THE 
AMERICAN GEOLOGIST. 
Vol. XVI. SEPTEMBER, 1895. No. 3. 
EDWARD HITCHCOCK. 
By C. H. Hitchcock, Hanover, N. H. 
[Portrait, Plate VII.] 
Edward Hitchcock, the youngest of five children, and of the 
sixth American generation of an English family, was born at 
Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1793. He died at Amherst, Mas- 
sachusetts, in 1864, having nearly completed his seventy-first 
year. 
An ardent desire for knowledge impelled him to acquire by 
himself many of the branches of learning usually taught in 
colleges, but at hours devoted by his associates to recreation 
and repose. His tastes were shaped at first by a maternal uncle. 
Gen. Epaphras Hoyt, being directed towards astronomy and 
military engineering. His first study was the determination 
of the longitude of his native town by observations upon the 
total eclipse of the sun in 1811. For three months and a half 
he took observations upon the distance of the comet from va- 
rious stars, on the latitude and longitude by lunar distances 
and eclipses of the sun and moon and on the variation of the 
magnetic needle. Then it required several months to reduce 
the observations, and as he had very few books he was obliged 
to calculate many elements by spherical trigonometry, which 
are found to-day in practical astronomical tables. The results 
as applied to the longitude of Deerfield church were given by 
Gen. Hoyt in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts 
and Sciences for 1815, vol. in, p. 307-9. Few young men of 
