George Jar vis Brush. 395 



mated. The School at the beginning had almost no funds, but 

 it early attracted the interest of Mr. Joseph E. Sheffield and 

 this interest was wisely and tactfully guided and stimulated by 

 Mr. Brush. As the result of this, the School received from 

 Mr. Sheffield a considerable endowment and in 1861 was 

 formally called the Sheffield Scientific School. The endow- 

 ment was still further increased later, especially by the pro- 

 visions of the will of Mr. Sheffield, who died in 1882. It 

 would be difficult, without detailed historical discussion, to give 

 any adequate idea of the complexity and difficulty of the prob- 

 lems of the growing School and of the skill and wisdom with 

 which they were met and solved by Mr. Brush. One particu- 

 lar matter maybe mentioned here. The School, in 1863, became 

 the land grant College of Connecticut under the land grant act 

 of the Federal Government. The sale of the land yielded an 

 income which was most important to the School at a critical 

 time in its growth. Later, in 1892, this fund was transferred 

 by the State to the Storrs Agricultural College, but in the con- 

 test over the subject the interests of the School were so ably 

 handled by Mr. Brush that in the settlement it received out- 

 right a sum of $150,000, thus putting it in a better position 

 than that which it had before occupied. 



The financial skill shown in the management of the interests 

 of the School was also used for the benefit of the funds of the 

 Peabody Museum, of which Mr. Brush was one of the original 

 trustees appointed in the deed of gift of Mr. George Peabody 

 in 1866. It was largely through his able management that the 

 original $150,000 grew so steadily and surely that the 

 $100,000 set apart at the beginning amounted to the $176,000 

 needed to pay for the building completed ten years later. 

 Mr. Brush sometimes alluded with satisfaction to the fact that 

 he had the foresight to exchange the five per cent Massachu- 

 setts State bonds of the original Peabody gift for the seven- 

 thirties of the civil war loan, thus producing a rapid increase 

 in the available funds. It is also interesting to note that for 

 many years he was a director in the Jackson Iron Company of 

 the Lake Superior district. He was, further, a director in the 

 New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad from 1893 

 until his death, attending all the meetings with great regularity. 



Professor Brush was elected a member of the National 

 Academy of Sciences in 1868 and received the degree of 

 Doctor of Laws from Harvard University in 18S6. He pre- 

 sided as president of the American Association for the 

 Advancement of Science at Cincinnati in 1881, and delivered 

 the presidential address at Montreal the following year. He 

 was an honorary member of the Mineralogical Society of Eng- 

 land, a foreign member of the Geological Society of London, 



