by the author fifty-two years afterward suggested very few alterations and disclosed no important errors. The cabinet of Mr. Benjamin D. Perkins was shortly afterward purchased for a thousand dollars, and in 1810 the splendid cabinet of Colonel George Gibbs was deposited in the college. The latter cabinet, which attracted visitors from all parts of the country, was bought fifteen years afterward. While Professor Silliman was engaged in arranging it, the Rev. Dr. Ely accosted him: "Why, dominie, is there not danger that with these physical attractions you will overtop the Latin and the Greek?" Professor Silliman replied: "Sir, let the literary gentlemen push and sustain their departments. It is my duty to give full effect to the sciences committed to my care."
An "American Journal of Mineralogy" had been started by Dr. Archibald Bruce, of New York, in 1810, but had been suspended after the publication of four numbers. Professor Silliman, at the suggestion of Colonel Gibbs, and with the approbation of Dr. Bruce, started, in 1818, a journal intended to include the entire circle of the physical sciences and their applications. This was "Silliman's" (now the "American") "Journal of Science," which is still continued under the direction of the son and son-in-law of its founder.
The courses of popular lectures on scientific subjects which were conducted by Professor Silliman in the different cities of the United States, originated in 1808, when a course in chemistry for ladies and gentlemen was proposed to him, and gladly assented to, as a scheme in the interest of scientific progress. A class of about forty-five persons was formed, and listened to the instruction given them apparently with complete satisfaction, for it appeared afterward, the lecturer remarks, in speaking of the matter, that the course "turned on female hinges," and "sentiment lubricated the joints. . . . It was my province to explain the affinities of matter, and I had not advanced far in my pleasing duties before I discovered that moral affinities, also moving without my intervention, were playing an important part." One of the affinities involved the professor, and his marriage to Miss Harriet Trumbull, daughter of the second Governor Trumbull, and one of his hearers, followed in the course of the next year. Many years afterward he was invited to deliver a course in Hartford—the first out of New Haven; then followed courses in Lowell, Boston (where "the Orthodox and Unitarian influence was united in his favor," and where he returned to lecture in several successive years afterward), other New England towns, and New York. In 1843 he lectured in Pittsburg, where he received most "vivid demonstrations of kind and gratified feelings"; the next year in Baltimore, where he found that "people who came for once, staid"; and afterward in Baltimore again, Mobile, New Orleans, Natchez, at Washington before the Smithsonian Institution, and in St. Louis. The calls to lecture continued actively through twenty-three years, from 1834 to 1857. In
