his son-in-law, Professor Dana, in that of Geology and Mineralogy. The name of Silliman was given to both chairs.
Professor Silliman was still to continue a prominent figure before the public, kept so by other events than those connected with science and the affairs of the college. A few months after his resignation the Kansas-Nebraska controversy rose to its height, and the Republican party was born amid the convulsions it excited. Professor Silliman had always abhorred slavery, and he saw in these disputes great moral issues, and the question of the equal rights of citizens of all the States to settle in the Territories and defend themselves there. His active interest in these matters, and the works by which he showed it, called out bitter partisan reprobation, and this in turn invoked eloquent and deserved eulogies of his pure character and his attainments in science from Senators Foster and Dixon in the United States Senate.
Professor Silliman kept even pace with the progress of science and scientific ideas as they were developed through all his career, and let his religious faith shine at the same time with a light of even brilliancy. The possibility that there was a conflict or could be a conflict does not seem even to have occurred to him. From his earliest college-days, piety and a firm devotion in religious faith seem to have formed a prominent side of his character; yet he never hesitated to accept the most startling discovery, when it proved deserving acceptance. "Now, at eighty-two and a half years of age," he says, March 1, 1862, "I can truly declare that, in the study and exhibition of science to my pupils and my fellow-men, I have never forgotten to give all the honor and glory to the infinite Creator, happy if I might be the honored interpreter of a portion of Lis works, and of the beautiful structure and beneficent laws discovered therein by the labors of many illustrious predecessors. For this I claim no merit. It is the result to which right reason and sound philosophy, as well as religion, would naturally lead. While I have never concealed my convictions on these subjects, nor hesitated to declare them on all proper occasions, I have also declared my belief that while natural religion stands as the basis of revelation, consisting as it does of the facts and laws which form the domain of science, science has never revealed a system of mercy commensurate with the moral wants of man. In Nature, in God's creation, we discover only laws—laws of undeviating strictness, and sure penalties annexed for their violation. There is associated with natural laws no system of mercy; that dispensation is not revealed in Nature, and is contained in the Scriptures alone. With the double view just presented, I feel that Science and Religion may walk hand in hand." "For his own part," says Professor Fisher, from whose rich biography we have drawn freely in the composition of this sketch, "he felt that the Bible was a revelation from God. . . . Not being in the habit of resorting to the Scriptures for information in physical science, he had valued its early pages for the pure and sublime theism which they
