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746 the poor but worthy student of pure science in this country. It is needless for me to insist on the estimation in which Prof. John Tyndall is held among us. We know him to be a man whose heart is as large as his head, both contributing to the cause of science. We regard him as one of the ablest physicists of the time, and one of the most level-headed philosophers that England has ever produced—a man whose intellect is as symmetrical as the circle, with its every point equidistant from the centre. We have been the recipient of former endowments from that land which, we thank God, was our mother-country, for from it we have drawn our language, our liberty, our laws, our literature, our science, and our energy, and without whose wealth our material development would not be what it is at the present day. Count Rumford, the founder of the Royal Society of London, in earlier years endowed a scientific chair in one of our larger universities, and Smithson transferred his fortune to our shores to promote the diffusion of science. Now, while these are noble gifts, yet Count Rumford was giving to his own countrymen—for he was an American—and they were posthumous gifts from men of large fortune. But the one I now refer to was from a man who ranks not with the wealthy, and he laid his offering upon the altar of science in this country with his own hands; and it has been both consecrated and blest by noble words from his own lips; all of which makes the gift a rich treasure to American science; and I think we can assure him that, as the same Anglo-Saxon blood flows in our veins as does in his (tempered, 'tis true, with the Celtic, Teutonic, Latin, etc.), he may expect much from the American student in pure science as the offspring of his gift and his example.



OON after my return from America, I learned with great concern that a little book of mine, published prior to my departure, had given grave offence to some of the friends and relatives of the late Principal Forbes; and I was specially grieved when informed that the chastisement considered due to this offence was to be administered by gentlemen between whom and myself I had hoped mutual respect and amity would forever reign. We had, it is true, met in conflict on another field; but hostilities had honorably ceased, old wounds had, to all appearance, been healed, and I had no misgiving as to the permanence of the peace established between us.

The genesis of the book referred to is this: At Christmas, 1871, it fell to my lot to give the brief course of "Juvenile Lectures" to which