Mines. It is note- 

 worthy that while Dr. Egleston's first love 

 was mineralogy and, as he expressed it, he 

 " only took charge of metallurgy because at 

 the time he could not persuade anyone else 

 to take it," yet after the completion of his 

 text-books in mineralogy he did little or no 

 work in this direction, except in the devel- 

 opment of the collection. In the collection 

 work he never relaxed and even the year of 

 his retirement, when grievously broken in 

 health, insisted on personally choosing and 

 setting in the new specimens. 



In metallurgy, on the contrary, he pub- 

 lished nearly one hundred books and papers, 

 covering a wide field and to a very great 

 extent the result of data collected in his 

 yearly trips to different parts of the world. 

 This complete passing into metallurgy was 

 practically coincident with and in a meas- 

 ure caused by the founding of the']American 

 Institute of Mining Engineers in 1871. Dr. 

 Egleston was approved for membership at 

 the first meeting and thereafter for over 

 twenty years was one of its most vigorous 

 members, twice a manager, three times vice- 

 president, and in 1887 president. He con- 

 tributed to their transactions over thirty 

 articles, and in this same period he pub- 

 lished over twenty articles, principally 

 metallurgical, in the School of Mines Quar- 

 terly, and contributed also papers to the 

 •American Society of Civil Engineers and 

 American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 

 The New York Academy of Sciences, and 

 in the London Engineering he published a 

 long series of articles upon the Metallurgy 

 of Silver, Gold and Mercury in the United 

 States, which, with other matter, were re- 



