Samuel William Johnson. 407 



Shortly after the establishment of the Connecticut Agricul- 

 tural Experiment Station, for which he had labored so long 

 and earnestly, he became its Director in 1877, and acted in 

 that capacity until 1899. In this position he was eminently suc- 

 cessful, setting an example to the stations of the same kind which 

 were soon established in all the other states of the Union. 



He was very conspicuous in his literary activity. His 

 voluminous writings for the agricultural press have been 

 alluded to already, and his official reports of the Agricultural 

 Station, published annually for more than twenty years, should 

 also be mentioned. He edited the first American editions of 

 Fresenius's " Qualitative " and " Quantitative Analysis," and 

 afterwards revised the former work, supplying it with the 

 "new system" of chemical nomenclature and symbols. He 

 published many of the results of his scientific investigations in 

 this Journal, and was an associate editor of it from 1863 to 

 1879. Particularly during the earlier years of this period, he 

 was also a copious contributor to its department of " Scientific 

 Intelligence." 



He was the author of several books : " Peat and its Uses as 

 a Fertilizer and Fuel," 1866; "How Crops Grow," 1868; 

 and "How Crops Feed," 1870. One of these particularly, 

 " How Crops Grow," a treatise on the chemical composition, 

 structure and life of the plant, should receive special mention 

 as a very celebrated work. It was not only received with 

 much favor in America, but an English edition of it was 

 published, and it was translated into German, where it was 

 honored with a preface by Justus von Liebig. It was trans- 

 lated also into Russian, Swedish, Italian, and Japanese. The 

 author published a revised and enlarged edition of this work 

 in 1891. It is fortunate that a full bibliography of Professor 

 Johnson, up to 1892, was prepared by himself and published 

 in " Yale Bibliographies." 



Professor Johnson's services to science were widely recog- 

 nized. He was elected to membership in the National 

 Academy of Sciences in 1866, was president of the American 

 Chemical Society in 1878, chairman of the sub-section of 

 Chemistry, American Association for the Advancement of 

 Science, in 1875, associate Fellow of the American Academy of 

 Arts and Sciences, and at one time was president of the Asso- 

 ciation of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment 

 Stations. 



Professor Johnson married Elizabeth Erwin, daughter of 

 George H. Blinn, of Essex, K Y., on October 13th, 1858. 

 She and a daughter, Mrs. Thomas B. Osborne, of New Haven, 

 survive him. 



H. L. Wells. 



