SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF PROF. CHESTER DEWEY, D. D., LL. D.,

Late Professor of chemistry and natural history in the University of Rochester, and for many years a correspondent of the Smithsonian Institution.

BY MARTIN B. ANDERSON, LL. D., President of the University of Rochester.

Chester Dewey, D. D., LL.D., at the time of his death emeritus professor in the University of Rochester, was in two respects a representative man. He was not only a typical teacher, but he also held a distinguished position among the few who at an early day cultivated and organized the study of natural science in America. In these two relations we propose to speak of his life and labors.

Dr. Dewey was born in Sheffield, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, October 25, 1784. His father was a man of strong character and clear head, who seems to have had the will and the capacity to give his son a most symmetrical training, both moral and intellectual. In this work the father was aided by a wife of singular piety, cheerfulness, and moral excellence. It was doubtless to these early formative influences that Dr. Dewey owed much of that moral completeness which adorned the whole of his subsequent life. After a youth spent in alternate labor on the farm, and study in the common school, he fitted himself to enter the college at Williamstown, Massachusetts, in his eighteenth year. He graduated in 1806, taking rank as a scholar among the first in his class. During his residence in college he became the subject of those deep religious convictions, by which he ever after ordered his entire life. In 1807, he was licensed to preach by the Berkshire Congregationalist Association. After teaching and preaching for a few months at Stockbridge and Tyringham, Massachusetts, he was appointed a tutor in Williams College. After two years' service in this capacity, he was elected (at the age of twenty-six) professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. He held this position till 1827, a period of seventeen years. During this time the college was poor, and struggling for life. Of necessity, a heavy burden of labor and responsibility rested upon the officers of instruction. Among these, Dr. Dewey bore a distinguished part. In times of confusion and internal disorder, his influence over the students is said to have been most salutary and powerful. According to the custom of the time, his department of instruction included not only mathematics and physics, but the whole range of chemistry and the natural sciences.

He entered upon the work of accumulating and organizing the apparatus and collections requisite for the study of chemistry and natu

ral history with great zeal and enthusiasm; while he was equally earnest in giving instruction in the severer portions of the broad department for whose cultivation in the college he was made responsible. He fitted up a laboratory, and commenced making collections for the illus tration of botany, mineralogy, and geology. This was accomplished mainly by personal labor and exchanges with those engaged in similar pursuits in our own and other countries. These labors gave the initial impulse to the cultivation of the natural sciences in Williams College, and laid the foundations of its now large and valuable illustrative collections.

In 1827, Dr. Dewey resigned the chair which he had so long held. The friends of education in Western Massachusetts had been impressed with the necessity of providing more systematic and vigorous instruction for young men preparing for college and immediate business pursuits." An opportunity for public service of this sort of more immediate usefulness, as it seemed to him, than was afforded by his college chair, was found in the establishment of a gymnasium at Pittsfield. He removed to Pittsfield, where he had previously been engaged as professor of chemistry in the Medical College, and became principal of this institution. He remained in Pittsfield nine years, at the same time occupying the chair of chemistry in the medical colleges in Pittsfield and in Woodstock, Vermont. At the end of this period he removed to Rochester, New York, and took charge of the collegiate institute in that city. This institution, in connection with Professor N. W. Benedict, he conducted with high success for fourteen years. In 1850, at the establishment of the University of Rochester, he was elected professor of chemistry and natural history in that institution, and continued to discharge the duties of that chair for a little more than ten years. He retired from active duty at the ripe age of seventy-six. It was during the period of his connection with the university that I first became acquainted with Dr. Dewey personally and in the work of instruction.

In attempting an estimate of the services and worth of our venerated friend, we are naturally led first to speak of him as a teacher. In his chosen profession he was an enthusiast. His whole life was absorbed in obtaining knowledge and imparting it to others. In the street, in the social circle, in the professor's chair, he was always the teacher. No person could come within the sphere of his influence without carrying away some new fact or thought, or being inoculated with new love for moral or natural truth. In accumulating knowledge he seemed always to have in mind the idea of imparting it to others. In his mind new truths seemed to fall spontaneously into the form best adapted for presentation to the learner. He always conceived of nature and man as belonging to a common system, related to each other in every part, and designed to illustrate a common moral purpose. This naturally led him to estimate new investigations and discoveries to be important mainly as they served to set forth the moral dignity of man, to promote his

happiness, and elevate his character. His intellectual life was a beautiful commentary on the remark of Gibbon, that "it is a greater glory to science to develop and perfect mankind, than it is to enlarge the boundaries of the known universe." He appeared to study nature, not so much for the reputation which knowledge or discovery would secure to him, as from a tender affection for her various forms and aspects considered as exhibiting a grand connection of benevolent uses, means, and ends, revealing the goodness and wisdom of the Almighty. Hence, he was utterly free from those petty jealousies which so often manifest themselves among scientific men. He rejoiced in scientific progress, to whomsoever it was due, and was always most generous in his estimate of the achievements of others. Every discovery which developed new elements in the Divine plan was to him a matter for personal rejoicing. Whittier's verses, describing St. Pierre's sympathizing relation to nature, are more strictly applicable to Dr. Dewey than to the brilliant Frenci

To his mind there was no broad separation between the moral and the material order. But he was intensely averse to that false philosophy which seeks unity at the expense of reducing all thought and volition to dynamics, making no distinction between man and a crystal. To his mind, the whole scheme of material things was ever throbbing and quivering with divine life, benevolence, and power. This profound recognition of God in the modes in which He has revealed himself, rounded and completed his moral and intellectual life, and made him, by way of eminence, the Good Teacher.

