A Memoir of Elias Loomis

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 edition. Excerpt: ... A MEMOTR OF BLIAS LOOMIS By H. A. Newton. The President and Fellows of Yale College have requested that in this public place and manner, I should give an account of the life, scientific activity, and public services of our late colleague, Prof. Elias Loomis. It is a pleasure to perform the duty thus laid upon me. The hours of intercourse I have had with him, and his generous confidences, are precious treasures of my life. And I hope you will find it worth your while to have turned away from other thoughts for a single hour, to listen to the account of what, during near three score years of mature life, our colleague was doing for science, and through science for man. Elias Loomis was born in the little hamlet of Wellington, Connecticut, August 7, 1811. His father, the Rev. Hubbell Loomis, was pastor in that country parish from 1804 to 1828. He was a man possessed of considerable scholarship, of positive convictions, and of a willingness to follow at all hazards wherever truth and duty, as he conceived them, might lead. He had studied at Union College, in the class of 1799, though apparently he did not finish the college course with his class. He is enrolled with that class in Union College, and he also received, in 1812, the honorary degree of Master of Arts from Yale College. At a later date he went to Illinois, and there was instrumental in founding the institution which afterwards became Shurtleff College. Although the boy inherited from his father a mathematical taste, yet bis love for the languages also was shown at a very early age. At an age at which many bright boys are still struggling with the reading of English, he is reported to have been reading with ease the New Testament in the original Greek. He prepared for college almost...