comment. We have ample passages from Professor Silliman's journal, and from an autobiographical memoir written during his last years, as well as extracts from his letters and the letters addressed to him. It is an easy and pleasant way of writing personal history, and it would be an easy and pleasant way of reading it, if life were as long as art. But we fear that the popular usefulness of this work—and the biography of the eminent man who did so much to popularize science should be in the hands of all—must be impaired by its magnitude; and we are disposed to regret that Professor Fisher did not think fit to reject that part of the correspondence which contributes nothing to the movement of the narrative or the development of character, and condense much of that material which has only a value reflected from the interest already felt in Professor Silliman. These are faults in a work from which we have risen with a clear sense of the beauty and goodness, as well as the greatness, of the eminent scientist. It is admirable to see how his career, begun in another century and another phase of civilization, ended in what was best and most enlightened and liberal in our own time. A man could hardly have started from better things, or been subject at important points of his progress to better influences. Benjamin Silliman was of Revolutionary stock, which had its roots in the soil of the Reformation. The Connecticut Puritan came of Tuscan Puritans, who fled their city of Lucca, and finally passed from Switzerland through Holland to our shores. Brain and heart in him were thus imbued with an unfaltering love of freedom, chastised by religious fervor; and when he became a man, he married with a race of kindred origin in faith, sentiment, and principles. He advanced with his times in a patriotic devotion to democracy and equality, but he seems to have always kept, together with great simplicity of character, the impression of early teaching and associations, and something of old-time stateliness and formality. His youth, like his age, was very sober, modest, and discreet. The ties which united him to his family were strong; and he loved his mother, who long survived his father, with the reverent affection of the past generation. He inherited certain theological principles from his parents, and never swerved from them for a moment. Some friendships came down to him from his father which he always honored; and the institution of learning with which he maintained a life-long connection was in his early days the object of a regard mixed with awe, and always of pride and devotion. He used to think President Styles the greatest of human beings; and one reads with a kind of dismay, that he was once fined sixpence for kicking a football into the President's door-yard.
There was in this grave youth the making of many kinds of greatness. He who became so eminent in science could have been a great jurist, for he had the tranquillity and perseverance necessary to legal success; he could have been a great statesman, for his political views were clear and just and far-reaching; he wrote some of the most popular books of travels in his day, and he could have shone in literature; while he appears to have been conscious of the direction in which a sole weakness lay, and with early wisdom forsook the muse of poetry. He tells us that it was no instinctive preference which led him to the study and pursuit of the natural sciences, but the persuasion of Dr. Dwight, who was President of Yale in Silliman's twenty-third year, and who opened this career to him by offering him the Professorship of Chemistry, then about to be established. At that time Silliman was studying law; but, once convinced that he can be of greater use to himself and others in the way proposed, he enters it and never looks back; goes to Philadelphia to hear the learnedest professors of that day; goes to Europe for the culture unattainable in this country; overcomes poverty in himself and in Yale; will not be tempted from New Haven by the offer of the Presidency of the University of South Carolina, but devotes himself to a generous study of science, to the diffusion of scientific knowledge, and the promotion of the greatness of the institution to which he belongs. His devotion is not blind, however: he finds time to write attractive accounts of his voyages to Europe, to concern himself in religious affairs, to sympathize and cooperate with whatever is noble and good in political movements. He lives long enough to enjoy his fame, to see Yale prosperous and great, and his country about to triumph forever over the evil of slavery, which he had hated and combated. It was a noble life,—simple, pure, and illustrious,—and its history is full of instruction and encouragement.
