Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/707

Rh Curtis Bolton subsequently removed to New York and became the head of the firm of Bolton, Fox and Livingston, owners of the Havre line of packets. Curtis married his cousin, Ann Bolton, daughter of Robert, of Savannah; their third son, Jackson, was graduated at Columbia College in 1833, and later at the University of Paris, where he received the degree of D. M. P. Dr. Jackson Bolton practiced his profession with success for over twenty years in New York city, and was also Vice-President of the New York Academy of Medicine and President of the Pathological Society.

That branch of the North family into which Dr. Jackson Bolton married had been residents of New England for two hundred years; the male ancestors of Dr. H. C. Bolton's mother for three generations had been physicians, the last in the line being Elish North, M. D., of Goshen, later of New London, Conn. Dr. North is remembered as among the first in America to practice vaccination, at Goshen, in 1800; as the first physician to open an eye infirmary in the United States; and as the author of works on Spotted Fever (New York, 1811) and on physiology, 1829.

Henry Carrington, the only child of Jackson and Anna H. Bolton, was born in his paternal grandfather's house. No. 08 Greenwich Street, New York city, at the date above given. The vicinity was the court end of the town, and the boy's earliest playground was the Battery. Later, his father moved up town, and the Battery was replaced by Union Square. Dr. Bolton's primary education was in private schools, and he has been heard to mention with deep gratitude the excellent training and kind consideration of Mr. George Stowe, who laid secure foundations in English studies. At the age of nineteen Dr. Bolton, in 1862, was graduated at Columbia College; he took no distinguished place in his class, but showed marked aptitude for mathematics, and for chemistry when the latter study was reached in the curriculum. Prof. Charles A. Joy, who held the chair of Chemistry at that time, had been prohibited by the trustees of Columbia from admitting students to practical work in the small laboratory adjoining the lecture-room, and Dr. Bolton was debarred from studying chemistry in a rational way; to supply this deficiency, however, his father provided him with simple apparatus and a few chemicals at home, where he attempted to apply the principles learned from the lectures of Prof. Joy. Very different from this the present methods at Columbia College.

Going to Europe immediately after graduation to continue his study of chemistry in foreign universities, young Bolton spent one year in Paris, first in the laboratory of the Sorbonne, then in charge of J. B. Dumas, and afterward in the laboratory of the École de Médecine under Adolphe Wurtz.

In 1863 to 1865 he continued his studies in Germany: at