elaborately explained in the Preface. During the thirty years of his total blindness, his memory, which was naturally good, was cultivated, as is not unusual in such cases, to great quickness and accuracy. Besides retaining with literal exactness nearly the whole of the New Testament, he is said to have solved all the problems of Euclid, orally, by recalling the images of the diagrams with which he had been familiar in his youth.

Our late respected colleague, BENJAMIN APTHORP GOULD, also died in October last. Mr. Gould was born in Lancaster, Mass., in 1787, and graduated at Harvard College in 1814. In early life he struggled against many disadvantages, having only the opportunities of a common country school, and not having even the command of his own time until he became of age. He then supported himself by teaching for some years, a profession in which he exhibited peculiar aptitude and acquired a marked reputation. Being intent on a collegiate education, he prepared himself, somewhat late in life, for admission into College, almost without assistance, and afterwards took his place in the foremost rank of a class distinguished by the presence of some of our brightest luminaries in literature. In the latter part of his Senior year, a vacancy occurred in the Public Latin School in Boston, and Mr. Gould, though yet an undergraduate, received, in consequence of the character he had acquired and the strong recommendations of President Kirkland and others, the appointment of master in that institution. How well he discharged the duties of that office the testimony of his numerous pupils, and the acknowledged elevation of the character of the seminary itself, afford ample proof. In 1828, Mr. Gould resigned his post as Principal of the Latin School, and devoted the remainder of his life to commerce. For many years he sustained the reputation of an honorable, intelligent, and successful merchant; and has died in the maturity of life, leaving many who recollect with pleasure his generous nature, his conscientious rectitude, and his unwavering fidelity in the path of duty.

Even within the past month, viz. on the 21st of April, the Academy lost another, and one of its most venerable Fellows, MR. WILLIAM WELLS of Cambridge. Mr. Wells had reached nearly the age of eighty-seven years, an age which had of late precluded him from any active participation in our labors, and his retirement had made him comparatively a stranger to most of our members. Yet those who were privileged to know him can truly say, that to

the last his lively sympathy still followed with interest the literary and scientific movements of the day. Mr. Wells was endowed by nature with that exquisite taste which avoids in life, as in literature, all tints that do not blend and harmonize. No surer critic could be found of any work of genius, classical or modern; no safer arbiter His conversation of the appropriate and the true in social intercourse. was singularly fascinating, and it would be prized just in proportion as study and refinement had qualified the hearer to appreciate his highly cultivated intellect. To these mental endowments, to sound scholarship and fine taste and critical power, were added in Mr. Wells a most attractive sweetness and simplicity of character.

Of our two late Associate Fellows deceased during the past year, one, MR. NUTTALL, was personally known only to some of the older Fellows of the Academy, and perhaps mostly to those interested in Natural History. The other, MR. MANN, moved in a wider and more public sphere, and was too prominent and active in educational, reformatory, and political life not to attract a large measure of attention.

HORACE MANN was born in Franklin, Norfolk County, Mass., May His father died 4, 1796. His early life was one of toil and sorrow.

in 1809, and he remained with his mother on the farm until 1816, when, after a hurried preparation by an itinerant teacher, he entered the Sophomore Class in Brown University, Providence, R. I., where After a few he was graduated with the highest honors in 1819. months spent in reading law, he was appointed to a tutorship in Latin and Greek at Brown University. He resigned this post in 1821, and was admitted to the bar in December, 1823; and immediately opened an office in Dedham, where he continued in the practice of law until 1833. In 1827 he was elected to the General Court, and annually re-elected until 1833, when he removed to Boston. From that time until 1837, he was a member of the State Senate, continuing also in the practice of his profession. He then became first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and for twelve years was indefatigable in those labors which have given him an enduring fame. In the spring of 1848, he was chosen to succeed John Quincy Adams in the National House of Representatives, re-elected in November, 1848, and again in November, 1850. In September, 1852, he was elected President of Antioch College, at Yellow Springs, Ohio, which was opened in October, 1853, and over which he presided to the

day of his death, which occurred on the second day of August, 1859. The distinguishing traits of his character were his unwavering fidelity to his convictions, and the passionate intensity with which he gave himself to the work before him. He usually had some chosen great end in view, to accomplish which he labored with a zeal and energy of which few, even of the strongest men, are capable. The Asylum at Worcester is perhaps the noblest of the monuments which attest his efficiency when a member of the State Legislature; the great and sudden improvement of the common schools in Massachusetts shows that his oft-quoted and oft-praised reports give no exaggerated view of his ability and success as Secretary of the Board of Education; the feelings which, after a lapse of eight years, are awakened in Massachusetts by any allusion to his course in Congress, bear conclusive testimony to his intense devotion, while there, to the single cause for which he took a seat in the House; and the voice of his pupils at Antioch College assures us, that, for the last six years of his life, he gave himself up wholly to the interests of his charge. Abstemious and economical in his habits, he was generous to those who needed his aid; full of tender affections, and repressing them only for fear that they should lead him to be too lenient to wrong-doers. So great was his scorn of all vice, and so unflinching his exposure of moral weakness, that few knew how deep and loving was his heart. His chief fault arose from that which was his highest virtue. Careful to attempt only what he thought he ought to do, he considered success to be a duty, and threw himself upon his work with such an intense energy as to render him incapable, for the time, of seeing the possibility of any other course, or any other opinion. But this want of breadth was atoned for by the superior effectiveness which it gave him in behalf of whatever he undertook.

THOMAS NUTTALL was born of humble parents at Settle, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in the year 1786, and died at Nutgrove, (an estate in Lancashire bequeathed to him by his uncle,) on the 10th of September last. Although his life began and closed in England, nearly his whole scientific career belonged to this country, and was devoted to American Natural History. When he immigrated to the United States in 1808, at the age of twenty-two years, he no doubt brought with him a fondness for the pursuits in which he afterwards excelled; but his knowledge was acquired here, mostly in the field, and through his own explorations. His extended explorations began,

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