within two years after his arrival in this country, with a journey up the Missouri River, in company with Mr. Bradbury, a journey at that day perilous; and it was with much suffering and danger that the small party penetrated to some distance beyond the Mandan villages, where they were robbed by the Indians and narrowly escaped with their lives.

Between 1811, when he returned to Philadelphia, and 1817 Mr. Nuttall had visited the more accessible portions of the United States; and in 1818 he published his "Genera of North American Plants," his largest, and, considering the period and the circumstances of its production, much the best of his botanical works.

The next year his equally perilous journey up the Arkansas River and its tributaries was undertaken, the principal results of which were published in his "Narrative of a Journey into the Interior of Arkansas," with an Appendix full of interesting scientific and ethnological information; and in several separate botanical memoirs.

After the death of Professor Peck, in 1822, Mr. Nuttall was called to supply his place at Cambridge, which he did for ten years; during which he produced his admirable "Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada," as well as several botanical, ornithological, and mineralogical papers. Leaving Cambridge in the winter of 1833-4, he made a third and more successful attempt to penetrate and explore the western part of the continent, then so imperfectly known. Joined to Captain Wyeth's party, he crossed the Rocky Mountains by the pass at the South Fork of the Platte, reached the coast of Oregon, visited the Sandwich Islands, and the coast of California in the vicinity of San Francisco, Monterey, and San Diego, and returned to Boston by a voyage around Cape Horn.

The scientific results of this exploration, and of some other collections, so far as they have been published or elaborated by Mr. Nuttall himself, are contained in three memoirs in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, in the first volume of Torrey and Gray's Flora of North America, and in Nuttall's three volumes supplementary to Michaux's North American Sylva.

In 1842 the death and legacy of his uncle recalled Mr. Nuttall to England, to an estate upon which he resided, with the exception of a visit to the United States in the autumn and winter of 1846-7, until his death, in September last, at the age of seventy-three.

Mr. Nuttall was a person of great simplicity of life and manners, and of extremely retiring habits, though affable and communicative when with congenial companions. Although fond of every department of Natural History, and a proficient in ornithology and mineralogy, to our knowledge of which he made useful contributions, his favorite pursuit was Botany. His earliest and principal work, the Genera of North American Plants, revealed talents for observation and description of a high order, and a quickness in detecting natural affinities which seemed to be intuitive, and was certainly very remarkable for that day. Altogether, the name of Nuttall must ever stand very high among the pioneers of botanical science in the United States.

The three names which now disappear from the roll of our Foreign Honorary Members, belonged one to each of our three Classes. They are those of the great Engineer, the great Geographer, and of one of the most distinguished Greek scholars of the age.

STEPHENSON died in October last, in middle age; RITTER, on the 28th of September, in his eighty-first year; THIERSCH, near the end of February, in his seventy-seventh year.

ROBERT STEPHENSON was the son, pupil, and companion of the illustrious George Stephenson, a man to whose genius, persevering industry, and practical good sense our age is more indebted for its greatest instrument of civilization and material progress, than to the talents or labors of any other individual. Inheriting a good measure of his father's mental endowments, and judiciously trained in the physical and mathematical sciences, by which his talents were developed, strengthened, and directed, without being smothered or distorted by an excess of mere learning, our associate opened upon his career, as assistant to his father in building the Liverpool and Manchester railway, and in perfecting the locomotive which triumphed over all its competitors in 1829. The completion of this road and engine established the fact that railways were to become the greatest instrument of intercourse amongst men, and were to carry the power of civilization wherever the dry land appeared.

On the formation of the London and Birmingham company for the commencement of the road which was to become the central line of England, Mr. Stephenson, although hardly thirty years old, received the appointment of Chief Engineer, when he soon established a reputation second only to that of his father; and on the gradual retirement

and subsequent death of the latter, he became, in public estimation, though not without rivals, the first railway engineer in Europe.

This is not the time nor the place to review his controversies with some of his rivals, who, with more ambition than genius, attempted to surpass his constructions, and those of his father, by mere excess of dimensions, for which they received from many persons a praise which should be accorded only to improvements of mechanical construction or organization. It is enough upon this subject to say, that the experience of the few years that have yet elapsed has shown, as far as so short an experience can show, that upon all these subjects of controversy Mr. Stephenson was mainly in the right; nor has it yet appeared that in his long and diversified career he ever made what may be called an engineering blunder. Praise like this can hardly be accorded to any one who has gone before him.

Of all the works of Mr. Stephenson, the tubular bridge, of which the first was constructed to cross the Menai Strait, is that upon which his reputation for genius will mainly rest. In the construction of the railway and locomotive, no high claim as an inventor can be accorded to him, for not only his father, but Trevethick and many others had preceded him; but the tubular bridge is the embodiment of a high original conception, at once bold and practical; and although it will probably never be of common use, yet there have been and must hereafter occur extraordinary obstacles, which cannot be so well overcome in any other way.

