462 
JULIUS ERASMUS HILGARD. 
JULIUS ERASMUS HILGARD. 
[Read before the Society, October 15, 1892.] 
When Joseph Henry presided over the first meeting of 
this Society, there were gathered around him, among its 
founders, many men of uncommon intellectual strength, not 
least among whom sat Julius Erasmus Hilgard, the sub¬ 
ject of this sketch. 
He was a man of medium height, in maturity of substan¬ 
tial form. His head was round, his features small, and his 
kind gray eyes were well set under an ample forehead. His 
speech betrayed his foreign birth, for, notwithstanding that 
he came to this country as a mere lad of ten years, having 
been born at Zweibriicken, in the Palatinate, in 1825, he 
spoke with a marked accent. This was doubtless due to the 
fact that his youth was spent on a farm in Illinois, where 
intellectual intercourse was largely restricted to members of 
his own family, who, like himself, acquired the English lan¬ 
guage chiefly from books. 
His father, who had studied jurisprudence in Paris and 
who had become imbued with the republican spirit of the 
times, gave up a promising and already successful judicial 
career in Bavaria under the mistaken impression that ideal 
social and political conditions were to be found on a remote 
farm in Illinois, whither he accordingly transplanted his 
large family. Being a man of cultivated mind and unusual 
talents, he successfully undertook the education of his chil¬ 
dren, instructing them in the humanities, but in the direc¬ 
tion of the exact sciences he had to yield the teacher’s place 
to his son and pupil Julius, owing to the phenomenal apti¬ 
tude for mathematics displayed by the latter. 
At the age of eighteen Hilgard went to Philadelphia, 
where, at the house of Judge Kane, he met Alexander Dal¬ 
las Bache, who had then but recently been placed at the 
head of the Coast Survey. To this acquaintance his special 
interest in geodesy and connection with the Coast Survey 
