USA > New York > Old New York : or, Reminiscences of the past sixty years > Part 15
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GULIAN C. VERPLANCK.
possession of the Governor. I remember bringing over from Paulus Hook, now Jersey City, some of the volumes.
We possessed liberal benefactors in our earlier movements for a library, in Samuel M. Hopkins, Cadwallader D. Colden, and Gulian C. Verplanck. This last-named gentleman, who is recorded as an early member, and whom, thanks to a beneficent Providence, we still hail among the living celebri- ties of the Republic, both in letters and in hu- manity, stored with varied knowledge, and actu- ated by true Knickerbocker feelings, deemed the library department of enduring importance, and with a comprehensive view affirmed, that it was the bounden duty of the Society to collect every book, pamphlet, chart, map, or newspaper that threw light on the progress of the State, its cities, towns, or on the history of its literature; thus carrying out the plan unfolded in the Society's ad- dress to the public at their first organization. That we profit by more than his advice, may be seen in his historical discourse on the early Euro- pean friends of America, and the tribute he pays to the character of our forefathers, the Dutch and the Huguenots.
There is probably little recorded on your min- utes of the services rendered the Historical Society by Robert Fulton. Cut off too early in the midst of his great career very shortly after he had united
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in membership with you, his opportunities of per- sonal attendanee were limited ; and the mighty affairs which engrossed his time and weighed upon his intelleet, yielded little leisure from his engross- ing pursuits ; yet you had not one in your list who eherished a stronger zeal for the advancement of your important interests. His patriotie spirit was so eminently Ameriean ; his impulses so gen- erous, and the intimate relations which he held with the Livingstons, many of whom were most anxious to seeure the perpetuity of your institu- tion, all served to rivet his affections to advanee the great ends you had in view. On his ageney in enabling you to seeure the Gates' papers, I need not dwell ; he justly appreciated their value, and deemed it a duty that they should be preserved for the future historian. He comprehended the philo- sophy of history as well as the philosophy of steam navigation.
Amid a thousand individuals you might readily point out Robert Fulton. He was eonspie- uous for his gentlemanly bearing and freedom from embarrassment ; for his extreme activity, his height, somewhat over six feet, his slender yet en- ergetie form, and well-accommodated dress; for his full and eurly dark brown hair, earelessly seat- tered over his forehead, and falling round about his neek. His complexion was fair ; his forehead high ; his eyes large, dark, and penetrating, and
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ROBERT FULTON.
revolving in a capacious orbit of cavernous depth ; his brow was thick, and evinced strength and de- termination ; his nose was long and prominent ; his mouth and lips were beautifully proportioned, giving the impress of eloquent utterance, equally as his eyes displayed, according to phrenology, a pictorial talent and the benevolent affections. In his sequestered moments a ray of melancholy marked his demeanor ; in the stirring affairs of active business you might readily designate him, indiffer- ent to surrounding objects and persons, giving directions, and his own personal appliances, to whatever he might be engaged in. Thus have I often observed him on the docks, reckless of tem- perature and inclement weather, in our early steamboat days, anxious to secure practical issues from his midnight reflections, or to add new im- provements to works not yet completed. His floating dock cost him much personal labor of this sort. His hat might have fallen in the water, and his coat be lying on a pile of lumber, yet Fulton's devotion was not diverted. Trifles were not calcu- lated to impede him, or damp his perseverance.
There are those who have judged the sym- pathies of our nature by the grasp of the hand : this rule, applied to Mr. Fulton's salutation, only strengthened your confidence in the de- clarations he uttered. He was social ; capti- vating to the young, instructive even to the
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wisest. He was linked in close association with the leading characters of our city ; with Emmet, Colden, Clinton, Mitchill, Hosack, Macneven, and Morris. A daughter of his first-named friend, with artistic talents has painted his interesting features and his habitat. After all, few eminent men recorded on tlic rolls of fame encountered a life of severer trials and provoking annoyance. The incredulity which prevailed as to the success of his projects, as they were called, created doubts in the bosoms of some of his warmest friends, and the cry of "Crazy Fulton," issuing at times from the ignoble masses, I have heard reverberated from the lips of old heads, pretenders to science. Nor is this all. Even at the time when the auspicious moment had arrived, when his boat was now gliding on the waters, individuals were found still incredulous, who named his vast achievement the Marine Smoke Jack and Fulton's Folly. With philosophical composure he stood unruffled and endured all. He knew what Watt and every great inventor encounter. During his numerous years of unremitting toil, his genius had solved too many difficult problems not to have taught him the prin- ciples on which his success depended, and he was not to be dismayed by the yells of vulgar ignorance. Besides, he was working for a nation, not for him- self, and the magnitude of the object absorbed all other thoughts.
