EIGHTS 356 ELIOT in the State Herbarium at Albany. Dr. John M. Clarke, Director of the New York State Museum, says of Eights: "It is worth while taking note of Eights's geological observa- tions . . . they were the first ever made in the Antarctic and were put down by a man who was in his time reckoned a geologist." According to the same authority, "Eights was among the first observers to make record of the active volcanoes in the vicinity of these islands and what was then called Palmer's Land." In 1837 Eights published a paper in the first volume of the Journal of the Boston So- ciety of Natural History and gave an account of Decolopoda australis an unbelieveable ten- legged pycnogonid; Dr. Leon J. Cole says of this: "A ten-legged pycnogonid such as Decolopoda was an unheard of thing until Eights described this one." On the Fanning Expedition was one John N. Reynolds, not a man of science, but a man who had much to do in initiating the sentiment and leading the campaign which resulted in the Wilkes Exporting Expedition. Eights wanted to go on the new expedition, and was appointed as its geologist, but when the final arrangements were completed we find that he had been skilfully eliminated from the corps of scientists on the expedition. This proved to be a bitter disappointment for him and was doubtless the deathblow to his am- bitions and to what might have been a not- able scientific career. The rest of the story is short. Between 1835 and 1853 he resided in Albany and wrote anonymously for the Zodiac, an Albany maga- . zine, articles on flowers, clouds, weather, in- sects, birds, mollusca, geology, the lowering of the Hudson river, elevated beaches, turtles, sun-spots, fossils, minerals, constellations and other subjects, the observations of a well- stocked mind of a gifted naturalist. At one time during this period he appears to have been an assistant in the preparation of a report on the geology of the western part of the state. In 1852 he published a paper in the "Transactions of the Albany Institute" on the superficial geology of Albany. This was his last appearance. Of the remainder of his life, we only know that he was living alone, and was unmarried, and that he was very, very poor, so poor that he received assistance from his friends. He apparently found most congenial company among the interesting scientific men, who were active at that period in the affairs of the Albany Institute, but with increasing age he was obliged to take up his residence with a sister in Ballston, New York, where he died in 1882, at the age of eighty-four. H. D. House. The Reincarnation of James Eights, Antarctic Explorer, by Dr. John M. Clarke, Scientitic Monthly, 1916, vol. ii, 189-202. Trans. Albany Institrute. Jour. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., vol. i. EHot,Jared (1685-1763). Jared Eliot was eminent as a Congregational minister and famous as a physician, unques- tionably the first physician of his day in Con- necticut, frequently visiting every county there- in, and often making professional visits to Newport and Boston. Born in Guilford, Connecticut, November 7, 1685, his father was the Rev. Joseph Eliot, whose great abilities as a divine, a politician and a physician were justly admired, not only among his own people, but throughout the colony. His grandfather was John Eliot, "Apostle to the Indians," an Englishman who landed at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1631. The wife of the "Apostle" had great .skill in physic and surgery. The grandson, Jared, married Hannah, daughter of Samuel and Elizabeth Smithson, who was a famous midwife in Guilford. From his father, Joseph, his grand- mother, Ann, wife of the "Apostle," and from association with his wife, Hannah, and her mother, the midwife, Jared Eliot must have been in the way of acquiring many useful hints in the healing art. He graduated from Yale College in 1706. Harvard College gave him the honorary A. M. About 1756-7 he was unanimously elected a member of the Royal Society of London. He was trustee of his alma mater from 1730 till his death. Seven of his printed sermons reveal unusual excellence in his chosen profession, and a num- ber of his printed essays upon agriculture show that he was a scientific agriculturist. So valuable were they that they were printed in a volume in 1760. In 1762 his "Essay on the Invention, or Art of Making Very Good, if not the Best Iron from Black Sea Sand," appeared. For this the Royal Society of London granted him a valuable gold medal inscribed for "Producing Malleable Iron from the American Black Land," which then, and now, abounds on the shore of Long Island Sound at Qinton. The medal is in the possession of a descendant at Goshen, New York. Eleven children, nine sons and two daugh- ters, were the result of his marriage. Three of the sons graduated at Yale College, two of
