Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/640

622 address, is the great prominent feature of Christianity. Christianity was revealed in a life, and ever abides a life in the soul of man, to purify, ennoble, and redeem humanity.



HIS gentleman was elected, at the Portland meeting, last year, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for 1874, and will preside at the twenty-third session, to be held at Hartford, Conn., commencing August 12th. He belongs to a family that has made itself distinguished in American science, mainly in the direction of natural history and geology, his own chosen field of inquiry having been chiefly that of entomology.

was born in New York, on May 13, 1825. His father, Major John Eatton Le Conte, formerly of the U.S. Army, possessed broad culture both in science and literature, and was well known among the early botanists and zoologists of the country.

The family is descended from a Huguenot of noble birth, who emigrated to New York in consequence of the religious and political persecutions which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Major Le Conte and his brother Louis were close students and accurate observers, almost from the beginning of the century, though the extreme diffidence of the latter, added to the want of proper channels for publication, prevented him from contributing to the literature of science. Two of the sons of Louis Le Conte, John and Joseph, formerly of Georgia and South Carolina, but now of the University of California, have made many valuable additions to physics and geology.

The subject of the present sketch was inspired, at an early age, by the example and teaching of his father, with a strong passion for science. After an academic course at Mt. St. Mary's College in Maryland, where he graduated in 1842, he studied medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, in New York, receiving his diploma in 1846. The intervals between the courses, and other times later in life, were 