Men of the Time, eleventh edition/Barnard, Frederick Augustus Porter
BARNARD, Frederick Augustus Porter, D.D., LL.D., born at Sheffield, Massachusetts, May 5, 1809. He graduated at Yale College in 1828; became tutor there in 1829, and subsequently a teacher in the Deaf and Dumb Asylums in Hartford and New York. From 1837 to 1848 he was Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, and afterwards, till 1854, of Chemistry, in the University of Alabama. In 1854 he became Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy in the University of Mississippi, of which he was elected President in 1856, and Chancellor in 1858. In 1854 he took orders in the Protestant Episcopal Church, and in 1861 resigned his Chancellorship and chair in the University of Mississippi. In 1864 he was chosen President of Columbia College, New York, a position which he still holds. In 1860 he was a member of the Astronomical Expedition to observe the total eclipse of the sun in Labrador, and was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1862 he was engaged in the reduction of Gilliss's observations of the stars in the southern hemisphere, and in 1863 had charge of the publication of the charts and maps of the United States Coast Survey. In 1867 he was United States Commissioner to the Paris Exhibition. He is a member of various learned societies in Europe and America, and has received the honorary degrees of LL.D. (Jefferson College, 1855, Yale College, 1859), S.T.D. (University of Mississippi, 1861), and in 1872 that of Doctor of Literature from the Regents of the University of New York. He has published, "Treatise on Arithmetic," 1830; "Analytic Grammar," 1836; "Letters on Collegiate Government," 1855; "History of the United States Coast Survey," 1857; "Report on Machinery and Industrial Arts," 1869; "Recent Progress of Science," 1869; and "The Metric System," 1871. He has also contributed largely to scientific and educational journals. In conjunction with Professor Arnold Guyot, he edited Johnson's "Universal Cyclopædia," 1874–7.