112 Biographical Sketch of Prof. Olmsted. 
d referred 
the strata correctly to the same age with that of the Richmond 
While at Chapel Hill, Prof. Olmsted also began researches to 
determine the practicability of obtaining illuminating gas from 
tton-seed—a waste material so abundant in cotton-growing 
districts as to be an important product of agriculture if capable 
of being put to any valuable use. 
. These researches, however, were broken off, as well as his fur- 
ther cultivation of chemistry and geology, by his call, in 1825, 
to the professorship of Mathematics and Natural a in 
Yale College, left vacant by the death of Prof. Matthew R. Dut 
ton, who himself, only three years before, had succeeded the la- 
mented Fisher, Prof. Olmsted’s classmate and intimate friend, 
whose brief but brilliant mathematical career was so sadly ter- 
minated by shipwreck in 1822, when on his way to Europe for 
the purpose of study. 
Prof. Olmsted came to this new chair, it will be noticed, after 
___ he had spent some of his best years in one requiring attainments 
- and mental culture of a widely different cast. But though lack _ 
ing somewhat, as he was himself aware, in that special prepara 
| 
tion which a devotion of those years to the higher mathematics 
and the more abstruse investigation of physics might have given 
him, he nevertheless applied himself with such zeal to his new 
duties as to overcome in great measure the difficulties he encoun- 
tered, and approve himself a successful instructor in the branches 
committed to his care. The department of mathematics, howeve!, 
in accordance with his own wishes, was in 1835 made a separate 
chair, and assigned to the able and promising, but short-lived 
Prof. Anthony D. Stanley, while Prof. Olmsted retained his fa- 
vorite branches of natural philosophy and astronomy. In these 
he continued to give instruction down to his last illness, a period 
in all of thirty-four years. 
en he came to New Haven he discovered a sad want of 
suitable text-books in his department. Enfield’s Philosophy, 
which had held its place in our colleges for many years, was 
of inaccuracies and far behind the existing state of science. And 
the series of text-books then recently prepared by Prof. Farrar 
of Cambridge, chiefly translations from abe authors, were, D 
sides other objections, both too extensive and too difficult for 
the majority of American students at that period. This recog. 
nized want Prof. Olmsted successfully met by the preparation of | 
his work on Natural Philosophy, which was first = : 
i in 1831, in two volumes octavo. This work, though 1? 
parts professedly a compilation or abridgment, asin mechanics, 