His scientific attainments were supplemented by various and thorough knowledge in the department of critical scholarship. This gave a breadth and many-sidedness to his mind, which is so conspicuously wanting in many of the scientific men of our time. In the lecture-room, Dr. Dewey was exact and brief in his statements of principles; clear and full in his illustrations of difficulties; sympathetic with the dull in intellect, and patient with the wayward and inattentive. As a colleague, he was uniformly unselfish and courteous, bearing his share of all common burdens, ready to receive suggestions, never taking offense at trifles, exhibiting always that rare combination of natural qualities and acquired habits which distinguishes the Christian gentleman. He loved his work, continued in it during his whole active life, and neither sought nor wished for any other employment. It was his lot to have been connected with schools and colleges which have been recently founded

or were in the process of formation. For this reason his labors were the more self-denying.

He also represents two departments of the teacher's profession. He went from a college chair, in which he had been eminently successful, into an academy, and from an academy back again to a college chair, simply at the call of duty, apparently without a thought that dignity or position was in the slightest degree affected by either transfer. His only desire was to ascertain the position in which he could be most useful to his fellow-men. In view of these facts in our friend's career, I cannot forbear to note the lesson which they convey to our profession. As teachers, we should always bear in mind that we belong to a brotherhood laboring in a common work for a common end; that rank and dignity among us do not depend upon the accidents of position, but upon high attainments and faithful services, no matter where those attainments are made or those services rendered. In this respect the legal profession gives us a worthy example. From the Chief Justice of the United States to the village attorney, all lawyers, as members of the profession, are brethren, and equal. Let us frown upon any attempt to separate our profession into sects and orders, on the false assumption that there are, or can be, rival dignities or clashing interests among those engaged in the high and benevolent work of training the minds and characters of the young.

As a man of science, Dr. Dewey belongs to a class whose abilities and public services are liable, in our time, to be overlooked or underrated. I refer to those men who were pioneers in the work of cultivating and popularizing natural science in our country. When Amos Eaton, Parker Cleaveland, Robert Hare, Benjamin Silliman, Edward Hitchcock, and Chester Dewey began their labors, the natural sciences, as they are now understood, had in this country hardly an existence. Since that time the discoveries and investigations upon which they rest have, in great part, been made or matured.

Dr. Dewey left college in 1806. Just about this period that remarkable impulse was given to scientific inquiry, resulting in an almost simultaneous development of chemistry, zoology, crystalography, botany, and geology, which rendered the first half of the nineteenth century so supremely illustrious. What are now elementary truths, finding a place in every text-book, were then either undiscovered or new and strange, waiting the time of their acceptance or verification. The very year of Dr. Dewey's graduation, Davy made his discovery of the metallic bases of the alkalies, and promulgated the electro-chemical theory by extending and applying the discoveries of Galvani and Volta. A few years previous, Lavoisier and his associates had published their new system of chemical nomenclature. In 1807, Dalton's law of chemical equivalents and definite proportions was first given to the world. Häuy, Weiss, and Mohs published their new views on crystalography from 1800 to 1809, while Berzelius and others were at the same time developing the chem

ical system of mineralogical classification. The natural system of botany, founded by the younger Jussieu, was, during this period, slowly making its way to public favor. Cuvier's "Fossil Bones," which first raised geology to the rank of a science, was not published till 1812. The "Animal Kingdom," which rendered a similar service to systematic zoology, appeared in 1817. William Smith, who, in England, was learning to describe strata in different parts of the island, and to identify them by their fossil remains, gave his results to the public about the same period, his most important work having been published in 1815. Many other facts in the history of science, which will occur to those who now hear me, illustrate the fact that our scientific pioneers labored under the disadvantage of having begun their career with the infancy of the sciences which they cultivated. They grew intellectually with the growth of natural knowledge, and their active lives stretched over the whole period during which these sciences were born and reached maturity.

The scientific attainments of these men were not made like those of young naturalists in our time, by the study of a body of coherent and established truths, or by the accumulation of new facts which take their places naturally under laws already verified, or fall into classifications already fixed and named. Their attainments were made amidst sudden and almost violent revolutions in method and changes in fundamental ideas, which were startling to the timid and bewildering to the weak. It required no ordinary courage and manliness, no ordinary faith in the universality and coherence of the Almighty's plan in the universe, to accept and promulgate ideas which seemed subversive of all established opinions-utterly superseding and setting at naught the "wisdom of the ancients."

The facilities for the acquisition of new facts, and the testing and verification of the new hypotheses, were inadequate in the extreme. Laboratories and apparatus were to be created or invented. Cabinets of minerals were meager, and collections of fossils were almost unknown. A single illustration in point we give from an article in Silliman's Journal for 1865. It will be borne in mind that Professor Silliman, senior, was appointed professor of chemistry and natural history in Yale College in 1805. The college was then over a century old, and under the presidency of Dr. Dwight. We are told that "not only the chemical laboratory, but also the cabinet of minerals, owed its existence to his [Professor Silliman's] energy. About the time when Mr. Silliman was appointed a professor, the entire mineralogical and geological collection of Yale College was transported to Philadelphia in one small box, that the specimens might be named by Dr. Adam Seybert, then fresh from Werner's school at Freiberg, the only man in this country who could be regarded as a mineralogist sufficiently trained for that work." This illustrates the facilities for the study and illustration of natural science at Yale College, and we can readily infer the discouraging circumstances under which Dr. Dewey began his work and collec