PROFESSOR BENJAMIN SILLIMAN, JR. 637 



offspring of his heart and labors had, by the benefactions of Sheffield, been placed 

 on the high road to prosperity. Immediately other scientific schools, technolog- 

 ical institutes, and industrial colleges, began to follow in the lead, until to-day we 

 see them scattered as widely as our common schools. 



Yet this was not all, for Prof. Silliman continued a teacher to the end ; nor 

 should we forget that physicists like George F. Barker were his pupils, that nat- 

 uralists like Marsh own his guidance, and that through his influence, perhaps 

 more than any other's, the munificence of the great philanthropist laid deeply the 

 foundations of the Peabody Museum, with its already startling achievements. 



But others, whose evidence is not hearsay, are telling more vividly the story 

 of the debt we owe him. After all, lighting the fires of that educational revolu- 

 tion of the fifties was not furnishing the fuel, nor could the momentum of the 

 new engine on the highway of learning be maintained by projecting into it the 

 Nortons and the Gilmans. Science was yet to be popularized and the raison £ 

 etre of technology must appear. 



Probably no chemist in America has so often acted as consulting expert. 

 New and great industries, like petroleum, have arisen at his bidding and 

 everywhere experiment and waste have dwindled at his command. Besides the 

 early applications of science with which his name is linked, and the reports upon 

 matters referred to his committee by the National Government during the war, I 

 recall, among a multitude of others in recent years, laborious investigations upon 

 water-gas for illumination and fuel, upon the purification of coal-gas, upon mar- 

 , bleized or granite iron-ware, upon the fitness for industrial purposes of the water 

 supply of towns, and upon the burning of bagasse and other wet fuels. This but 

 hints at the variety of his studies and the range of his association with men of 

 affairs. It is to works like these that we must look for the continuation of the 

 liberal support which even pure science is now receiving from the productive 

 arts. 



"To love her," said The Tattler of Lady Hastings, "was a liberal educa- 

 tion." To have access to Prof. Silliman's study, was to lay the foundations of 

 character. It was to make all lovely things seem still more lovely, to learn the 

 worth of easy circumstances, of domestic peace, of gentle sympathy, of devotion 

 to duty, of learning, manners, and modesty, of simplicity when fortune smiles, of 

 unswerving fortitude when she frowns. His library was a large room, blending 

 by ample bay window with the garden. Its stretch of floor was broken by thick 

 and kindly rugs, by escritoire and reading desk, by map cases, easels, and quaint 

 chairs. Its mantel over-arched a grate of flaming coal which cast a glow like 

 the peaceful love that reigned there. Piled high around were line after line 

 and tier after tier of scientific periodicals and books, most cherished if not sole 

 return from half a century's devotion to the American fournal. The sustained 

 and serious, but bright and cheerful, occupation of the family, the earnest but 

 above all kindly face of the master, complete a picture such as we love to hang 

 on memory's wall. 



VIII-41 



