The various newspapers of these cities reported large and appreciative audiences, with many often turned away for lack of seats; and they invariably praised the lectures. For example, the Indianapolis _Daily Sentinel_ declared, “(The subject) was presented in such a pleasing and attractive form, and the facts, the experiments, and the analogies from which his conclusions were drawn were stated so clearly and clothed so beautifully that it seemed to the hearer rather like the fanciful description of the poet than the details of experimental philosophy”. The Cleveland _Plain Dealer_ thus expressed its praise: “(His theme) was treated with a mastery of facts, an array of historical data, and a thoroughness and completeness of detail and all with a clearness, vigor, and force of language highly instructive and deeply and powerfully interesting. Without any of the graces of oratory, or the beauties and effects of elocution, without even the charms of an agreeable delivery, Lieutenant Maury invested his subject with a degree of interest and power of attraction that was such as to challenge the admiration and rivet the attention of his auditors from the opening to the close”. The tour was evidently a great success, but the exposure to the wintry storms so damaged Maury’s health as to bring on an attack of rheumatic gout on his return home, a disease from which he continued to suffer off and on until his death fifteen years later. The following autumn, however, he was lecturing again, this time in Alabama and Tennessee. While in Nashville to address the State Agricultural Bureau, he was invited by the Tennessee Historical Society to deliver in the Hall of the House of Representatives of the Capitol his lecture on “The Geography of the Sea”. This was on October 12, 1859, and on the following day Maury visited the House while in session and was welcomed by Speaker Whitthorne in the high-flown language which was popular at that day, as one who “has by his genius and his talents made himself the peer of earth’s great men, and who by his wooing of the stars has made them to give forth speech and by his control of the winds of the sea has compelled their obedience to man and made them to become ministers of his happiness”.