Essex County, Massachusetts - Chapter 4: Science in Essex County, 1888 (part 1 of 2)

By John Robinson

In the sketch here attempted of a collection of subjects which may be classified under the general head of scientific, no pretence is made of completeness of detail, or even that many points are not omitted which are as well worthy of notice as some others which are included. The breadth of the term scientific might easily be made to embrace much matter which can be more properly treated under the separate histories of this volume by writers more familiar with the individual worker or his special subject; nor will space be given to the scientific institutions of the county or their work, as they will be fully treated elsewhere. It will, therefore, only be undertaken to show, before directly taking up the subjects of natural history, the principal ground intended to be covered by this article, that in science of almost every sort Essex County has produced workers, and workers, too, of no mean order. In the special field of natural history a very remarkable amount has been accomplished, especially in the direction of local investigation, and, besides, the county offers noteworthy inducements to encourage students of the natural sciences.

There are many names, to which we may point with pride, of men who, at home and abroad, have received high honors, and, either by birth or residence, have added to the fame of Essex County. In medical science the name of Edward Augustus Holyoke, and in mathematics and astronomy those of Andrew Oliver, Nathaniel Bowditch and Benjamin Pierce, are remembered with gratitude and respect. In connection with the early established scientific institutions Essex County held a prominent place. The original membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences included seventeen names, which may be claimed as belonging to Essex County, and the initial volume of the memoirs of that institution published in 1785 was very largely composed of papers and communications from Essex County scientists. In chemistry many workers might be enumerated who have contributed their share towards the increase of general knowledge of the subject.

Dr. James R. Nichols of Haverhill, well known through his long connection with the " Boston Journal of Chemistry," of which he was the editor, has been a worker in science and a writer of note. Among his published works are " Fireside Chemistry " and " Chemistry of the Farm," but the one which has probably arrested the most attention is a little volume printed in 1882, entitled "From Whence, What, Where?" which has already passed through several editions.

Mr. Chas. Toppan is conspicuous as the inventor of a very successful process for bleaching, and for the new i^roducts of petroleum which he has introduced, having also published accounts of his experiments. In this place should be mentioned the name of Francis Peabody, a patron of the sciences, who was among the first to become interested in the establishment of the " Lyceum " system of scientific lectures, and whose valuable library, ever open for the use of the earnest student, now enriches the shelves of the Essex Institute, of which, as well as the Peabody Academy of Science, he was president. In physical science the record is interesting. Moses G. Farmer, of Salem, the well-known electrician, was for many years connected with the United States Government torpedo station at Newport, R. I. Prof. Charles Grafton Page, in 1837, made experiments with magnetic currents and musical sounds, which excited much attention both in this country and abroad, and which paved the way to that great invention, the speaking telephone, which Prof. A. Graham Bell, a resident of Salem during the years of his experimenting, first publicly exhibited before a meeting of the Essex Institute in that city in 1877.

With these brief references to other branches of science, we will proceed to consider the natural history of the county and the work of students in its various departments.

Geology and Mineralogy. - The entire absence of fossils and the obscure nature of the rocks of the county render the study of these branches of science uninteresting to the beginner, who is usually attracted at first, and led to more serious study, by the beauty of the minerals or the curious forms of petrifactions It is, therefore, easy to explain the rather limited number of students of geology and mineralogy, as compared with those interested in zoology and botany. The work, too, in the county, although in many cases emanating from prominent sources, has been carried on by many different persons, no single student having attempted any general survey of the whole county, so that a thoroughly satisfactory account of the geology and mineralogy of the region cannot as yet be given.

A great number of papers and notices of local interest have been published in the scientific journals and proceedings of scientific societies ; but as the larger portion of these refer to a region of which Boston is the centre, most of the work only covers the southern and eastern portions of Essex County, A very full list of published articles referring to the region of Eastern Massachusetts, collected by Professor M. E. Wadsworth and printed in the " Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History " (vol. xix. p. 217), viii includes upwards of ninety titles of articles in the "Memoirs andProceedings of the American Academy," " Boston Journal of Philosophy and Arts," "American Journal of Science and Arts," " Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History " and the " Proceedings" and "Bulletin of the Essex Institute," of greater or less length, which relate more especially to the geology and mineralogy of Essex County. Many of these, articles are of course very brief and possess only a negative value, while others are communications of much interest and importance.

Taking the more recently published work as a guide, the following synopsis of the underlying rocks has been prepared by Mr. J. H. Sears, of the Peabody Academy of Science, as a provisional arrangement, but one which, however, a more careful study of the rocks of the county now in progress may in some respects require to be changed :

The most conspicuous geological features of Essex County are the trap-dykes, of which fine specimens are to be seen at Nahant, Marblehead and Cape Ann^ and the curious drift boulders which are met with in almost every part of the county, and which, together with the many wonderful glacial scratchings and groovings, offer a most favorable opportunity for the study of this epoch in geology.

Many of the drift boulders are of great size and are often found in most remarkable situations, projecting over ledges, mounted upon other stones or crowning the summits of the hills. Among the most noted boulders are Ship Rock, in Peabody, the estimated weight of which is eleven hundred tons ; Agassiz Rock, in Manchester ; and Phaeton Rock, in the woods between Peabody and Lynn. Muny of these, including some of several tons in weight, perched upon the bare hill-tops, may be rocked by the hand, some even by a child. Were some of these erratics in the grounds of any popular summer resort their fame would be heralded abroad and thousands flock to see them ; but, as it is, the country boy, with his bare feet and berry pail, or the infrequent pedestrian on his woodland rambles are their only visitors.

Careful study is continually bringing to light minerals previously unknown in the county. Many of these, although insignificant in appearance, are of great interest to the student, and serve to show the relations between the characters of the Essex County rocks and those of other regions. The number of known or authentically reported minerals may be placed at fifty-nine species.

The most general interest is naturally attached to those minerals, chiefly the metals, of value in commerce or the arts. In the earliest colonial times bog iron was worked at Saugus, and later, at Topsfield and Boxford, it was taken out in two or three places for mechanical purposes. The history of the old iron-works at Saugus River is a very interesting one. They were started in 1643 and continued in operation under many difliculties until about 1688, but now only cinder-heaps, covered with soil and herbage, remain to tell of their existence. At these works labored Joseph Jenks, a native of Hammersmith, England, the founder of a prominent New England family. Jenks was an inventor of considerable note in his day and deserves to be remembered as one of the earliest men of scientific tendencies in the county. A bit of romance attaches itself to him as the engraver of several of the dies from which the famous Pine Tree shillings were struck off" in 1652 and later. Iron pyrites had been mined in Boxford, and gold was at one time found in small quantities near Hood's Pond. The so-called Governor Endicott copper mine in Topsfield, has been worked within the century ; but, probably, at a profit too small to warrant a continuance of operations. Serpentine at Saugus, Lynnfield and Newburyport has been quarried in small quantities for ornamental purposes and for the manufacture of magnesia.

But the most conspicuous effort, however, to turn our mineralogical resources to account was that at Newburyport, when the wave of speculation in lead and silver passed over the once valueless pastures of that locality. The result, not unexpected to the miner of more practical experience in other regions, although it may have placed profit in the hands of some of the original land-owners or speculators in land, proved of greater interest to the student for whom specimens were brought to hand without cost, than to those who were unfortunate enough to invest their capital in the enterprise with the hope of large financial returns. All attempts thus far made in the direction of working our precious metals have resulted, as similar attempts in the future are likely to result, in small profit, if not actual loss. But aside from this, there is left, however, as the pride and prize of Essex County's geological and mineralogical resources, the solid granite whose mass not only assure us an enduring foundation and probably exemption from natural convulsions, but which, unquestionably, is to be looked upon as the mineral product of the greatest commercial value in the county.

Our Scientific Frontier. - From the fact that the geographical boundaries of Essex Co. are largely natural ones, it is possible to study its flora apart from that of surrounding regions, with much more satisfactory results than is usually the case in small areas of territory bounded by arbitrary lines. Indeed, with the exception of Barnstable County, Mass., where the ocean marks nearly its entire outline, no county in New England offers better opportunities for such work than our own. For the botanist, the Merrimac Valley to the northwest and the ocean on the northeast and southeast form most natural limits, while toward the south a solid mass of cities separate the county from the region beyond Boston, the flora of which shows many immediate and marked changes in character from that of Essex County. The southwestern boundary is, however, a less natural one, although the line of hills beginning at Chelsea and running through Melrose and Saugus to Wakefield and Reading forms a natural division between Essex and Middlesex a portion of the distance. The dividing line between these counties, where Andover and Methuen join Tewksbury and Dracut, is less satisfactory. This is but a short distance, however, and there is no marked difference in the character of the plants on the opposite sides of the line at this point.

Botany and Zoology: General Features. - Essex County contains upwards of fifty ponds rich in water and marsh plants, while the deep woods of Middleton, Boxford and Andover and those of Manchester and Essex closely resemble the interesting region at the base of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and with these woods the bare and rugged shores of Gupe Ann form a striking contrast.