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ROBERT FULTON.
Mr. Fulton was emphatically a man of the people, ambitious indeed, but void of all sordid designs ; he pursued ideas more than moncy. Science was more captivating to him than pecu- niary gains, and the promotion of the arts, useful and refined, more absorbing than the accumula- tion of the miser's treasures.
I shall never forget that night of February 24th, 1815, a frosty night indeed, on which he dicd. Dr. Hosack, with whom I was associated in business, and who saw him in consultation with Dr. Bruce, in the last hours of his illness, returning home at midnight from his visit, remarked, "Fulton is dying ; his severe cold amidst the ice, in crossing the river, has brought on an alarm- ing inflammation and glossitis. He extended to me," continued the Doctor, "his generous hand, grasping mine closely, but he could no longer speak." I had been with Mr. Fulton at his residence but a short time before, to arrange some papers relative to Chancellor Livingston and the floating dock erected at Brooklyn. Business dispatched, he entered upon the character of West, the paint- er, the Columbiad of Barlow, and the great pic- tures of Lear and Ophelia, which he had deposited in the American Academy. This interview of an hour with the illustrious man has often furnished grateful reflections.
I enter not into a consideration of the special
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claims which Fulton possesses as the inventor of steam navigation ; it is sufficient for me on this occasion to know, that at the time when the Cler- mont steamed her way on the Hudson from New York for Albany on the 7th September, 1807, not another steamboat was in successful operation, save his own, throughout the globe. Well might the eloquent Gouverneur Morris exclaim, in his in- augural discourse before your Historical Society, " A bird hatched on the Hudson will soon people the floods of the Wolga ; and cygnets descended from an American swan, glide along the surface of the Caspian sea." **
A word or two in relation to another worthy member of our fraternity, whose life and character were directed with successful results in behalf of New York, and who, amid numerous benevolent engagements, was never indifferent to your His- torical Association : I allude to the late Thomas Eddy, a philanthropist in the fullest acceptance of the term. He was of the Society of Friends, but free of all sectional bias ; he had laid the founda- tion of a solid elementary education, had embarked in mercantile transactions, viewed men and things with the wisdom of an inductive philosopher, read largely ethical compends and books of voyages and
* See Colden's Life of Fulton ; Walsh's Appeal, &c., and the life-like delineation of Fulton, by Tuckerman, in his Biographical Essays.
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THOMAS EDDY.
travels, and was versed in Quaker theology from Fox and Barclay down to Sarah Grubb, the re- nowned Elias Hicks, and the experience of the last field preacher. The greater part of his life was devoted to charitable and humane purposes. He was associated with the Manumission Society with Colden ; with the New York Hospital with Robert Bowne ; with our Frce School system with Isaac Collins and John Murray ; and his name is ever to hold a conspicuous place in the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, and the establishment of the House of Refuge with John Griscom, Isaac Collins, and James W. Gerard. With De Witt Clinton he was the most promi- nent individual to project and organize the Bloom- ingdale Asylum for the Insanc. He corresponded largely with the philanthropists abroad as well as at home, on the critical and responsible subject of diseased manifestations of intellect ; and his pa- tient labors for a series of years, by letters with Tuke and Colquhoun, Roscoc and Lindley Murray in Europe, with Jefferson, Clinton, and Hosack, his American friends, rendered his opinions of cor- responding weight in the discussions which finally led to the adoption in this metropolis of the moral management of madness. His strong common sense often penetrated deeper than the judgment of some of his ablest associates. Chancellor Kent gives a striking instance of this truth in a sketch
4*
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of his character addressed to Knapp, the biogra- pher of Eddy ; and his great tact in the cases of lunacy of the celebrated Count Regnaud de St. Jean D'Angely, proved that he might have en- countered with triumph the interrogatories of the stoutest committee on medical jurisprudence. His fiscal integrity afforded a captivating illustration of his Christian belief. His early career in merchan- dise proved disastrous, and embarrassments of himself and friends for years followed : by the simplicity of his habits and a rigid economy, he was again made whole, when he discharged with fidelity every obligation with interest. I always thought that by this one act he had mounted at least a rung or two up Jacob's ladder .- These few specifications must suffice for a touch of the qual- ity of the man. Eddy was a great utilitarian, and quoted Franklin as John Pintard did his mid- night companion, Samuel Johnson. He told most pleasant stories of his canal explorations with Clinton and Morris. He was a model of industry, and more economical of time than of health. No saint ever battled with sin more earnestly than he did with procrastination and delay. His apho- risms were the fruits of practical humanity, and the whining cadences of the mere sentimentalist he shook off as if leprous. It must have been a trying sickness that arrested the march of his mul- tifarious business, and his occasional physical suf-
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THOMAS EDDY.
