Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/111

Rh nor could this be justly expected of a man whose life has been so absorbed in the work of educational reform, the progress of scientific culture, the organization and administration of collegiate institutions and the furtherance of those higher measures and agencies of intellectual improvement which are never carried out except through the executive force and indomitable perseverance of a few men who are specially constituted for such tasks. Dr. Barnard has been untiringly busy in these important spheres of activity for nearly half a century, and seems still in the prime and vigor of his powers, and the meridian of his public influence.

was born in Sheffield, Massachusetts, in the year 1809. He was educated at Yale College, where he graduated in 1828. He began his career as teacher by taking the position of tutor in that institution in 1829. In 1831 he went to Hartford, and engaged as instructor in the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb; and, becoming interested in this branch of teaching, he subsequently pursued it in the Deaf and Dumb Asylum of New York. He afterward published an "Analytic Grammar, with Symbolic Illustrations," based upon a system he had originated for teaching the deaf and dumb, and which is still used in institutions devoted to their education. Dr. Barnard early chose the South as his field of labor, and in 1837 became Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the University of Alabama, at Tuscaloosa, and subsequently took the chair of Chemistry in the same institution, which he held until 1854. The same year he took orders in the Protestant Episcopal Church. In 1854 he became Professor of Mathematics, Astronomy, and Civil Engineering, in the University of Mississippi, at Oxford, was elected its president in 1856, and promoted to its chancellorship in 1858. During his long residence at the South, Dr. Barnard devoted himself with great energy to the subject of education, both primary and academic, and advocated liberal and advanced views regarding college polity in several able reports. Never an opponent of classical culture, he freely criticised it, and strongly urged the claims of science to a larger and higher place in modern study than had been hitherto allowed. At the approach and outbreak of the civil war, President Barnard, remaining loyal to the Union, found himself embarrassed in his Southern position, and in 1861 he resigned his chancellorship and his chair in the university, and returned to his native North. In 1862 he was engaged in continuing the reduction of Gilliss's observations of the stars in the southern hemisphere. In 1863 he was connected with the United States Coast Survey, and had charge of chart-printing and lithography. Prof. McCulloch, who occupied the chair of Physics in Columbia College, New York, having left the institution and gone South to take his chances with the Confederate cause. Dr. Barnard became an applicant for the vacant position; but, instead of accepting him for this place,