The land plants belong to the northern flora, and some mountain sjiecies may yet be found, while a paradox in the shrubby form of the Magnolia glauca, still abundant in the Gloucester swamps, offers a subject for speculation. The marine alg£e belong decidedly to the arctic flora, for the long arm of Cape Cod projecting into the ocean seems to form a natural barrier to the farther progress of southern species northward. At this point, too, the warm current of the Gulf Stream bears off to the eastward, while toward the shore, in Massachusetts Bay, the almost expended influence of the cold Labrador current is felt. A marked distinction is therefore found between the marine animals and plants north of Cape Cod and those at the south of it, although in favorable situations, in warm nooks, some southern species are found north of this barrier, while some northern ones retain a foothold south of it, and there are certain cosmopolitan species which flourish in all waters.

It will be seen, therefore, that with the great variety of animals and plants which may be collected, and the natural limits which may be placed to the study of their distribution, attractions are ottered which have proved sufficient to develop many students of botany and zoology at home, and to induce many others from abroad, among them some of the most eminent naturalists of the day, to come here to pursue their investigations.

Introduced Plants - The early settlement of the county and numerous historical data available to the botanist render this a particularly favorable region to observe the introduced plants. Many species, such as the genista, barberry, white-weed and others of European origin, early established themselves in places where they now flourish to an extent it would seem difficult for them to exceed in their native lands. The natural fruits and vegetable productions, and such plants of the old country as could be made to succeed in this soil, were among the first things to which the colonists gave their attention, as early accounts amply testify, and thus we are, in many cases, able to trace the date of introduction of species now thoroughly naturalized. The study of these plants is aided by the little work entitled, " New England Rarities Discovered," by John Josselyn, an early traveler, who made several visits to this country, the most extended being from 1663 to 1671, when he seems to have given much attention to the native and introduced plants. A reprint of Josselyn's work, with notes by Professor Edward Tuckerman, is now available. In studying the Essex flora, it must be borne in mind that, by the clearing of the laud and other great changes incident to the settlement, such native plants as were best able to endure these changes, and those which the changes favored, have now been given prominent places, while those which, at the time of the settlement, may have been abundant, but which wei'e unable to endure the changed surroundings, are now scarce or have entirely disappeared. To the botanist all these questions add interest to the study of the local flora, and perhaps explain why the plants have received more continuous attention than either the animals or the minerals of the county.

The Native Plants. - The following table, taken from the catalogue of the flora of Essex County, published by the Essex Institute in 1880, with additional notes made from the herbarium of the Peabody Academy of Science, gives a fair idea of the material available for botanical study and the distribution of species among the different families, as well as the number of introduced plants to be found in the county :

In this table the introduced plants enumerated are chiefly such as have become thoroughly established, although sometimes very locally. j| The Thallophytes include only the lichens, of which forty-five genera, one hundred and fifty-seven species, are recorded, and the marine algse, of which there are seventy genera, one hundred and fifty-four species. The fungi of the county have never been catalogued, owing to their great number and the difficulties attending their study ; but, judging from the catalogues of other regions, it is quite probable that twelve hundred species would be a fair estimate of their number. Neither has any list been prepared of the Diatoms and Desmids, a numerous class, which, together with a large part of the fungi, are microscopic, and, although numerous in species, possess but little value in considering the flora as a whole, or the general distribution or character of the plants of the county.

Prominent Botanists. - The study of botany in Essex County, it may be said in New England, properly dates from the time of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, at the close of the last century. Early writers, as Francis Higginson, John Josselyn, William Wood, John Winthrop and others, refer to the native fruits and flowers. Josselyn published the well-known " New England Rarities Discovered," previously referred to, and Higginson, in a letter written from Salem in 1629-30 (Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. 1. p. 121), speaks of the " Flowering Mulberry," or raspberry, and "Chervil," or sweet Cicely, as growing near Salem in places where, certainly until a few years, these interesting historical plants still flourished. None of these writers can, however, be considered as Essex County botanists, and it is not until the close of the American Revolution that we find any serious or scientific study given to the plants of the county. Manasseh Cutler, of Hamilton, after his varied services of Revolutionary chaplain, lawyer, doctor, pastor, reformer and pioneer, found time to prepare, in 1783-84, as the the title of his paper says, " An account of the vegetable production growing in this part of America, botanically arranged." This was published in the first volume of the " Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences," which was printed in 1785, where some three hundred and fifty species of flowering plants were described, and several important scientific points suggested, which have been since adopted in botanical treatises. Dr. Cutler's paper bears the date of presentation, January 26, 1784, and it was his intention to extend the work, several manuscript volumes now being in existence prepared toward this end.

Following Cutler came Dr. George Osgood and Dr. Andrew Nichols, both of Danvers. The former contributed notes for''Bigelow's Florula Bostoniensis," and published a partial list of plants in the vicinity of Danvers and Salem ; and the latter delivered, in 1816, a series of lectures on botany, the first of such ever given in this neighborhood. Dr. Nichols was one of the founders of the Essex County Natural History Society, and for some years its president, and he thus had an important influence on local botanical work. In 1823 two young men, both destined to be long remembered on account of their contributions to botanical knowledge, began their work in Essex County. These were William Oakes, of Danvers, later of Ipswich, and Charles Pickering, then spending much of his time at the homestead of his grandfather. Colonel Timothy Pickering, at Wenham.

Oakes, disgusted with law, his chosen profession, became the first critical botanist of the region, and at this time converted Dr. Pickering from entomology and conchology, studies he had first chosen, to botany. Oakes botanized with Pickering extensively in Essex County, particularly in the Great Swamp, Wenham, a region then almost in its primitive wildness. He afterwards prepared a list of Vermont plants for Thompson's history of that State, and had in contemplation a work on the plants of New England, which, owing to the appearance of Beck's Botany, was never completed. His most elaborate work was a. folio volume on White Mountain scenery, illustrated by Sprague, which, however, was not published until after his death, in 1848. Oakes was impulsive and generous, and thoroughly in earnest in his favorite study. Like many men of note, he was little appreciated while living, yet no monument could have been erected to make his memory more cherished and his labors more respected by the present generation of botanists than that which he left behind, - an extensive collection of beautifully prepared botanical specimens determined with faultless accuracy, a portion of which formed the nucleus of the present county botanical cabinet, now in the hands of the Peabody Academy of Science in Salem.

Professor Tuckerman dedicated to him a pretty little plant common in the region of Plymouth, but as this was afterwards transferred to another genus, the name " Oakesia " has been given to the spring bellwort, a common Essex County plant, by Professor

In 1838 Dr. Pickering was appointed naturalist to the United States (Wilkes) Exploring Expedition, and, to perfect his knowledge of animals and plants in foreign countries, he made extensive journeys after his return from that expedition. He was the author of several works of great value, the production of which required untiring research. Among them are the " Geographical Distribution of Animals and Plants " and the " Chronological History of Plants," the latter occupying the last sixteen years of his life in its preparation.

It is but right that Essex County should claim a share of the honor of his name, for it was here that his attention was drawn to the study of botany, and in the " Chronological History of Plants," page 1063, we find the following entry : " 1824. In this year, after an excursion in 1823 with William Oakes, diverting my attention from entomology, (I made) my first botanical discovery." Dr. Pickering retained the deepest interest in botanical work in Essex County until his death, which occurred at Boston March 17, 1878.

The work of the Essex Institute from its foundation, in 1848, following that of the Essex County Natural History Society, from which it was in part developed, was largely devoted to botany and horticulture, a leading speaker at its meetings and contributor to its publications being Rev. John Lewis Russell, who made his home in Salem in 1853.

Mr. Russell devoted himself principally to cryptogamic botany, publishing accounts of his investigations from time to time as he proceeded. He was, besides, the author of many popular articles on various families of plants. He lectured frequently on botany, and was for many years vice-president of the Essex Institute, and contributed much to the general knowledge of botany in Essex County, but his most extensive collections were made in other places.

Among the earlier published catalogues of the plants of portions of the county was the " Studies of the Essex Flora," by Mr. Cyrus M. Tracy, of Lynn. This was intended to give a list of the flowering plants found in the neighborhood of Lynn, and enumerated five hundred and forty-six species. Besides possessing a very happy gift as a botanical lecturer, Mr. Tracy has contributed several valuable articles upon local botany to the publications of the Essex Institute and elsewhere.

At the evening and field meetings of the Essex Institute many papers on botanical subjects have been presented, including, in addition to those previously referred to, contributions from George D. Phippen, S. B. Buttrick, John Robinson and John H. Sears, of Salem ; Rev. A. B. Alcott, of Boxford ; Miss Mary N. Plumer, of Newburyport ; Miss H. A. Paine, of Groveland ; and others. Many students of botany are distributed throughout the county, and numerous private herbaria have been formed, and, at the rooms of the Peabody Academy of Science in Salem, a large and valuable collection of the plants of Essex County is accessible to botanists. Special work has been done by several authors and collectors outside of the county, who have either visited this region to study the plants, or who have made comparative observation from specimens sent to them from the county for the purpose. W. H. Harvey visited Nahant about 1850 to study the marine algae in preparing his famous work, " Nereis Boreali-Americana," which was published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1852-57. Professor W. G. Farlow, in his "Algae of New England," and in his monograph of the Gymnosporangea, includes the Essex County species studied by him at various stations. Dr. B. D. Halstead and Dr. T. F. Allen have studied the Characese, and have published articles on the species ; Mr. F. S. Collins has carefully studied the marine algse, Mr. C. E. Faxon the grasses, sedges and mosses, and Mr. C. J. Sprague the lichens. Rev. A. B. Hervey, now of Taunton, worked almost entirely in Essex County in preparing his " Collector's Guide and Introduction to the Study of Marine Algse." Nearly all of the work of Essex County botanists has been systematic ; at least little, if anything, in the way of original research has been published by any county author in relation to the physiology or morphology of plants.

