Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/625

Rh standing among each ten instructors. The five institutions that have the best record are of comparatively recent establishment; they have given a relatively more prominent position to science than the older institutions and have selected better men. At certain other institutions the ratios are: Yale, 10.6; Michigan, 12.3; Wisconsin, 13.2; Columbia, 13.3; Cornell, 16.5; California, 21.3; Pennsylvania, 25.2.

the establishment of the Johns Hopkins University in 1876, Harvard and Yale were our chief centers of scientific research and productive scholarship. We are losing one after the other the men who gave distinction to these universities. Yale has mourned the death of Dana, Loomis, Newton, Gibbs, Marsh and Johnson, and now in the death of William Henry Brewer one of the few remaining links with the past is severed. He belonged to a generation and to a type of university professor which scarcely survive. The man of the world is now likely to be found in the university chair as elsewhere, leaving small space for the naive and the unconventional. Brewer was born on a farm eighty-two years ago; he graduated with the first class of the Yale scientific school; he studied with Liebig before studying abroad had become usual; in 1858 he became professor of chemistry and geology at Washington College. From 1860 to 1864 Brewer served on the California State Survey and was during the latter part of this period professor of natural science in the University of California. He always looked back with special interest to these years. He was associated with King. Whitney and others in exploring the Sierras, one of whose peaks is named in his honor. At this time the "Botany of California" was prepared.

In 1864 Brewer began his long service as professor of agriculture in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University. In addition to the work of his chair, he was indefatigable in investigation and exploration, in lecturing and in attendance at scientific gatherings, being rarely absent even to