donation of Ephraim Williams, for maintaining a free-school in Williamstown." William Williams was elected president, and the Rev. Seth Swift, treasurer.* Additional funds were solicited, and in 1788 a committee was appointed to erect a school-house, which, completed in 1790, is now the "West college" building of the institution. A good choice was made of a preceptor in the Rev. Ebenezer Fitch. This scholar and divine, who was to bear a prominent part in the establishment of the college, was born at Canterbury, Connecticut, September 26, 1756. He received his degree at Yale in 1777, and passed two years at New Haven as a resident graduate. He then was school teacher for a year in New Jersey, and from 1780 till 1783 was tutor in Yale College. An interval of mercantile business followed, in the course of which he visited London, again returning to Yale, as tutor, from 1786 to 1791, the year of his engagement at Williamstown. With this preparation he opened the free-school in October, with John Lester as assistant. Two departments were organized-a grammar-school or academy, with a college course of instruction, and an English free-school. In 1793 the school, by an act of the legislature, became Williams College, with a grant from the state treasury of four thousand dollars for the purchase of books and philosophical apparatus. To the old trustees were added the Rev. Dr. Stephen West, Henry Van Schaack, the Hon. Elijah Williams, Gen. Philip Schuyler, the Hon. Stephen Van Rensselaer, and the Rev. Job Swift, the charter allowing to the board seventeen members, including the college president. A grammar-school was at once provided for in connexion with the college, and the terms of admission to the latter required that the applicant "be able to accurately read, parse, and construe, to the satisfaction of the president and tutor, Virgil's Eneid, Tully's Orations, and the Evangelists in Greek; or, if he prefer to become acquainted with French, he must be able to read and pronounce, with a tolerable degree of accuracy and fluency, Hudson's French Scholar's Guide, Telemachus, or some other approved French author."

Mr. Fitch was unanimously elected president, and the first Commencement was held, a class of four, in 1795. The numbers rapidly increased with the resources of the college, which were augmented by a new grant of land from the state in 1796. Dr. Fitch held the presidency for twenty-one years, retiring from the office in 1815, after which he became pastor of a church in West Bloomfield, New York, where he died at the age of seventy-six in 1833.

The Rev. Zephaniah Swift Moore, then Professor of Languages at Dartmouth, was the successor of Dr. Fitch in the college presidency, and held the office from 1815 to 1821. The question was at this time discussed of the removal of the college to the banks of the Connecticut, an agitation which did not repair its fortunes. Dr. Moore, on his resignation, was chosen president of the collegiate institution at Amherst, which he had

William Williams, Theodore Sedgwick, Woodbridge Little, John Bacon, Thompson J. Skinner, Israel Jones, David Noble, the Rev. Seth Swift, and the Rev. Daniel Collins, were the first body of trustees named in the act.

greatly favored, and which drew off many of the students from Williamstown.*

The Rev. Dr. Edward Dorr Griffin was then chosen president. He brought with him the prestige of an influential career in the ministry at Newark, New Jersey, and in the Park Street Church at Boston. He had also been professor of pulpit eloquence in the Theological Seminary at Andover. He was inaugurated president and professor of divinity at Williams College, November 14, 1821. His reputation and influence revived the college interests, which had become much depressed, and it was enabled to bear up successfully against the rivalry of Amherst. Various advantages of gifts and bequests, which gave the means of improvement and increase of the college library, apparatus, and buildings, were secured during Dr. Grillin's efficient presidency, which he was compelled to resign from ill health in 1836. He died at Newark, New Jersey, November 8 of the year following, at the age of sixty-eight.

The Rev. Dr. Mark Hopkins was inaugurated president of the college on the 15th of September, 1836. Dr. Hopkins is a native of Berkshire, Mass. He was born at Stockbridge, February 4, 1802; was educated at the college of which he is president; studied medicine, and received a medical degree in 1828. In 1830 he was elected professor of moral philosophy and rhetoric in Williams College, a position which he held at the time of his election to the presidency.

The college during his administration has increased steadily in its resources and the number of its students. It is due to his efficient exertions that astronomical and magnetical observatories have been erected and well supplied with scientific apparatus.

Dr. Hopkins has also rendered services to general literature by the publication of his Lowell Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity in 1846, and by the collection of his Miscellaneous Essays and Discourses the year following.

Among the papers preserved in the latter is the author's Inaugural Discourse at Williams College. Its review of the subject of education is sound in philosophy and practical in its suggestions. In a wise spirit he speaks of the principle now settled among all thinking men, that we are to regard the mind—

not as a piece of iron to be laid upon the anvil and hammered into any shape, nor as a block of marble in which we are to find the statue by removing the rubbish, nor as a receptacle into which knowledge may be poured; but as a flame that is to be fed, as

Amherst College grew out of the academy at that place which was incorporated in 1812, and of which Noah Webster was one of the chief promoters. Further provision was required for the education of young men for the ministry. A college was resolved upon, and the question of union with Williams College agitated, in view of the removal of the latter. Dr. Moore was chosen the first president in 1821. He died two years after, when the Rev. Heman Humphrey was elected. A charter was obtained in 1825. Dr. Humphrey held the presidency till 1845, when he was succeeded by the Rev. Edward Hitchcock, who occupied the post till 1854, when the Rev. William A. Stearns was chosen in his place. The institution has preserved its distinct religious character in connexion with the Presbyterian Church. Its number of graduates, up to 1854, was over one thousand. It has a large charitable fund, from which the expenses of a numerous body of students preparing for the ministry are annually paid.-lolland's History of Western Massachusetts, i. 508–512.

an active being that must be strengthened to think and to feel-to dare, to do, and to suffer. It is as a germ, expanding under the influence certainly of air and sunlight and moisture, but yet only through the agency of an internal force; and external agency is of no value except as it elicits, and controls, and perfects the action of that force. He only who can rightly appreciate the force of this principle, and carry it out into all its consequences, in the spirit of the maxim, that nature is to be conquered only by obeying her laws, will do all that belongs to the office of a teacher.

