carry out a resolution of the General Assembly in regard to international literary and scientific exchanges. He wrote a report of proceedings and instructions, presenting the advantages of the exchange system so clearly as to reflect great credit upon himself and upon his State.
From an address which he delivered in Boston, in 1850, on the invitation of the Boston Society of Natural History, we learn something of the difficulties under which his knowledge of natural science was obtained. "What I have accomplished in the business of natural history," he said, "I have done without any associates engaged in like pursuits, without having any access to collections of specimens, and almost without books." In this address, while showing the difficulties, he at the same time insisted upon the importance of the cultivation of natural history in country places. A habit of observation and comparison of objects, he said, could be acquired quite as readily in the country as in the city. He urged that the study of natural history should be introduced more generally into our colleges and common schools, for the reason that such a study "would refine and improve the moral sensibilities of our people, and sharpen and invigorate their intellectual powers." Prof. Thompson's love for natural history was inborn, and throughout his life amounted to absolute devotion. It was the supreme force in his life. From early childhood until the end, his diligent study of Nature and zeal in collecting facts, and objects to illustrate them, never faltered. He was not only a student of Nature but her ardent and most constant lover. He also enjoyed mathematical studies and was fond of statistics, and these qualities rendered his work in all departments of science more accurate and orderly than it might otherwise have been.
Certain of his friends (his modest worth had made him many of these), knowing his great desire to see the Exhibition of 1851 at London, furnished him the means of making the trip. After an absence of three months, during which he had spent some time in Paris, he returned to his home in Burlington much benefited in spirit and in health. Yielding to repeated solicitation, he published soon after his Journal of a Trip to London, Paris, and the Great Exhibition in 1851, which gave a most realizing impression of what he had seen to those who had not made the trip.
In the ten years following the publication of his History of Vermont, railroads and telegraphs were introduced into the State, and various discoveries in its natural history were made, all of which furnished him material for a valuable supplement of sixty-four pages, issued early in 1853. The General Assembly of this year discovered what a blunder had been made in strangling the geological survey, and passed a bill appointing Prof. Thompson State Naturalist, "to enter upon a thorough prosecution and comple-
