Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/503

Rh Yale College. In 1847, while preparing to continue his studies in Great Britain, he was chosen to be chemist and mineralogist to the Geological Survey of Canada, then recently established under the direction of Sir William Logan, and having its headquarters at Montreal. This position he held for twenty-five years, resigning it in 1872. He was, during this time, for several years a professor in the Laval University at Quebec, where he lectured on chemistry and geology in the French language, and was afterward Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy at McGill University, Montreal. Coming to Boston in 1872 he took the chair of Geology in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made vacant by the resignation of Prof. William B. Rogers, a post which he still occupies. He has never married. His earlier scientific labors were chiefly in the domain of chemistry. Prof. B. Silliman, in his "History of American Contributions to Chemistry," which appeared in the "Proceedings of the Centennial of Chemistry" (American Chemist for 1874), says:

A considerable proportion of these, however, relate to pure geology.

From the "History" just quoted, and from a biographical notice in we learn of Dr. Hunt's important contributions to theoretical chemistry, and his attempts to introduecintroduce [sic] into the sciences of chemistry and mineralogy a new philosophy, some points of which will be found in his address in 1874, at the Centennial of Chemistry at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, entitled "A Century's Progress in Chemical Theory." His papers on these subjects were widely copied and translated, and have greatly influenced modern chemistry. At an early date Dr. Hunt prepared a summary of organic chemistry, which he first defined to be the chemistry of carbon and its compounds, and which forms a part of Silliman's "First Principles of Chemistry" (1872). A statement of some of the aspects of the science will be found in the last annual address before the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, delivered by him, on "The Relations of Chemistry to Pharmacy and Therapeutics" (Boston, 1875); and we present an abstract of this in the present number. It is said of Dr. Hunt, in the notice above referred to, that his researches on the chemistry of soda and mineral waters have probably been more extended than those of any other living chemist. These have been both