MANASSEH CUTLER. 
JAMES ELLIS HUMPHREY. 
A MAN who clearly deserves a distinguished place among 
American pioneers in science is the subject of this sketch. 
Without advantages of birth, and through life dependent on 
the meager stipend of a New England country minister, he yet 
contributed much useful work to the development of science 
and to the extension of civilization in the United States. Two 
volumes of extracts from his letters and journals, of the great- 
est interest and value, were published by some of his descendants 
at Cincinnati in 1888. These give a striking impression of his 
progressive spirit and tireless activity, and furnish the chief 
available facts concerning his life. 
Manasseh Cutler was born May 3, 1742, the son of a farmer 
of Killingly, Conn. His home was evidently one in which the 
Puritan love of learning prevailed, for he was graduated at Yale 
in 1765. He then obtained a position as a teacher in Dedham, 
Mass., a somewhat unusual thing at the time when the towns 
about Boston were accustomed to look to Harvard for their 
teachers. Here he became acquainted with Miss Mary Balch, 
daughter of Rev. Thomas Balch, the minister at Dedham, and she 
became his wife in 1767. In that year he went to Edgartown, 
on Marthas Vineyard, to take charge of and close up the busi- 
ness of a relative of his wife, just deceased. While there he was 
admitted to the bar, having devoted his time since his gradua- 
tion to reading law. But his first experiences in legal practice 
gave him a distaste for it, and he determined to enter the 
ministry. 
Accordingly, he returned to Dedham and began a regular 
course of study with his father-in-law. The glimpses of his 
experiences and deliberations while preaching as a candidate in 
several Massachusetts parishes, afforded by his journal, show 
the shrewd and cautious man, with keen zest for amusing situa- 
tions and with clear understanding of and sympathy with human 
