Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/482

478 Mr Peters and I have talked seriously about supplying you with proper persons for the Indian Mission, and on the whole submit to you whether it were not best to have one or two pious young men of sound principles and good education, not exceeding twenty-two years of age, to be sent immediately to spend two years under your direction as Catechists and schoolmasters, till they acquire the language; others, if found fit, to be sent for orders. We have two such men, who can speak both German and English, educated in our College, of exemplary good behaviour; one of them on account of his grandfather Conrad Weiser, perhaps might be particularly acceptable to the Indians. He is also the son of a most worthy man, the Revd Mr Muhlenberg, who married Weiser' s daughter, and is at the head of the Lutheran Churches in this Province, and is willing his son should go on this business and take orders in the Church. The other is equally well qualified.

Young Muhlenberg was Henry Ernst, the youngest son of the Patriarch Muhlenberg; he received in 1780 the honorary degree of Master of Arts in the University of the State of Pennsylvania; and became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1785. "He passed his days as a pious and devoted Lutheran pastor, adding to his spiritual cure a close study of the natural sciences, in which he obtained eminence, particularly that of botany." Who the other one recommended by the Provost was we know not; it suffices only to know that the project was not consummated, though it held large promise in offering a grandson of Conrad Weiser to give his life work among the Indians. Just seventy years after this the University graduated James Lloyd Breck, whose life work among the Indians of the Northwest has shown what might have been that of Henry Ernst Muhlenberg among the Indians of the North in provincial days.