OBITUARY NOTICES. 
471 
were marked by ease and grace, and by great care in select¬ 
ing words and terms which should be accurate in expressing 
the meaning intended. 
Colonel Mallery died, after a short illness, at his residence 
on N street in this city, on October 24, 1894. He will be 
long remembered in this Society for his warm interest in its 
welfare and for his kindly disposition and genial manners. 
Robert Fletcher. 
MONTGOMERY CUNNINGHAM MEIGS. 
[Read before the Society, March 26, 1892.] 
A man’s biography is properly to be written by one who 
has intimately known him, if not through life, then at least 
at life’s culminating point and beyond. I have known 
General Meigs, not intimately at any time, but only through 
a chiefly official intercourse in his old age, and I cannot 
ask you to listen to what you might expect from a comrade 
of the soldier’s active years, or to much more than a brief 
summary of the dates and bare outline of a life which we 
have known at its evening, but whose noon was passed in 
the time of great events. 
Montgomery Cunningham Meigs was a son of the emi¬ 
nent physician and medical author, Charles D. Meigs. He 
was bom May 3, 1816, in Augusta, Georgia, and, entering 
as a youth the United States Military Academy at West 
Point, he was graduated from that institution in 1836, at 
the age of twenty. He was at once appointed to a position 
in the artillery service, and in the following year was trans¬ 
ferred to the Corps of Engineers. In 1838 he was made a 
first lieutenant in that corps, and was detailed to direct the 
construction of Fort Delaware and afterward of other im¬ 
provements on the Atlantic coast. In 1849 he was engaged 
in the Engineer Bureau at Washington, and in the latter 
part of 1852 was directed to make a survey at Washington, 
D. C., with the view of determining the best plan for sup¬ 
plying the city with water. He recommended the largest 