ferings were rarely adverted to by him. The lines of Cowper would not apply to Eddy ; he was filled with other ideas.
"Some people use their health (an ugly trick) In telling you how oft they have been sick."
Our public charities and the Historical Society encountered a loss by his death, which occurred in 1827, at the ripe age of 70 years. He left a namc a synonym for benevolence.
From the studies and accomplishments of the well-instructed physician, from the wide range of knowledge, physical and mental, that falls within his observation ; from the fact that every depart- ment of Nature must be explored, the better to discipline him properly to exercise his art ; the in- ference may be readily drawn that the faculty of medicine would scarcely prove indifferent to the creation of an institution fraught with such incen- tives to intellectual culture, as are necessarily em- braced within the range and intentions of our Historical Society. Moreover, I incline to the belief, that veneration for our predecessors is some- what a characteristic of the cultivators of medi- cal philosophy : the past is not to be overlooked, and the means for its preservation is in itself an intellectual advancement. The concurrence of the leading medical men of that early day was proved by the fellowship of Hosack, Bruce, Mitchill,
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Miller, Williamson, and, shortly after, by N. Ro- mayne, and others of renown. These distin- guished characters need no commendation of ours at this time. Your secretary has made records of their services, and it has so chanced, that, from personal intimacy, I have long ago been enabled to present humble memorials in different places, of their professional influence and deeds. They were men of expansive views, nor were the ele- ments of practical utility idle in their hands. Of my preceptor and friend, David Hosack, let it be sufficient to remark that, distinguished beyond all his competitors in the healing art, for a long series of years, he was acknowledged, by every hearer, to have been the most eloquent and impressive teacher of scientific medicine and clinical practice this country has produced. He was, indeed, a great instructor ; his descriptive powers and his diagnosis were the admiration of all ; his efficien- cy in rearing, to a state of high consideration, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, while he held the responsible office of professor, is known through- out the Republic ; his early movements to estab- lish a medical library in the New York Hospital ; his co-operation with the numerous charities which glorify the metropolis ; his adventurous outlay of the establishment of a State Botanical Garden ; his hygienic suggestions the better to improve the medical police of New York ; his primary forma-
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DAVID HOSACK.
tion of a mineralogical cabinet ; his copious writ- ings on fevers, quarantines, and foreign pestilence, in which he was the strenuous and almost the sole advocate for years, of doctrines now verified by popular demonstration ; these, and a thousand other circumstances, secured to him a weight of character that was almost universally felt through- out the metropolis. It was not unfrequently re- marked by our citizens, that Clinton, Hosack, and Hobart, were the tripod on which our city stood. The lofty aspirations of Hosack were further evinced by his whole career as a citizen. Sur- rounded by his large and costly library, his house was the resort of the learned and enlightened from every part of the world. No traveller from abroad rested satisfied without a personal interview with him ; and, at his evening soirées, the literati, the philosopher, and the statesman, the skilful in nat- ural science, and the explorer of new regions, the archaeologist and the theologue, met together, par- ticipators in the recreation of familiar intercourse. Your printed volumes contain all, I believe, he ever prepared for you as your President. His strictly medical writings are of some extent, and have excited a profitable emulation in the cause of science and humanity, and renewed inquiry into the causes of pestilence and the laws of contagion. His memoir of his friend De Witt Clinton, is a tribute to the talents and heroic virtues of that
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great statesman, and contains the most ample his- tory we possess of the origin, progress, and termi- nation of the Erie Canal. His life was a triumph in services rendered and in honors received ; his death was a loss to New York, the city of his birth ; his remains were followed to the grave by the eminent of every profession, and by the hum- ble in life whom his art had relieved. Hosack was a man of profuse expenditure ; he regarded money only for what it might command. Had he pos- sessed the wealth of John Jacob Astor, he might have died poor.