Horticulture. - In horticulture, a science too seldom treated as such, the citizens of Essex County have furnished valuable contributions. The establishment of the Essex Agricultural Society and the horticultural department of the Essex Institute have doubtless fostered the interest which has been shown from the earliest date in this subject, and which at times has been given considerable prominence in the county. There are several names worthy to be mentioned as promoters of the science of horticulture. Robert Manning, of Salem, whose death in the midst of his labors occurred in 1812, at one time cultivated in his own gardens, for the purpose of critical comparison, nearly one thousand varieties of pears, together with other fruits, sufficient to make the total of two thousand varieties, several of which he originated. John Fisk Allen, as early as 1848, produced some valuable varieties of grapes, the famous "Allen's Hybrid" being one of the number, and during the years of his experimenting in horticulture he tested the large number of four hundred varieties of grapes under glass. Mr. Allen was the first person in New England and the second in the United States to successfully cultivate the great water lily of South America ( Victoria regia), which he flowered in Salem in 1853, and later he published, at great expense, a superbly illustrated folio work on its habits and cultivation. Between 1830 and 1877 Mr. Geo. Haskell, of Ipswich, made many scientific experiments in the culture of the grape by grafting, inarching amd hybridization, the results of which he published in pamphlet form in 1877. During this time Mr. Haskell produced several hardy hybrid grapes of acknowledged merit. Beginning in 1861 and continuing for several years afterward, Mr. Edward S. Rogers, of Salem, by a strictly scientific experiment, the result of excellent botanical knowledge, produced the famous hybrids between the native fox grape and the more tender hot-house varieties, known as the "Rogers' Grapes." These have given to cultivators a class of hardy grapes of rare excellence and world-wide reputation, and have won for the originator the gold medal of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the highest award of the most eminent institution of its character in America.

Zoology} - Though Essex County has been a favorite collecting ground for naturalists for many years, exact statistics of its fauna are lacking. For this there are several reasons, the most prominent of which is that in recent years students have failed to record the results of their researches. Thus, of the moUusks, no catalogue has been published for half a century, while not a single group of insects has been thoroughly worked up. In fact, the only group concerning which we have definite statistical knowledge is that of the vertebrates, where we have, thanks to the labors of Messrs. Goode and Bean, of the United States National Museum, a catalogue of all the fishes that are known within the county limits, and the excellent catalogue of the birds by F. W. Putnam, which, although the work of his youth, has required but few corrections to bring it up to the present time. Of the other vertebrates, the turtles, snakes and batrachians are comparatively few in number and fairly well known, while to the knowledge of the existing mammals but little can be added, although a very interesting chapter could be written upon those which have disappeared, and whose story must be looked for in the early colonial records and the Indian shell-heaps. We have many catalogues of New England animals, but it is a difficult task for a student to predict from these exactly what forms will be found in a certain restricted region. Thus the land forms to be found in Northern Maine or on the White Mountains would differ greatly from those occurring near the shore of Long Island Sound, and from neither could we exactly tell those which would be found in Essex County. In the marine fauna, too, a similar difficulty is noted, for Cape Cod divides the animals occurring in the salt water into two groups, each with its own facies, although there are of course many species which occur on either side of that barrier.

The following estimate of the number of species, although but rudely approximate, may serve as a guide for the present and until further published

1 Th-e writer is largely indebted to Prof. J. S. Kingsley, of the State University of Indiana, formerly a special student at the Peabody Academy of Science at Salem, for the account of this branch of the natural history of the county.

work shall furnish us with accurate figures (in some groups there are almost no data to base any conclusions upon, while others, however, are comparatively well known) :

In the above estimate both the fresh water and marine fauna are included. Of the simplest forms of animal life, the Protozoa, no account is made for the reason that absolutely nothing is known of them beyond the fact that the species are very abundant ; every stagnant pool has its population, while the mud near the shore is actually alive with them. Inconspicuous as they are, they play an important part in the food supply of many of the economic fishes, as well as in destroying still smaller forms which might otherwise be injurious to human health. Of the sponges of the county but little is known ; many of them are inconspicuous, and none are of value for the ordinary purposes for which sponges are used, as all lack that resilience of fibre characteristic of commercial sponges. The finest examples of sponges in Essex County have been found on the piles of Essex bridge.

The marine worms are very abundant, and furnish a large amount of food for fishes. While the ordinary conception of a worm is that of a disgusting animal, many of the marine worms are marvels of beauty both in shape and color. In this respect however they must yield to some of the Coelenterates, a group which includes the jelly-fish, sea-anemones and those other flowers of the sea which the naturalist calls hydroids. None of these, however, have the economic importance possessed by some of the mollusks and Crustacea, groups which furnish the oyster, clam and lobster.

The insects are almost solely terrestrial and, as will be seen from the above table, include over half the total number of species occurring in the county. Of these the beetles are the most numerous in species, it being estimated that from twelve to fifteen hundred can be found within the boundaries. Next in numerical importance come the flies and bugs, followed in turn by the bees and ants on the one hand, and the butterflies and moths on the other, the remaining forms of insects being few in number of species. The vertebrates are so well known that they need no further mention than the figures against the difierent orders in the table above.

The marine fauna of Essex County is decidedly northern. The majority of the species found along the coast range north to the British provinces, and not a few may be collected on the shores of Europe, making the passage by the way of the Arctic seas. A smaller number range southward and pass the boundary line of Cape Cod, though but few extend in this direction beyond the Jersey shore. The land animals are likewise northern in character, and Essex County maybe regarded as a portion of the " Alleghaniaa region " of the " Eastern province " of zoological geography.

Several localities in the county have become famous as zoological centres, either from the students who have lived near them or from the profusion of the material they offer for study. To the first category belongs Salem, for the Essex Institute and thePeabody Academy of Science have drawn many zoologists hither. Here Wheatland, Putman, Packard, Hyatt, Morse, Emerton and Cooke have labored, while for several years students came from all parts of the country to attend the Academy's Summer School of Biology. Salem may also rank among the places of the other group, for there are few spots on the whole New England coast which furnish better collecting ground than that around Essex (Beverly) Bridge, where the number of species to be found is very large, although indiscriminate collecting would soon deplete it. Next in order is Nahant where the Agassizs, father and son, with their assistants and pupils, did so much to enlarge our knowledge of the marine life. More lately Annisquam has come into prominence through the laboratory there established in 1881 by Professor Hyatt and maintained by the Women's Educational Society of Boston.

The interest in zoological studies has been fostered by the various scientific societies within the county, the most prominent among which are the Essex Institute and thePeabody Academy of Science of Salem. Besides these may be enumerated the Lynn Natural History Society, the Cape Ann Literary and Scientific Society, at Gloucester, the Danvers Natural History Society, the Bradford Natural History Society, the West Newbury Natural History Society, the Merrimac Natural History Society, of Amesbury, and the Cuvier Club, of Salem, which last, although composed entirely of young people, gives promise of good results, For two years the United States Fish Commission made Essex County the centre of its explorations, contributing much information of value, especially in relation to the deep-water animals.

The fauna of Essex County has been made the subject of several studies, some of which are worthy of mention in the present sketch. Professor Hyatt has studied the sponges ; the Agassizs, father and son, and the late H. J. Cook have investigated the radiates the development of the worms has been studied by Alexander Agassiz and Charles Girard ; the mollusca have been investigated by John Lewis Russell

William Stimpson and Edward S. Morse ; Professor Morse, also, was the first author to point out the true position of the brachiopods among the worms, his theory now being adopted by the most eminent scientists. The Crustacea and their development have been studied by A . S. Packard and J. S. Kingsley ; the harvestmen have been described by H. C. Wood, and J. H. Emerton has made and published researches on the spiders. Among the insects, the work of A. S. Packard, S. H. Scudder and F. W. Putman deserves mention. J. S. Kingsley has described the development of one of the acsidians, while among the fishes the papers of G. B. Goode and T. H. Bean and of F. W. Putman upon the species, and the investigations of J. S. Kingsley, H. W. Conn and B. H. Vantleck upon the development, should not be omitted. F. W. Putman has studied the reptiles and birds, furnishing the list of county species published in the proceedings of the Essex Institute previously referred to. The birds have also been investigated by Dr. Elliot Coues.

In spite of the work above referred to, and the excellence, even eminence, of many of the workers, the field is so large and the supply of materials so great that there still remains an enormous amount of work to be accomplished before a knowledge which may be termed exact is obtained of the animals of the county.

