Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/490



This is the story of a pioneer in education in Oregon, a man who was probably the first who had a considerable equipment of scientific and medical training to be placed in a position of educational responsibility in the state. In the fields of Natural History, Medicine, Religious Philosophy, as well as in building up institutions, he pushed forward and gave of his energy unsparingly toward adding to and organizing that which already existed, thereby making it more available for the use of others. He was not primarily the working scientist, but rather one who undertook to interpret science and to make it a part of the two fields in which his chief interests were centered, namely, medicine and religion. He belongs to the category of the sturdy group who felled forests, built roads and bridges, and attempted to bring law and order into the wilderness which others had discovered. In traversing the various parts of this wilderness, he himself found many things of interest which had been overlooked by those earlier in the field, but primarily he was the teacher and the organizer and builder of institutions and character.

We can best understand the work of Joseph Henry Wythe by first passing in brief review his early life and the impulses which obtained direction in that period.

He was born March 19, 1822, in Manchester, England, of a sturdy Anglo-Saxon family which had left its imprint on the history of many parts of middle England. His parents decided to try their fortunes in the New World, and emigrated to this country in 1832, in a sailing vessel, bringing the ten-year-old boy with them. The elder Wythe settled in Philadelphia where he established