PROFESSOR BENJAMIN SILLIMAN, JR. 639 



easy, he was enabled to enter at once into the thoughts and hearts of his pupils 

 and draw them in turn into his own. 



So he lived, modest in demeanor, not flaunting his achievements, choosing 

 good deeds, and pursuing steadily the path of duty. His life, his words, his 

 works, his rewards, were a perpetual inspiration to the scientific spirit, the love 

 of truth for truths' sake, to a zeal for research, to an eagerness to bestow upon 

 the arts the latest results of science, to a faith that the multiplied interests of a 

 community were one and single. Neither luxurious nor penurious in his habits 

 he saved a modest competence and for the rest spent liberally a handsome in- 

 come, an income derived not from his chosen profession, for from the founding 

 of the Yale scientific school he too often paid his own salary, and many an earnest 

 student can testify how freely his time, and means as well, have been forced upon 

 his pupils. That was the use he loved to make of the dollars he received from 

 the industries to which he had saved fortunes. 



Withal, his life knew its sorrows, none deeper, I think, than the calumnies 

 which befell him in connection with the Emma mine. It was in 1869 when the 

 independents who afterwards started the Greely movement were decrying 

 **'Grantism" in all its forms, and calling especially for purity in politics, that a 

 suspicious connection with that ill starred English investment was fastened upon 

 General Schenk, our minister at St. James, and he was made the object of the 

 most unlimited abuse. The virulence did not end with him, but Prof. Silliman 

 was included in the scandal, the whole opposition press being free in its insinua- 

 tions that his favorable report upon the property was unjustified and corrupt. 

 In vain he courted congressional investigation and sought any opportunity for 

 his vindication. It did not come till 1877, when the principal, Trevor W. Park, 

 was sued by the English bond-holders. But by that time the public had lost all 

 interest. General Schenk was no longer an issue in American politics. It was 

 too late to erase from the popular mind the blot on the chemist's good name. 



He had hardly emerged, into the penumbra of this shadow, when the death of 

 his loved wife again darkened the day. Then came sickness, financial embar- 

 rassments, the infirmities of age, thickening to the end. But under all and 

 through all he remained the same genial and faithful worker and guide. 



The attacks which embittered the last years of his revered father seem to 

 have been more provoked and easier to have avoided than the cup of gall which 

 was given to the son. He told me once with great feeling how the genial Emer- 

 itus arose in a meeting in which the need of men for Kansas and the cause of 

 Free soil had been debated, and said: "It is not men we need for Kansas so 

 much as courage to fight for the right. I will be the first to give a rifle and 

 brace of revolvers to one who will use them in the Free soil cause; who will 

 give another?" and a hundred voices answered " I." He had pulled the trigger 

 of a loaded gun. Throughout the North shot the cry "a rifle for Kansas." The 

 The New Haven colony at Wabaunsee stands to-day a monument to that inspira- 

 tion. But the sequel was less fruitful of good. At once from strangers and 

 friends, from former hosts and guests, from old pupils and colleagues, there 