Archaeology. - In archteology, a study but recently given its proper position among the sciences, considerable work has been done in the county. The surface relics of the race which formerly occupied this territory have long been observed, and, in a few instances, preserved specimens of the so-called axes, celts and arrow-heads were placed in the East India Museum in Salem as early as 1802, and examples were figured in the first volume of the American Academy, published in 1785, from the cabinet of that institution. But it is only in comparatively recent years that any scientific observations have been made in relation to the graves, village sites and shell-heaps of this early race. Much has been written of late, speculative and otherwise, in relation to the pre-historic people, which may be read by those desiring to form opinions as to the correctness of the various theories advanced, but it is sufficient here to say that the most reasonable theories point to the Algonquin Indians of the region at the time of the settlement of this country, and their direct ancestors, as the people who fashioned the implements of stone, bone and clay which are daily turned up by the plough and occasionally met with in graves and shell-heaps. Yet it is reasonable to accept the theory that another and earlier race once occupied the country, perhaps the ancestors of the Esquimaux, even ruder in their way than the Indians, and who, being driven to the North by. a more aggressive race, left their relics behind, which are now found confused with those of later date. It was supposed formerly that the shell-heaps found all along our coast were natural deposits, and not until recently were they connected with the early inhabitants of the county. Professor JeflTrys Wyman, of Cambridge, investigated the shell-heaps at Ipswich, with Putnam, Cooke and Morse, and later these investigations have been continued by many others.

The most interesting result of the study of these shell-heaps is perhaps that learned from the examination of a very old deposit at Ipswich, composed of shells of the oyster, a species now practically extinct along our shore, but which at the time of the deposit of this shell-heap must have been very abundant. From the relics there found, it was clearly shown that cannibalism was practiced by the people who left us this record of their existence. In 1867 Mr. J. F. Le Baron prepared a map of the shellheaps on Castle Neck, Ijiswich, and throughout the county are numerous collections of so-called "Indian relics," most of which may be classed as " surfacefinds," owned by private individuals and public institutions. The largest collection of pre-historic relics is that of the Peabody Academy of Science in Salem, which numbers several thousand specimens and includes many objects from graves and shell-heaps, besides skeletons and crania.

Besides the work of Wyman, Putnam and others and the articles published by the Essex Institute on this subject, Dr. Abbott, of New Jersey, has made some field observations here and has published in his work entitled " Primitive Industry " much of interest in relation to the local archaeology, besides giving figures of specimens collected in Essex County. Professor Morse, of the Peabody Academy, during his visit to Japan, made several explorations in connection with the archaeology of that country, the results of his work being published in the memoirs of the University of Tokio, Jajian.

ArchcTology is now one of the most progressive among the sciences, and one of Essex County's gifted sons, Professor Frederick W. Putnam, formerly of Salem, now Peabody Professor of Archaeology and director of the Archseological Museum at Cambridge, profiting by his early training as a zoologist, is for the first time teaching the country the proper and only way of exploring the mysterious mounds of the West.

It will be seen by this sketch that a large portion of the scientific work has centered in and around Salem. This is undoubtedly due to the facilities there offered for study. Museums and scientific institutions had early become established in Salem, and many society and private libraries and microscopes were available. But with the interest in these subjects and the establishment of good lecture courses and libraries in nearly every city and town, natural history and scientific clubs and societies have sprung up in variparts of the county, and students of natural history may now be found at every hand, both collectors and those who are pursuing their studies of the minerals, the fauna or the flora, without forming collections.

The Spirit Of The Early Lyceums By Kobert S. Eantoul

Timothy Claxton was born in Norfolk, England, August 22, 1790. His father was a gardener, in the service of .the Windham family, at Earsham Hall. Neither his father nor his mother could read or write, but, with the generous aid of the Honorable Mrs. Windham, the mistress of the house, they were enabled to educate their children. Timothy was from boyhood a marked character, and, as a young man, identified himself with the great movement for the general diffusion of knowledge, which, under the lead of Henry Brougham and other less conspicuous and comprehensive minds, swept over England and Scotland in the third decade of the present century. It was in the year 1823 that the so called '' Mechanics' Institutes " began to attract the attention of all classes in Great Britain by their marked success. In that year, Claxton, who had spent sometime in Russia, engaged in the introduction of fgas-works, sailed from St. Petersburg and landed at Boston, whence, in September, he removed to Methuen, in this County, and connected himself with the machine-shop of a cottonmill established by Stephen Minot, of Haverhill, at Spicket Falls, and at that time operated under the supervision and agency of the afterwards well-known political economist and writer, Amasa Walker.

" In the spring of 1824 an opportunity offered itself for me to attempt the formation of a society for mutual improvement. A small society, for reading and general inquiry, had existed for about five years in the village, and was at a very low ebb at that time. I attended it and found a respectable number of both sexes, assembled at the house ot one of the members. They were engaged in reading by turns, and the president put questions to them as they proceeded. I inquired what other exercises they had. He told me that was all, except an annual address by the president. I asked if it would not be well to try the debating of questions and familiar lectures on science and the arts. He thought well of it. I told him I thought they need not be afraid, for I had seen persons engaged in such exercises whose opportunities were inferior to theirs. I was asked if I could give them a lecture. I said I would try, and prepared myself accordingly. I had brought a small air-pump with me from Russia, which I made from a piece of gas-tubing, with a ground brass plate, on a mahoganj' stand. I bought a few glass articles, which I ground to fit the pump-plate, with a little sand and water, on the hearth-stone of my room. I procured a small wash tub and fitted a shelf to it, for a pneumatic cistern. In this way I succeeded, with a very simple apparatus, in explaining the mechanical and some of the chemical properties of air. This put new life into the society. Their constitution was revised, to make provision for a library and apparatus. Debating was introduced with succeBS, and the ladies handed in compositions which were read at the meetings. Several members were prevailed upon to give lectures on subjects connected with their professions or callings. I served as vice-president' for the remainder of my stay in the town, a7id took an active part. The society became too large for the members' houses. It tried the School-House and then the Tavern Hall, but, not satisfied with either, built a two-story building for its own use, and continued to prosper. It held weekly meetings, with a routine of exercises for the month, comprising, for the first week, Reading by all ; for the second, Reading by one member specially designated ; for tlie third. Original Lectures, and for the fourth. Discussion."

Here we have germinating, in the spring of 1824, in Essex County, the root-idea of the American Lyceum. The society, which Claxton left behind him well-established in Methuen, when, in October, 1826, he removed to Boston, possessed every characteristic feature of the novel organization now to be described, and which, under the new name of "Lyceum," soon to be applied to it by another, was about to challenge the approval and enlist the interest, and even the enthusiasm of the best minds in the country. I have been thus minute in describing Claxton's enterprise, because no earlier date than this can be assigned to the origin of "the Lyceum system in America. On his removal to Boston, he became well known for his mechanical ingenuity, his large scientific attainments and his whole-souled devotion to the diffusion of useful knowledge. He at once associated himself with Josiah Holbrook, who had just come there from Connecticut, and with other kindred spirits and before the end of the year 1826 had established the " Boston Mechanics' Institution." In 1829 he bore an active part in the formation of the first Boston Lyceum, and in 1831, with Holbrook and others, established the " Boston Mechanics' Lyceum," of which, for the next five years, Claxton was chosen president. Finally, having inherited an estate in England, he returned thither to enjoy it, and there closed his life. In 1839 he issued, from the London press, a book of " Hints on Self-Education," of which the London Civil Engineer and Architects' Journal remarked, in a strain of high commendation, that "it had all the ease and simplicity of He Foe, and the exemplary utility of Franklin."

Dr. George A. Perkins, of Salem, who passed his early years in Boston, well remembers Claxton as a valued friend of his boyhood, always genial, gracious and kind, who would interrupt his work, not for hours merely, but for days, in order that some willingminded youth might not go unenlightened.

Attention was first j^ublicly called to the general practicability of organizations like this in an anonymous article which appeared in the October number of the American Journal of Education for 1826. It proved to have been written by one Josiah Holbrook, an alumnus of Yale College and a native of Derby, Conn., born in 1788. Mr. Holbrook afterwards became well known as an enthusiastic devotee of popular education in all its phases. At different periods of his career he was a lecturer upon science, a maker of school apparatus, and a compiler of school textbooks, and in 1824 was conducting at Derby an agricultural and manual- labor school, in which he had, in some measure, anticipated the modern theory of object- teaching. His scheme for "Associations of Adults for Mutual Education," as he called them, the name "Lyceum" being only applied a little later, was introduced to public notice in a guarded editorial indorsement as "of uncommon interest," as "important in a political point of view," as " intimately con- nected with the diffusion of intelligence and with the elevation of character among the agricultural and mechanic classes," as " a sure preventive of those insidious inroads of vice which are ever ready to be made on hours of leisure and relaxation." With such high hopes, prompted by motives so unmistakably humane, ingenuous and noble, did the pioneers in this unique undertaking make their modest, though confident appeal to public favor !

