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