Almost at once began a series of brilliant experiments in electricity which have linked his name with that of Benjamin Franklin as one of the two most original investigators in that branch of science which this country has ever produced. His first work was the improving of existing forms of apparatus, and his first important discovery was that of the electro-magnet. His development of the "intensity" magnet in 1830 made the electric telegraph a possibility. Two years later he was called to the chair of natural philosophy at Princeton University, where he continued his investigations, many of which have been of permanent value to science. In 1846, he was elected first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and removed to Washington, where the last forty years of his life were passed in the development of the great scientific establishment of which he was the head. He steadily refused the most flattering offers of other positions, among them the presidency of Princeton, and like Agassiz, he might have answered, when tempted by larger salaries, "I cannot afford to waste my time in making money." To his efforts is largely due the establishment of the national lighthouse system, as well as that of the national weather bureau. Besides his services to American science as instructor at Harvard College, Louis Agassiz rendered another when he persuaded Arnold Guyot, his colleague in the college at Neuchatel, to accompany him to this country. Guyot was at that time forty years old, and was already widely known as a geologist and naturalist, and the delivery of a series of lectures before the Lowell Institute, established his reputation in this country. He was soon invited to the chair of physical geography and geology at Princeton, which he held until his death. He founded the museum at Princeton, which has since become one of the best of its kind in the United States. Perhaps he is best known for the series of geographies he prepared, and which were at one time widely used in schools throughout the United States. Perhaps no family has been more closely associated with American science than that of the Huguenot Le Conte, who settled at New Rochelle, New York, about the close of the seventeenth century, moving afterwards to New Jersey. There, in 1782, Lewis Le Conte was born. He was graduated at Columbia at the age of seventeen and started to study medicine, but was soon afterwards called to the management of the family estates of Woodsmanston, in Georgia. There he established a botanical garden and a laboratory in which he tested the discoveries of the chemists of the day. His death resulted from poison that was taken into his system while dressing a wound for a member of his family.