On January 7, 1879, the Concord Lyceum commemorated its fiftieth anniversary. The first name on its original roll and its first president had been the venerable and Reverend Dr. Ripley, the Revolutionary sage who had, from his study window in the Old Manse, watched his parishioners defending the bridge on that fateful day when there

The last of the original signers of its constitution had been Judge Hoar, then a lad of twelve, now become a personage of the first distinction, introduced in 1870 by Emerson to Carlyle, as " a friend whom you saw in his youth, now an inestimable citizen in this State, and lately in President Grant's Cabinet, Attorney-General of the United States, He lives in this town and carries it in his hand."

" The Lyceum began, as most things do tliat are good, by the gratuitous labors of an enthusia.st, Mr. Josiah Holbrook, of Boston, a man who was interested in geology and mineralogy, and went about the State delivering lectures upon these subjects, and urging the people of the cities and towns to form Lyceums for popular education. His scheme embraced a good deal. He persuaded the people of various towns and cities, of Boston, and Cbarlestown, and Salem, and Worcester, and many of the smaller towns of the commonwealth to start his Lyceums. There has been but one, however, that has grown up into anything like the proportions of the institution which be contemplated and recommended, and that 'is the Essex Institute at Salem. It has, as he proposed each Lyceum should have, a large library, an extensive collection of objects in natural history, cabinets of mineralogy, having courses of lectures, and th« members dividing themselves into sections for the prosecution of the study of history, science and art."

The large expectations entertained of Holbrook's novel scheme will appear from the contemporary expressions of its prime mover and his coadjutors, and from the sympathetic utterances of the journals of the day. There was nothing new in the Debating Club, the Social Library, the Literary Circle, the Union for General Inquiry and for Scientific Research. These had long been known, and in one form or another had sprung into a sporadic life in all the active centres of the world. Paris and London had not been without them for centuries, and Franklin had, just a hundred years before, established his "Junto," where the select coterie of a dozen friends, picked from his " ingenious acquaintance," who spent Friday evenings at the Ale House in Philadelphia in 1727, discussed curious queries on points of morals, politics or natural philosophy, propounded a week in advance of their consideration, heard original essays from each member in turn, and finally established a " lending library," - the germ of the American Philosophical Society. But the idea of combining the functions of libraries and literary, scientific and debating clubs all in one body - of throwing the doors wide open and inviting in all who would assume their share of the work - of systematically organizing such clubs in every village and hamlet and then, for mutual encouragement and help, joining them all in a common league together, was indeed a new conceit, and if impracticable in its details, was not unworthy of that formative period which preceded Boards of Education, Normal Schools and Teachers' Institutes and Conventions, - the day of slow mails, stage-coach travel, rare newspapers, scant amusements and unsystematic teaching, before the cylinder-press, the electric telegraph, the locomotive engine, the submarine cable and the ocean steamer had made the world one family, - the day which ushered in our "revival of learning," when the depressions resulting from two wars waged to effect our independence of Great Britain were happily over, when a distinctly American literature was beginning to show itself in the writings of Dana, Bryant, Irving, Cooper and Halleck, when Mann and his co-workers were just extorting from the close-locked Teutonic intelligence the secrets of the Prussian school system for the advantage of our new republic, when Bancroft, Everett, Ticknor and Hedge were just returning from their first taste of German University culture, burthened like honey-bees with their delicious store, and when the English speaking peoples on both sides of the water seemed suddenly waking up to the consciousness as of newly discovered truth in the now familiar postulate that democratic government, while it is the safest and most stable of all if it rest on generally diff'used intelligence, becomes, when based on prevailing ignorance, the most intolerable of despotisms.

Holbrook's confidence in his scheme was contagious because it was enthusiastic and exuberant. He supposed the Lyceum system would rapidly pervade the country and ultimately the world at large. " It seems to me," he said in his original prospectus, "that if associations for mutual instruction in the sciences and other branches of useful knowledge could once be started in our villages, and upon a general plan, they would increase with great rapidity and do more for the general diffusion of knowledge and for raising the moral and intellectual taste of our countrymen than any other expedient which can possibly be devised. And it may be questioned if there is any other way to check the progress of that monster, intemperance, which is making such havoc with talents, morals and everything that raises man above the brute, but by presenting some object of sufficient interest to divert the attention of the young from places and practices which lead to dissipation and to ruin."

educational periodicals fairly teemed, the general mechanism of the proposed organization is sufficiently disclosed. Each " Association of Adults for Mutual Improvement " was to have its president, secretaries, treasurer, curators and other needful functionaries and also three delegates to meet, twice a year, delegates from other branches of the organization in the same county, for the furthering of its various objects, especially " for qualifying teachers." And this board of delegates for the county, duly organized, shall appoint a representative to meet representatives from other like boards, who shall be styled the " Board of Mutual Education for the State." These State boards are to organize in turn, to meet annually for certain prescribed functions, and to send delegates to a general conclave embracing the whole country, whose permanent headquarters were ultimately to be established at Washington. The society was to be open to all adults of both sexes who were willing to share its labors and its cost, and the monies accruing from fees for admittance or from the generosity of patrons were to be applied to the purchase of books, cabinets, philosophical and scientific apparatus, the collection and exchange among the Lyceums of the country of specimens in botany mineralogy and natural history, the preparation and publication of town and county maps and histories and the observing and communicating through loublication and correspondence of atmospheric, meteorological and climatic phenomena, the chemical analysis of soils, the character of quarries, minerals and mines, and such other facts of importance as might from time to time come to the knowledge of the corresponding secretaries. Funds might also be applied to the aid of institutions for " practical instruction," and even to the help of deserving aspirants in pursuing the higher branches of study. In science " classes " were to be formed, each choosing its " foreman," and conducting its investigations in its own way, and each in turn occupying the floor on its allotted night and claiming the attention of the whole Lyceum, be it in geology, astronomy, natural philosophy, chemistry or mechanics. The plan of itinerant, migratory or perambulating libraries was commended to the attention of counties and towns. This plan consisted in combining the funds devoted by several neighboring towns to the purchase of books for general circulation, so that more books should be obtained for the money expended and no duplicates bought. Thus each town in a group, say of five towns for instance, would take possession of one fifth of the books purchased, keep them for an agreed period and pass them on to the next town of the group, receiving a second fifth at the expiration of the stipulated term. But in the estimation of the projectors of the Lyceum the library in all its forms had failed as a stimulant to independent thinking amongst the mass of the people. Some more pungent flavor must be imparted to general education. This was to be effected through the immediate contact and clashing of mind with mind in neighborly bouts over issues of real, living, dominating importance. Questions upon which all the townspeople had finally to pass were to be debated before all the town by friends and neighbors who had serious convictions, pro and contra, as to how these questions ought to be determined. Moreover, scholarship was seen to possess intrinsic and inherent values of its own, quite aside from the consideration it buys. Why, it was asked, may not all men enjoy these in equitable measure? The locking up of learning in cloisters and colleges had been denounced by our forefathers from the first, as among the "wiles of Satan." Why not seize, perforce, upon the cherished heir-loom of the schools? If eloquence and culture, if the gifts of tongue and pen and the power of deep thinking were precious boons, entitling the possessor to the deference they claimed, why, it was impatiently asked, might they not be more evenly distributed ? If science and the arts really conduced to the amelioration of mankind, why be longer indebted for their bles-isings to a few favored devotees? Why not snatch them for ourselves? Was it the spirit of the Renaissance and the Reformation abroad again? Or was it rather the error of the French Encyclopaedists masquerading in a new disguise? It was no spirit of hostility or jealousy towards the higher learning, for it assumed that haj^piness was possible in the ratio of the learning attained. It was not proposed to raze the citadel, but only to assault its keep and divide its hoarded treasure. It was an uprising in behalf of more light. Perhaps it was the socialistic principle applied to culture. Perhaps it was communism in brain-food and brain products. It wandered far away from its English prototype, - so far that we find Sir Thomas Weise, a British member of Parliament, discussing the doings of the National Lyceum of America in 1831, with a view to adapt its methods to the needs of the Mechanics' Institutes of England. Holbrook claimed it as a thoroughly American product, and it certainly seemed well suited to the genius of the country, for it was democratic in spirit and republican in form; it was free and voluntary and spontaneous in its origin ; it was elastic and self-adapting in its organization ; it was social and humanizing in its aims, and kept before it the great and dignified cause ot self-culture and mutual improvement, while it certainly might claim continental scope and dimensions, after its first national meeting in 1831, when no less than eight or nine hundred town Lyceums were reported in different parts of the country, with fifty or sixty county Lyceums, as well as several State organizations. The end showed that vitality resided in the town Lyceums and not in the attempted confederations of them.

The reader who finds it hard to recognize in all these anticipations the lyceum of actual fact as we have known it for the last half-century, may easily reconcile himself to the truthfulness of the picture I have drawn by a little study of the journals of the day, - by an examination of the score of articles which appeared in the first five volumes of the American Journal of Education, - and by a passing glance at the state of opinion and conditions of life which prevailed in the New England of 1820-30.