Early at the commencement of your patriotic undertaking, was recorded Archibald Bruce as a member. We had, at that time, more than one Bruce in the faculty among us. He of the His- torical Society was the physician and mineralogist. He was born in New York in 1771, was graduated at Columbia College, studied medicine with Ho- sack, and, in 1800, received the doctorate at the Edinburgh University. While in Scotland, he acquired a knowledge of the Wernerian theory under Jameson, and subsequently became a corre- spondent of the Abbé Hauy, the founder of Crys- tallography. He collected a large cabinet of min- erals while travelling about in Europe, projected the " American Journal of Mineralogy" in 1810, the first periodical of that science in the United States. and was created Mineralogical Professor by
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SAMUEL L. MITCHILL.
the regents of the University, at the organization of the College of Physcians and Surgeons. He had a cultivated taste for the Fine Arts, and con- tributed to our Library. He died in 1818. His reputation rests with his discovery, at Hoboken, of the Hydrate of Magnesia. In " Silliman's Jour- nal " there is a biography of him.
The universal praise which Dr. Mitchill en- joyed in almost every part of the globe where sci- ence is cultivated, during a long life, is demon- strative that his merits were of a high order. A discourse might be delivered on the variety and extent of his services in the cause of learning and humanity ; and as his biography is already before the public, in the "National Portrait Gallery," and we are promised that by Dr. Akerly, I have little to say at this time but what may be strictly associated with our Institution. His character had many peculiarities : his knowledge was diver- sified and most extensive, if not always profound. Like most of our sex, he was married ; but, as Old Fuller would say, the only issues of his body were the products of his brain. He advanced the scientific reputation of New York by his early promulgation of the Lavoisierian system of chem- istry, when first appointed professor in Columbia College : his first scientific paper was an essay on Evaporation : his mineralogical survey of New York, in 1797, gave Volney many hints : his
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analysis of the Saratoga waters enhanced the im- portance of those mineral springs. His ingenious theory of septic acid gave impulse to Sir Hum- phrey Davy's vast discoveries ; his doctrines on pestilence awakened inquiry from every class of observers throughout the Union : his expositions of a theory of the earth and solar systems, capti- vated minds of the highest qualities. His corre- spondence with Priestley is an example of the de- licious manner in which argument can be con- ducted in philosophical discussion ; his elaborate account of the fishes of our waters invoked the plaudits of Cuvier. His reflections on Somnium evince psychological views of original combination. His numerous papers on natural history enriched the annals of the Lyceum, of which he was long president. His researches on the ethnological characteristics of the red man of America, be- trayed the benevolence of his nature and his gen- erous spirit : his fanciful article for a new and more appropriate geographical designation for the United States, was at one period a topic which enlisted a voluminous correspondence, now printed in your Proceedings. He increased our knowledge of the vegetable materia medica of the United States. He wrote largely to Percival on noxious agents. He cheered Fulton when dejected ; en- couraged Livingston in appropriation ; awakened new zeal in Wilson the ornithologist, when the
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SAMUEL L. MITCHILL.
