Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/453

Rh Church Hamilton and Major-General Schuyler Hamilton satisfy the criterion here imposed.

Few people realize that Washington Irving was one of six Irvings, all distinguished in authorship—three brothers and two nephews of the author of Rip Van Winkle. Washington Irving, therefore, counts five eminent close relations according to the test.

Louis Agassiz, one of the few great Americans of foreign birth, was the father of Alexander Agassiz, who also reached eminence in natural science. Besides conducting many researches of a purely scientific nature, such as deep-sea dredging and archeological explorations, he served the cause of education by princely gifts to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard; money which he had himself made through developing the now famous Calumet and Hecla copper mines. Alexander Agassiz received the highest honors in the American scientific world, inasmuch as he was president of the National Academy of Sciences and also president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also given the Order of Merit by the German emperor.

Jonathan Edwards, America's greatest metaphysical thinker, was one of a great group of interrelated eminent Americans. He is of the first magnitude in a galaxy of stars. With grandfather, son and grandson, he is surrounded by these luminaries of the second rank.

S. F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, is the center of a small and isolated cluster. His father, Jedediah Morse, D.D., is considered "the father of American geography." A brother, Sidney Edwards Morse, won fame as an inventor.

Henry Clay belonged to the distinguished Virginia Clays. Of his four sons who reached maturity, one son, James B. Clay, enters the 3,500 group. He was a member of Congress and prominent politically. He died in 1864, aged forty-seven.

Peter Cooper, the wealthy New Yorker, who was elected to the Hall of Fame as a representative philanthropist, was the father of Edward Cooper, who was mayor of New York from 1879 to 1881 and 1883, and is remembered in history on account of his activity in the overthrow of the "Tweed ring."

Oliver Wendell Holmes was the son of Rev. Abiel Holmes, pastor of the First Congregational Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1792 to 1832, who in 1805 published "American Annals," the result of great industry and research. "We consider it," says Professor Sparks, "among the most valuable productions of the American press." The son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the poet, is Oliver Wendell Holmes, of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Robert E. Lee, as every one knows, belonged to one of the most distinguished families in America. Many of his relatives are the