When Claxton was lecturing on air before his townsmen of Methuen, there was not a rod of steam railway in existence. That potent leveling and centralizing agency had not begun its work. The question was still an open one whether horse-power or steam would ultimately prove the better motor for the new roadways already being provided with rails of wood, iron and stone. And it was only in 1828-29 that the Stephensons succeeded in applying the tubular boiler to the traction engine " Rocket," and that the triumph of steam was established. The first locomotive-engine which invaded Essex County ran on a spur track laid by the Boston and Lowell corporation to Andover in 1833, and to Haverhill in 1835. The Eastern Railroad reached Salem in 1838. Topsfield was, up to this time, the recognized centre of the county, and its Academy Hall and its famous Stage House, since removed to Phillips' Beach, Swampscott, and there consumed by fire, were the usual meetingplaces for all county gatherings. Each town had then a social autonomy of its own, not yet impaired by the draft on its active citizenship, necessary to meet the business demands of our great railroad centres, building up great hives of industry and bringing together great swarms of population, nor by the superior attractions of city art galleries, concert-halls, lecturerooms and theatres for our hours of ease. Each was a social centre for itself, - a planet, as it were, revolving with its own satellites in its own sphere, and not yet swung out of its appointed course by the disturbing attraction which, when brought near, the greater body, be it material or social, possesses for the less. Each had its traditions, its ancient families, its leading people, - both those of approved hospitality, of the great house and the long purse, and those who based their claims on superior knowledge, character, discrimination and taste, - its clergymen and deacons, its 'squires, doctors, teachers, ship-masters and owners of shipping, - its town elite, - and for better or for worse, its own townspeople must suffice, in the main, for its own needs.

Our county, one of the original four incorporated and set off in 1643, has an area of not far from five hundred square miles which, at the time we speak of, supported a population of about eighty thousand souls, and of these fifty-four or fifty-five thousand lived in thirteen large towns, every one of them incorporated before 1650, and seven of them as early as 1640. Of the towns in Massachusetts possessed of four thousand inhabitants and upwards, Essex County contained nearly one-half. Of our six prosperous cities the largest, Lynn and Lawrence, held no such places in the census tables then. Lynn, now the larger of the two, was a town of not half the size of the Salem of that day, and smaller than either Newburyport or Gloucester, while Lawrence, which now bestrides our great water-way like a Colossus, had neither "promise" nor "potency" before 1847. In many ways ours was a peculiar county. Nowhere on this continent, outside the great cities, were so many people brought together in so small a space. Nowhere was there greater average wealth or more generally diffused intelligence, independence, comfort and thrift. Save in a few exceptional situations, as of the counties of Dukes and Barnstable, there was nowhere in the country a population living on an equal area and touched by navigable water at so many points. Besides the lordly Merrimac, flanked on either hand with growing towns, turning more spindles than any other river in the world to-day, and weaving miles enough of cloth every three weeks to swathe the earth, which furnished to our thirty miles of northern frontier a cheap highway for freight, the county could claim, within its limits, no less than five valuable and commodious harbors, at Newburyport, Gloucester, Beverly, Marblehead and Salem, not to omit others of lesser draught, but fully equal to the more moderate demands of local trade. Treading hard upon the heels of the great towns already mentioned came Andover, Haverhill, Newbury, Ipswich and Danvers. Amongst the counties of the State Essex had no rival. - not even Suffolk, - in the aggregate of her population, unless, perhaps, Worcester, and probably she overtopped them all. Her lands were held in small hereditary estates by the men who tilled them. Her capital and her enterprise found ready employment at home, or if they looked abroad, turned eager glances to the East, and not as lately toward the setting sun.

Content in earlier years with the hard fare and meagre earnings of the fisheries and the export trade in fish, and later trained on the gun-decks of ships of war, or of their own privateers, the people of Essex County had come, since the days of peace, to push their ambitious ventures into every sea. Foreign commerce, which is in itself a liberal education, had taught them what the bold and strenuous life of the fishing-smack or the man of-war could never have engrafted upon their sturdy. Puritanic thought, and they brought home from their distant voyaging a freight more remunerative than silks, or gums or spices, made up of broadening views of life and liberal estimates of men and things. Geography and ethnology they studied at first hand. The populations which their enterprise employed, and the trade which their successes and their hospitality invited, built up large markets for the consumption of all that the interior sections of the county could produce. The population was singularly homogeneous, the few mills there were being operated by the sons and daughters of Essex County farmers and mechanics, amongst whom the average of intelligence and character was not a whit lower than where mills did not eyist. This high average was not reduced - possibly it was advanced - by another manufacture which formed a peculiar feature of the industry of the oounty. Shoes were then made by hand, and as the occupations of husbandry and the fisheries left much of the inclement season unemployed, these callings were very generally supplemented in the winter months by the making of a coarse kind of shoe for the southern market. This was a craft which called for little capital, since the shoe-stock was distributed in weekly portions from Lynn or Haverhill, the great centres of this peculiar industry, nor did it require any great degree of dexterity or skill. And thus the frugal yeomanry of Essex, whose summers were employed on the Grand Banks or on their ancestral acres, clubbed together by half-dozens to build the little box-like shoe-shops which once dotted all our country roads, and in which they wrought lustily all winter with lapstone and awl, in a temperature less conducive to longevity, perhaps, then stimulating to cerebration. And here all unconscious of the dictum of Pliny - " ne sutor ultra crepidam " - they were so effectually over -ruling, as well as of the supercilious slurs of Cicero, and Plautus and Horace on their indoor habits and unmilitary pose, they passed judgment from the bench, so to say, on the latest sermon, newspaper leader, political harangue and local gossip, with as much critical acumen, and as deep, earnest consideration of each passing topic as though, in very truth, time's noblest offspring were the last.

I do not know that I need sketch in further detail the salient features of this sturdy people. General the Baron von Riedesel's remark upon the Bay Colony in Revolutionary days, - high praise from an enemy, - " the inclination of the people is for commerce, navigation and the military art," as well described them half a century later, and no local community could with less presumption take to itself the glowing encomium of Burke upon the commerce and fisheries of New England. Theirs was the county which had produced the Pickerings, the Cabots, the Crowninshields, the Lowells, - Nathan Dane, Manasseh Cutler, Rufus King, Theophilus Parsons, Joseph Story, - the Derbys, the Thorndikes, the Peabodys, the Jacksons, the Grays, the Lees, the Pickmans, the Hoopers, the families of Cleaveland and Phillips and Bowditeh, and, earlier than all these, the fine old stocks of Lynde, of Sewall and of Dummer. Theirs was the sod upon which Endicott and Higginson and Saltonstall and Winthrop first stepped ashore. Theirs was the soil upon which Gage had mustered his myrmidons, in the vain hope to quench the insurgent spirit flaming \x^ in a Provincial Assembly which defied his sovereign from the old town-house in Salem. And while it may be the fact that no actual collision of troops ever consecrated in blood the soil of Essex County, although we suffered from Indian butcheries in the valley of the Merrimac, and felt the shots of British cruisers along our seaboard, and saw from the north shore of the bay the smoke of battle between the " Shannon '' and her doomed antagonist, - that unequal contest over which English school-boys still regale their drooping spirits in the chorus, -

" The Chesapeake, so bold, out of Boston. I am told, Came to take a British frigate neat and handy, And the people of the port came out to see the sport, With their music playing ' Yankee doodle dandy I ' "

- while all this may be true, certain it is that no equal number of people had borne a heavier share in Indian, French or British hostilities, or contributed more victims to the horrors of Mill Prison, Dartmoor and the slave-pens of Algiers, from the gloomy days of Bloody Brook, of the Pequots and the Narragansetts, - from the days of the brilliant assaults upon Port Royal, Louisburg and Quebec, - down through the times when Washington took command of the Continental forces and called on us, without waiting for the action of Congress, to improvise a navy, - the times when Mugford and Manly and Harraden and Hugh Hill were afloat, - when Marblehead set her amphibious regiment on foot, - down to that later day when all our seaboard towns vied with each other to do homage to the naval heroes of the second war of Independence. The doubtful claim to the first bloodshed of the Revolution on that Sunday afternoon in February, 1775, at the old North Bridge in Salem, might be worth contesting in another county, but not here, for our people have twice sought out and attacked, on her own chosen field, the naval power which claims to rule the waves, closing with her wherever they could find her, be it in the Indian Ocean or the Irish Channel, or in whatever waters her red flag proclaimed her the terror of the seas, and giving battle until she cried enough. Facts like these go far to justify the ancient boast that Essex County produces more history to the acre than any equal area in the country. Antecedents like these had well prepared the people of the county for the new educational dispensation of which we speak, and they were as ready as any of their neighbors to distinguish the wheat from the chaft" in Holbrook's singular proposals.