Governor, Tompkins, had nigh paralyzed him by his frigid and unfeeling reception ; and, with Pin- tard and Colden, was a zealous promoter of that system of internal improvement which has stampcd immortality on the name of Clinton. He co- operated with Jonathan Williams in furtherance of the Military Academy at West Point, and for a long series of years was an important professor of useful knowledge in Columbia College and in the College of Physicians and Surgeons. His let- ter to Tilloch, of London, on the progress of his mind in the investigation of septic acid, is curious as a physiological document. The leading papers from his pen are to be found in the New York Medical Repository ; yet he wrote in the Ameri- can Medical and Philosophical Register, the New York Medical and Physical Journal, the Ameri- can Mineralogical Journal, and supplied several other periodicals, both abroad and at home, with the results of his cogitations. He was one of the commissioners appointed by the general govern- ment for the construction of a new naval force to be propelled by steam, the steamer Fulton the First. While he was a member of the United States Senate, he was unwearied in effecting the adoption of improved quarantine laws ; and, among his other acts important to the public weal, strenuous to lessen the duties on the importa- tion of rags, in order to. render the manufac-
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ture of paper cheaper, to aid the diffusion of knowledge by printing.
There was a rare union in Dr. Mitchill of a mind of vast and multifarious knowledge and of poetic imagery. Even in his " Epistles to his Lady Love," the excellent lady who became his endeared wife, he gave utterance of his emotions in tuneful numbers, and likened his condition unto that of the dove, with trepidation seeking safety in the ark. Ancient and modern languages were unlocked to him, and a wide range in physical sci- ence, the pabulum of his intellectual repast. An essay on composts, a tractate on the deaf and dumb, verses to Septon or to the Indian tribes, might be eliminated from his mental alembic within the compass of a few hours. He was now engaged with the anatomy of the egg, and now deciphering a Babylonian brick ; now involved in the nature of meteoric stones, now on the different species of brassica ; now on the evaporization of fresh water, now on that of salt ; now offering suggestions to Garnet, of New Jersey, the corre- spondent of Mark Akenside, on the angle of the windmill, and now concurring with Michaux on the beauty of the black walnut as ornamental for parlor furniture. In the morning he might be found composing songs for the nursery, at noon dietetically experimenting and writing on fishes, or unfolding a new theory on terrene formations,
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SAMUEL L. MITCHILL.
and at evening addressing his fair readers on the healthy influences of the alkalis, and the depura- tive virtues of whitewashing. At his country re- treat at Plandome he might find full employment in translating, for his mental diversion, Lancisi on the fens and marshes of Rome, or in rendering into English poetry the piscatory eclogues of Sannaza- rius. Yesterday, in workmanlike dress, he might have been engaged, with his friend Elihu H. Smith, on the natural history of the American elk, or perplexed as to the alimentary nature of tad- poles, on which, according to Noah Webster, the people of Vermont almost fattoned during a sca- son of scarcity ; to-day, attired in the costume of a native of the Fecjce Islands, (for presents were sent him from all quarters of the globe,) he was better accoutred for illustration, and for the recep- tion, at his house, of a meeting of his philosophi- cal acquaintance ; while to-morrow, in the scho- lastic robes of an LL.D., he would grace the exer- cises of a college commencement.
I have but very imperfectly glanced at the lit- erary and scientific writings of Dr. Mitchill : they are too numerous to notice at length on this occa- sion. To his biographer must be assigned that duty. His detailed narrative of the earthquakes which occurred on the 16th day of December, 1811, and which agitated the parts of North America that lic between the Atlantic Occan and Louisi-
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ana, and of subscquent occurrences of a like na- ture, is a record of physical phenomena well wor- thy the notice of our Storm Kings, but which seems to have escaped the attention even of our distinguished philosopher, Dr. Maury, the famed author of the Physical Geography of the Sea." Of his collegiate labors in the several branches of knowledge, which he taught for almost forty years, I shall assume the privilege of saying a few words. His appearance before his class was that of an earnest instructor, ready to impart the stores of his accumulated wisdom for the benefit of his pupils, while his oral disquisitions were perpetually enlivened with novel and ingenious observations. Chemistry, which first engaged his capacious mind, was rendered the more captivating by his endeavors to improve the nomenclature of the French savans, and to render the science subservi- cnt to the useful purposes of art and hygiene. In treating of the materia medica, he delighted to dwell on the riches of our native products for the art of healing, and he sustained an enormous cor- respondence throughout the land, in order to add to his own practical observations the experience of the competent, the better to prefer the claims of our indigenous products. As a physician of the
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