Our colleague was fortunate, not only in his paternity, but in his time; a time when the wealth of a long peace and the activity of a great empire were lavishly poured out under an excessive, perhaps. morbid, excitement for railway improvements. This, added to the great aid derived from the recent improvements in all the useful arts, gave him a success that no genius or activity at any preceding time could have brought to his career, a career that posterity will not fail to recognize as having left a deep impression upon our age.

FREDERICK WILLIAM THIERSCH, one of the most distinguished philologists of the age, was born at Kitscheidungen near Freyburg, June 17, 1784. His early education was pursued in the schools of his native town; he studied afterwards at the Universities of Leipsic and Göttingen, and took his doctor's degree at Göttingen in 1808, immediately after which he was appointed Professor in the Lyceum of that place. In the following year (1809) he was called to Munich as

Professor in the University just established there. The condition of the country was such, on account of the military movements of the time, that young Thiersch was only able to reach his destination in safety by joining a French corps, and marching equipped like a common soldier. He found that learning in Bavaria was at a very low ebb, and he at once devoted himself to the promotion of education and literature with extraordinary zeal and ability. It was through his influence over the most enlightened men of the kingdom that classical studies, including the archæology of art, first assumed the prominent position which they maintain at the present day in the Bavarian capital. In 1812, he founded the Philological Seminary, which soon became an important part of the University, and in the same year commenced the publication of the Acta Philologicorum Monacensium. Thiersch took a lively interest in the fortunes of Greece, and was one of the first among the European scholars to predict the restoration of her nationality. In 1814 he went to Vienna, and, meeting Count Capo d'Istria there, assisted in founding a Greek society of the friends of literature (the piλóμovoσi), and afterwards the political society intended to embrace the leading Greeks wherever found, and called the Hetaria. When the war of independence broke out, in 1821, his zeal in the cause influenced the king and court of Bavaria to lend their aid to the establishment of the Greek nation. In this and other ways he proved himself to be a constant and most valuable friend to the Greeks. Soon after the close of the war he visited the country, and made a careful study of its actual condition. The results of his observations were given to the world in 1833, in a work written in French, and entitled L'Etat actuel de la Grèce; and it is to him more than to any other, that Prince Otho was indebted for his election to the throne of Greece. The other writings of Professor Thiersch are on Public Education, on Ancient Art, editions of the Greek Classics, and numerous contributions to the transactions of the Royal Bavarian Society of Sciences, of which he was President for several years. In 1858 the jubilee of Mr. Thiersch's doctorate was celebrated with great enthusiasm at Munich. Deputations from all the leading Universities of Germany, and from numerous learned societies, were sent to Munich with addresses and congratulations. Orders of knighthood were conferred upon him by German sovereigns and by the king of Greece, in token of their high estimation of his character, abilities, and learning. The young Greeks studying in the University of Munich

sent to him a lyrical poem in the ancient language of their country, written by Bernadahes, one of their number, who has since distinguished himself in poetical literature, and the University of Athens addressed to him a grateful letter, written in Classical Greek by Professor Philippos Johannis, one of the most accomplished teachers, and in that year the Prytanis or Rector of the University. Professor Thiersch, it is understood, has left an edition of Eschylus, which he had prepared with a view to its publication after his death.

By his decease the world has lost a scholar of large and various acquirements, a man of elevated principles and pure character, of amiable temper and cordial manners, an acute and tasteful critic in literature and art, an author whose works take rank among the most learned productions of the age, a friend and supporter of learned institutions and of liberal principles of government.

CARL RITTER, the renowned author of the Erdkunde, &c., — or "The Science of the Globe in its Relation to Nature and to the History of Mankind," was born in Quedlinburg, a town of Prussian Saxony, on the 7th of August, 1779. When he had passed only two years as a student at the University of Halle, he became, for eighteen years, a private tutor in the family of Mr. Hollweg, a wealthy banker of Frankfort, where the celebrated statesman and minister, Von Bethmann-Hollweg, was one of his pupils. In 1814, after prolonged travel in the middle and south of Europe, he brought his two pupils to the University of Göttingen, where he produced, in 1817 and 1818, the first and second volumes of the first edition of his great geographical work. Two years after, mainly through the instrumentality of William Humboldt, then Minister of Public Instruction, he was called to Berlin, as Professor of Geography at the Royal Military School and at the University, where the first chair, it is believed, devoted to that special branch of knowledge in any German university, was created for him.

Here, besides other writings, he published, in 1822, the first volume of a second and much enlarged edition of his Erdkunde. Thisafter ten years of intense academical activity, largely occupied by the preparation and delivery of the courses of public lectures which gave him such renown as a teacher- was followed in 1832 by a second volume; and from that time down to 1838, six more volumes, or one volume a year, attest his wonderful industry and learning. In the twenty-one succeeding years, that is, to the close of Ritter's life, eleven