and important servants of the church at Rome. Priscilia, Mary, Junia, Tryphena and Tryphosa, Persia, Julia, the sister of Nereas and the mother of Rufus, whom the apostle calls "mine;" a touching tribute to the virtues of this Christian woman. There was no man among the Christian converts ever saluted by Paul with the title of father; and that he found a woman worthy of the tender, holy title of mother, shows how highly, in his estimation, ranked the piety of the gentle sex. The important trust reposed in Phebe proves, also, the efficient help he derived from woman's ministry in the cause of Christ. See Romans, chap. xvi. A.D. 60.
PHELPS, ALMIRA H. LINCOLN,
Was born in Berlin, Connecticut, in 1793. The character of her father, Samuel Hart, is described in the memoir of her eldest sister, Mrs. Emma Willard. Her mother was Lydia Hinsdale, a woman of great energy and sound judgment. Almira, the youngest of a large family, was indulged in childhood; but love of knowledge, and an ambition to excel, induced her, as she grew older, to seek her chief pleasure and occupation in intellectual pursuits and moral Improvement; religious truths, also, early exercised great influence over her. She was, for some years, the pupil of her sister Emma, and after the marriage of the latter to Dr. Willard, passed two years with her in Middlebury, Vermont. When about eighteen, she spent a year, as a pupil, at the then celebrated school of her relative. Miss Hinsdale, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She married, not long after, Simeon Lincoln, who succeeded William L. Stone as editor of the "Connecticut Mirror," in Hartford, Connecticut
At the age of thirty, Mrs. Lincoln was left a widow, with two children, and with two perplexed estates, those of her husband and his father, to settle, which she successfully accomplished. At that time, she began the study of the Latin and Greek languages, and the natural sciences, and also applied herself to improving her talent for drawing and painting, in order to prepare herself for assisting her sister, Mrs. Willard, in the Troy Seminary, where she passed seven years, engaged in alternate study and instruction.
In 1831, Mrs. Lincoln married the Hon. John Phelps, a distinguished lawyer of Vermont, in which State she resided for the next six years. In 1839, she was called on to assume the office of Principal of the West Chester (Pa.) Female Seminary, which invitation she accepted; she subsequently removed to the Patapsco Female Institute, near Ellicott's Mills, Maryland, where she now presides over one of the most flourishing and best-conducted institutions of the country. Mr. Phelps, by whose assistance and advice his wife had been aided and guided in establishing the Institute, died in 1849.
The first work published by Mrs. Phelps was her larger Botany, generally known as "Lincoln's Botany," printed about 1829. Few scientific books have had a greater circulation in America, and, for the last twenty years, it has kept its place as the principal botanical class-book, notwithstanding numerous competitors. Her next was a "Dictionary of Chemistry," which, though it purported to be a translation from the French, contains much, in the form of notes and an appendix, that is original. With the learned, this work gave the author great credit, as it evinced much research, and a thorough knowledge of the science which it illustrated. After