Enough has been said to indicate in a general way what these proposals were. It must be remembered that the first scientific survey of an American State was Hitchcock's survey of Massachusetts, the report of which became public in 1833 ; that we had no State Board of Education before 1837, and no authorized map of the commonwealth until 1842, and that our first Normal School, established at Lexington in 1839, and which it had been proposed, the year before, to establish at Dummer Academy, was the first in America, although the Prussians had known them for a century. The Lyceum was accordingly hailed as a cheap and much needed training-school and examining board for common-school teachers, while its semi-annual county gatherings were to serve the pur- poses now met by Teachers' Institutes and Conventions. It was the impression of its projectors that sscientific topics were to prove the most attractive, and that by adhering rather exclusively to these they were to escape at once both the Scylla and the Charybdis of religious and political contentions. To suppose, however, as is common, that at any time troublesome questions were successfully excluded from the Lyceum platform is to accept an error. No question was more generally discussed from the outset than that of the relative disadvantages of a free black and a slave population, the Colonization Society's methods, and abolition in the District of Columbia, and while the heat engendered was probably less than it would have been a little later, - the Garrison mob was in October, 1835, - I am convinced that the most volcanic topics were not interdicted, from reading a letter now before me, addressed by the Hon. Horace Mann to my father, both being members of Governor Everett's first Board of Education, in which is reported an attack made in a lecture before one of the bestconducted and most conservative Lyceums of the county, denouncing the board "as a machination of the Devil, - showing the preponderance of Unitarianism in it, - that the next element in point of strength was infidelity, two members being infidels, and its orthodoxy confided to one poor, weak old man !"

Another mode proposed to quicken the public mind was through " cheap and popular " publications. The Middlesex County Lyceum, under the Presidency of Edward Everett, began the publication of a series of treatises, of which the first was a popular Lyceum lecture on taxation by Andrew P. Peabody. It is now before me, and is designated on its title-page as Vol. I., No. 1, of the " Workingmen's Library." A prospectus follows, from which it appears that the publications were intended, in part, for reading as Lyceum lectures in small towns where there might be difiiculty in procuring speakers. They were to be published monthly, and furnished by a committee of five. They were not to fail for want of being "plain and intelligible;" each writer to be " answerable for his own statements and opinions ;" the price to be seventeen cents each. In a letter to my father, who was associated with him on the board of management of the Middlesex County Lyceum, Mr. Everett, whose clerical habit had not wholly worn off, although he franks his letter as a member of Congress, speaks of these publications as " tracts," is " more and more favorably impressed '' with the plan, " if it be made sufficiently cheap to penetrate the community," and recommends " short tracts, such, for instance, as may be read thro' aloud in an hour & a quarter at the farthest," - offers as his own contribution a lecture lately repeated at Charlestown, Waltham and Framingham, - hopes it " might do as one of the tracts," and thinks " the rule should be to put them as low as they can possibly be afforded." Henry Brougham was promoting

One marked result of the Lyceum system, the production of a school of trained and able debaters in every town, does not seem to have been anticipated by its projectors. Among the long lists of prospective benefits I do not find this enumerated. But it was plain from the start that the Lyceum was to afford a free-school of debate for questions calculated to shape public opinion, questions involving expediency and policy, quite as much as questions of pure science. Thus Emerson seems to have found in the Lyceum the freedom denied him in the pulpit. How far he shaped the Lyceum, how far the Lyceum shaped him, is a question upon which we may not eater here. His biographer, Cooke, states that at once upon his return from Europe in 1833 " he took advantage of the interest in this new mode of popular instruction and working with many others served to mould the Lyceum into a means of general culture ; helped make it a moral and intellectual power, a quickening influence on life and thought," while his admirer, Margaret Fuller, lets us see that in his lectures he was enlisting a following which made the later essays possible. Whether, without the Lyceum, Wendell Phillips and Henry Ward Beecher would have achieved their triumphs in the mastery of popular audiences, is a debatable question. Even of such men as Garrison and Parker, - men whose natures are an endogenous rather than an exogenous product, - it is not quite safe to say that they would have been just what they were without the Lyceum. But I had better let Mr. Emerson tell his own story.

Mr. Emerson stepped from the pulpit to the Lyceum platform. He describes his appearance in the new field, which occurred in the winter of 1833-34, as his " first attempt at public discourse after leaving the pulpit." His subjects had at that time a marked leaning towards natural science. Two years later he detailed to Carlyle the reasons which ought to bring the latter to America. " Especially Lectures. My own experiments for one or two winters, and the readiness with which you embrace the work, have led me to expect much from this mode of addressing men. In New England, the Lyceum, as we call it, is already a great institution. Besides the more elaborate courses of lectures in the cities, every country town has its weekly evening meeting, called a Lyceum, and every professional man in the place is called upon, in the course of the winter, to entertain his fellowcitizens with a discourse on whatever topic. The topics are miscellaneous as heart can wish. But in Boston, Lowell and Salem courses are given by individuals. I see not why this is not the most flexible of all organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its newness, permitting you to say what you think, without any shackles of prescription. The pulpit of our age certainly gives forth an obstructed and uncertain sound, and the faith of those in it, if men of genius, may differ so much from that of those under it as to embarrass the conscience of the speaker, because so much is attributed to him from the fact of standing there. In the Lyceum nothing is presupposed. The orator is only responsible for what his lips articulate. Then what scope it allows ! You may handle every member and relation of humanity. What could Homer, Socrates or St. Paul say that cannot be said here ? The audience is of all classes, and its character will be determined always by the name of the lecturer. Why may you not give the reins to your wit, your pathos, your philosophy, and become that good despot which the virtuous orator is ?

"Another thing. I am persuaded that if a man speak well, he shall find this a well-rewarded work in New England. I have written this year ten lectures ; I had written as many last year, and for reading both thcaC and those at places whither I was invited, I have received this last winter about three hundred and fifty dollars."

The next year he wrote to Carlyle: " I find myself so much more and freer on the platform of the lecture-room than in the pulpit. . . . But I preach in the Lecture-Room and there it tella, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer or pray according to your genius. It is the new pulpit, and very much in vogue with my northern countrymen. This winter, in Boston, we shall have more than ever; two or three every night of the week. When will you come and redeem your jiledge?" And again, " I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the Lecture-Room, so free and so unpretending a platform, a Delos not yet made fast. I imagine eloquence of infinite variety, - rich as conversation can be with anecdote, joke, tragedy, ei^ics and pindarics, argument and confession." In an earlier letter, dated April, 1835, he had said to Carlyle : " If the lectures succeed in Boston, their success is insured at Salem, a town thirteen miles ofi", with a population of fifteen thousand. They might, perhaps, be repeated at Cambridge, three miles from Boston, and probably at Philadelphia, thirty-six hours distant. . . . They might be delivered, one or two in each week. And if they met with sudden success, it would be easy to carry on the course simultaneously at Salem, and Cambridge, and in the City."

To all which solicitations, Carlyle, not taking very kindly to the proposal, though thinking " I could really swim in that element were I once thrown into it," " a thing I have always had some hankering after," " could any one but appoint me Lecturing Professor of Teufelsdrockh's Science, - 'Things in general ' ! " replies from time to time with an occasional growl, and they keep the plan "hanging to solace ourselves with it, till the time decide," until, in December, 1841, he writes in this characteristic strain of Emerson's " Lectures on the Times", " Good speed to the Speaker, to the Speech.' Your Country is luckier than most at this time ; it has still real preaching ; the tongue of man is not, whensoever it begins wagging, entirely sure to emit babblement, twaddlement, sincere cant and other noises which awaken the passionate wish for silence."

Of course there were objectors and doubters, and the Lyceum was opposed on the very grounds upon which its promoters supported it. For those who shook their heads over Pope's line, the answer was ready, - that we cannot have much unless we first have little, and that the having of little begets the desire for much. If these organizations might not hope to carry higher aloft the apex of the pyramid of human knowledge, they might hope to be able to broaden out its base and set the venerable pile upon a more firm, stable and comprehensive footing. It was the diffusion of information, primarily, and not the advancement of science, which the Lyceums aimed at. The systems of education they recommended were always described as practical, and were pretty sharply antagonized with those of the colleges and higher schools. They seem to have had a strong leaning towards manual labor academies, which were then much in vogue, and one of which enjoyed a brief career at the Cherry Hill Farm, in North Beverly. They pro^sosed to insist, amongst other branches, upon instruction in practical politics, and called for the study of the State and Federal Constitutions, and for text-books on familiar principles of law. The lottery was one vulnerable member of the hydra-headed monster, and they proposed to attack that. In temperance was another, and they proposed to have a tilt at that. As a Board of Education, as a Lecture Bureau, as an Agricultural, Geological and Topographical Survey, they made no doubt, the Lyceum was to prove invaluable. They proposed a great central School, for the dissemination of their ideas, connected with which a central work-shop was to manufacture and send forth at cost, school ap2:>aratus, philosophical, astronomical and geometrical instruments and chemical and other scientific preparations. They went so far as to propose, in much the same spirit in which we have set apart a Labor Day and an Arbor Day, to consecrate the second Monday of December to the interests of the Lyceum. The Lyceum was to do for the head, if not perhaps for the moral nature, what religion was doing for the heart, and one of our judges, holding a criminal term of court, charged his grand jury to go home and devote themselves to the establishment of town Lyceums, as a measure of prevention against crime. The mistakes they made were due in part to sanguine temperament, and partly to the spirit of the times, which was a spirit of unrest. These were the days of Fourier and of Owen, of Brook Farm and the

Phalansteries, when phrenology and mesmerism were struggling hard for a place among the sciences, and all sorts of experimental sociology were in the air. By undertaking a great deal too much ; by claiming a great deal more than they could maintain, the projectors of the system had well nigh obscured the real merits of their conception. They had discovered a valuable specific, but it was not a panacea for all human ills. They had found a pearl of great price. It was not the philosopher's stone. Fortunately there were not wanting keen-eyed scholars who could appreciate the value of the discovery, and Essex County had her share of these.

It was in November, 1826, that Holbrook addressed thirty or forty of the farmers and mechanics of Millbury, a little town of a thousand inhabitants just south of Worcester, and at the close of a lecture on natural science induced them to organize themselves for mutual improvement, and to assume the somewhat pretentious title of "Millbury Lyceum, No. 1, Branch of the American Lyceum." This little group of persons, - there is no reason for supposing they ever met earlier than September, 1826, - included among its number several marked characters of whom perhaps Thomas Blanchard, the great inventor, was the most conspicuous. The United States Government had, at that time, a manufactory of small arms at Millbury, under the supervision of a very able mechanic named Morse, and with the co-operation of Blanchard and another mechanic named Andrews, who had correctly calculated an eclipse of the moon, he established this society. It was by no means the first of the kind, nor the first to take the name of Lyceum, but it was the first in Holbrook's system. Troy, N- Y., had maintained its Lyceum since 1818, but it was a collection of curiosities and specimens, such as we oftener call a museum. Gardiner, Me., had a Lyceum in 1822, but that was an academy established by a benevolent gentleman of the town bent on trying the experiment of the manual labor system. Professor Hitchcock may have applied the name as early to one of the natural history societies at Amherst College, but what Holbrook knew of these things or what guided him in the choice of this classic word he has not told us. It was so new and strange a word that we are instructed by the Journal of Education to pronounce it " Li-see-um." To designate a new thing he had a right to a new word, and these Greek names have been most arbitrarily impressed into the service of modern ideas. An Athenaeum with us is likely to be a library, but this is not what it was at Athens nor what it means in England. A Gymnasium with us imports a place for physical training, but the Greeks used it much more comprehensively to cover all sorts of culture, especially mental, and the Germans follow them. The word Museum, quite divorced from the muses who gave it once a graceful significance and an affiliation with music, generally designates with us a gathering of rather dry subjects. In Ger many, equally without relation to its native origin, it means a club house. In Paris the Lyceum is a Government preparatory school; in London it is a theatre; in modern Greece a university, - so that whatever the word meant to the ancient Athenian, Holbrook might, without greater violence, apply it to his new club for mutual improvement. In fact the Lyceum of ancient Athens was a grove where Aristotle daily imparted his learning and inspiration through the medium of conversations and discussion, as did Plato in another grove called the Academy. And if, as is probably true, the word Lyceum is related in its origin to the words ^ii/fof, levufj^ lux, light, Holbrook might turn the laugh on his too fastidious critics, for surely Aristotle's grove was no lucus a non lucendo!

From whatever source derived the word met a want and while the more scholarly amongst his recruits objected that it was stilted and inapt and that it made a very bad plural withal, no movement was made for substituting any other, and those who cared much for the thing and little for the name were both astonished and delighted to see the number of societies throughout the country calling themselves Lyceums, increasing before the close of 1831 to something like a thousand.

Of these none were earlier in the field than Claxton's, at Methuen, and this was one of the very few which provided itself with a local habitation. The structure stood on what is now Broadway, near Park Street, and has since been removed and converted into a dwelling. One other in this county, organized at Salem, in January, 1830, and at once incorporated, completed and occupied in January, 1831, and paid for out of the proceeds of its lecture courses, the commodious structure for its own accommodation, still in daily use, and known as Lyceum Hall. Of the Salem movement, Judge White, Col. Francis Peabody, Hon. Stephen C. PhilliiJS, and Rev. Chas. W. Upham seem to have been the central figures. The first address delivered before the Salem Lyceum was given by Judge White, its first president, in the Methodist chapel in Sewall Street. The preliminary meetings for its formation had been held at Col. Peabody's house, and brought together, as we learn from the memoir of that conspicuous citizen by Mr. Upham, such active and able coadjutors as Dr. A. L. Peirson, Leverett Saltonstall, Rufus Choate, Benjamin Crowninshield, Robert Rantoul, Jr., Elisha Mack, Dr. Geo. Choate, Warwick Palfrey, and others, of whom Hon. Caleb Foote. Hon. Geo. Wheatland and William P. Endicott, Esq., are the last survivors. An address from Hon. Stephen C. Phillips opened the new hall the walls of which were decorated with frescos ol Judge White and Captain Joseph Peabody, of Demosthenes and Cicero, and also with a somewhat ambitious design over the platform, in which the Lycean Apollo appeared resplendent in his cloud-borne car. But of this tradition relates that an unlucky janitor, groping in the attic, presumably to regulate the ventilation, put his stumbling foot through the ceiling, and found himself occupying, uninvited, a seat in the chariot of the god of light! This famous Lyceum, with its unbroken continuity of lecture courses now reaching the limit of fifty-seven consecutive years, - a record only paralleled, so far as I know, by that of another, formed December 21, 1829, in the little red brick school-house in Littleton, a '.own of one thousand inhabitants, between Concord and Groton, which, under the name of the Littleton Lyceum, has sustained itself with spirit and success, and without a break, to the present time, - this famous Lyceum has called to its platform the most eminent men and women of our era. While few names are wanting which could add lustre to its record, the name of most frequent recurrence is that of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The next Lyceum formed in Essex County, after that at Methuen, of which I have definite information, was an organization for lectures and discussion formed at Beverly, certainly as early as December, 1828, - probably earlier, - and which took the name, November 5, 1829, of the Beverly Lyceum. It owed its origin to the activity and public spirit of Robert Rantoul, Jr., Dr. Augustus Torrey and T. Wilson Flagg. Hon. William Thorndike was its first president, and on its original roll of members, it is interesting to find, in company with the names of William Endicott, John Pickett, Augustus N. Clark and Warren Prince, probably the last survivors of the Beverly worthies who joined it, that of Caleb Foote, of Salem.

A Lyceum, formed at North Andover, April 13, 1830, is claimed to have been the outgrowth of an association for mutual improvement organized early in the year 1828, and such a society existing. May 15, 1830, in the North Parish of Danvers, is also thought to have been gathered in some form and at some time during the same year.

At South Danvers, the " Literary Circle," devoted at first to reading and conversation solely, opened its meetings with an address from Dudley Stickney, its first president, on December 16, 1828, at Dr. Shed's Hall, nearly opposite the South Danvers Bank, and although it enjoyed from the outset the countenance of Rufus Choate, Dr. Nichols, Fitch Poole, Dr. Joseph Osgood, and others hardly less honored, it could not be called a Lyceum before January 9, 1834, when it took that form of organization.

A movement began in Lynn, also, as early as December 23, 1828, and in this Alonzo Lewis seems to have been active; but of its nature I know nothing.

So far as I can learn, there was not in existence in Essex County, on the fifth day of November, 1829, any organized body, in full working order, calling itself a Lyceum, and supporting an established course of debates and lectures, except at Beverly.

Of the extent to which the late Hon. Robert Rantoul, Jr., contributed to the success of the organization, it does not become me to speak. His college experience had qualified him to be of service in this way, for he had succeeded, in 1823, before the end of his freshman year, in establishing a debating club called the AKPlBOAOrOYMENOl, which, in November, 1825, united with the Hermetic Society and the old Speaking Club or Fraternity of 1770, forming, under a constitution drawn by him, the Institute of 1770. Hon. Chas. W. Upham, in his memoir of Col. Peabody, has recorded his high estimate of my father's services, and the late Ellis Gray Loring, of Boston, Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, and Dr. 0» W. Holmes, all near his time in college, with Dr. Andrew P. Peabody and the late Richard Hildreth and J. Thomas Stevenson, his classmates, have testified at various times that they then regarded his power in organization and in debate as phenomenal. Mr. Rantoul left college in August, 1826. He resided at Beverly for the next five years, while studying his profession in the ofiices of Hon. John Pickering and Hon. Leverett Saltonstall, and afterwards occupying an office in the Stearns Building at Salem. In the summer of 1831, he was residing and practising his profession at South Reading, and there became a member of the publication committee of the Middlesex County Lyceum.

Rufus Choate, who was some years Mr. Rantoul's senior, was practising law at South Danvers, in an office facing the Square, from September, 1823, until his removal to Salem in 1828. Before those dates he had pursued his studies in the offices of Mr. Andrews, of Ipswich, and of Judge Cummins, of Salem, as well as in that of Attorney-General Wirt, at Washington. He seems to have taken an early and very active interest in the Lyceums springing up around him, as so rare a nature could not fail to do, and to have identified himself, both before and after his establishment in Salem, with the efforts of his neighbors in behalf of mutual improvement. Hi» name appears for the first time, as a lecturer, in the roll of the Salem Lyceum, - he was a member of its first board of managers, - in 1831, and but twice thereafter; but his lecture, entitled the "Romance of the Sea," originally known as the " Literature of the Sea," when first delivered in Salem, in 1837, became at once famous. Whipple says of it in his "Recollections of Eminent Men," - "Those who heard it forty years ago now speak of it as a masterpiece of eloquence. It enjoyed a popularity similar to that of Wendell Phillips's lecture on 'The Lost Arts.' "