With the same good sense he remarks:

:

There is a strange slowness in assenting practically to that great law of nature, that the faculties are strengthened only by exercise. It is so with the body, and it is so with the mind. If a man would strengthen his intellectual faculties, he must exercise them; if he would improve his taste, he must employ it on the objects of taste; if he would improve his moral nature and make progress in goodness, he must perform acts of goodness. Nor will be improve his faculties by thinking about them and studying into their nature, unless by so doing he is enabled and induced to put them into more skilful and efficient action.

This practical mode of philosophizing, seeing moral and intellectual truth in connexion with its individual adaptations, is a marked habit of the author's mind, and admirably adapts him for the chair of the professor or the government of a college.

By the triennial catalogue of Williams College of 1853, it appears that there have been one thousand four hundred and forty-four alumni to that date of whom four hundred and forty have followed the profession of divinity; three hundred and eighty-one the law; one hundred and seven medicine; and ninety-cight have become teachers. Besides the usual branches of instruction, the physical sciences receive particular attention.

EDWARD HITCHсоск was born at Deerfield, Massachusetts, May 24, 1793. In consequence of ill health, he was compelled to leave College before taking his degree. He commenced a literary career by the preparation of an almanac for four years, from 1815 to 1818; and by the publication of a tragedy extending to one hundred and eight pages, The Downfall of Buonaparte, in 1815. In 1816, he became principal of the Academy in Deerfield, where he remained for three years, when he was ordained minister of the Congregational

Edurend. Hitchcock

church at Conway, Mass. He resigned this post in 1825 to accept an appointment to the Professorship of Chemistry and Natural History in Amherst College, an institution which had been

Sketches of Willams College, Williamstown, Mass., 1847. An interesting contribution to the history of the region, by D. A. Wells and S. II. Davis.

founded four years before. He continued his connexion with the college, having been appointed to the presidency, with the professorship of Natural Theology and Geology, in 1844, until his resignation in 1854.

In 1823, he published Geology of the Connecticut Valley, and in 1829 a Catalogue of Plants within Twenty Miles of Amherst. These works, with other scientific investigations, gave him such repute that, in 1830, he was appointed by the legislature to make a geological survey of the state of Massachusetts. He was re-appointed to the same service in 1837; and in 1850, commissioner to visit the Agricultural schools of Europe. In fulfilment of these trusts he published in 1832 a First Report on the Economic Geology of Massachusetts; in 1833, Report on the Geology, Zoology, and Botany of Massachusetts; in 1838, Report on a Re-examination of the Geology of Massachusetts; and in 1841, Final Report on the Geology of Massachusetts; and in 1851, Report on the Agricultural Schools of Europe.

He has also published Elementary Geology, 1810; Fossil Footmarks in the United States, 1818; and an Outline of the Geology of the Globe, in 1853.

In addition to these purely scientific volumes, President Hitchcock is the author of The Religion of Geology and its Connec'el Sciences, in 1851, and of Religious Lectures on the Peculiar Phenomena of the Four Seasons; works in which he has shown the harmony of science with the records of the Bible, and its religious uses in the increase of reverence for the Almighty consequent on the devout study of the wonders of creation, and its adaptation to the wants of man. These works have been largely circulated in this country and in England.

Dr. Hitchcock has also been a prominent writer on Dietetics. In 1830, he published in this connexion Dyspepsia Forestalled and Resisted, and An Argument for Early Temperance.

His other separate publications have been, A Wreath for the Tomb, 1839, and Memoir of Mary Lyon. He has contributed about forty scientific papers to Silliman's Journal; three elaborate articles on the connexion between Religion and Geology to the Biblical Repository, from 1835 to 1838. He is also the author of two Addresses delivered before the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1843 and 1849; two before the Hampshire Hampden and Franklin Agricultural Society in 1827 and 1846; one on his inauguration as president in 1845; one before the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists (now the American Scientific Association) in 1841; one before the Mechanical Society of Andover in 1830; and one before the Porter Rhetorical Society in Andover in 1852-all of which were published.

He is also the author of several sermons, of four tracts Argument against the Manufacture and Sale of Ardent Spirits, Cars Ready, The Blind Slave in the Mines, Murderers of Fathers and Murderers of Mothers-which have been issued by the American Tract Society, and of numerous contributions to the press.

The utilitarian writings of Dr. Hitchcock, and his peculiarly scientific labors, executed under onditions of the deepest public trust and confi

dence, speak for themselves. In his discussion of the relation of science with scripture he has shown a liberal appreciation of the necessities of the former, in a philosophical view, without derogating from the claims of the latter. As a writer on natural philosophy his works are not only stored with original research, but his observations are presented in a pleasing, animated style.

HENRY C. CAREY.

HENRY C. CAREY, one of the prominent writers on Political Economy of the day, is the son of Mathew Carey, and was born in Philadelphia in 1793. He was brought up in the business of his father, and succeeded him on his retirement in 1821. He conducted, with his

Henry Mary

partner Mr. Lea, one of the most extensive publishing houses in the United States, until 1838, when he retired, and devoted his leisure to the prosecution of authorship, a career he had commenced in 1835, by the publication of an Essay on the Rate of Wages. This was followed, in 1837-9-10, by three octavo volumes on the Principles of Political Economy; in 1838, The Credit System in France, England, and the United States appeared; and in 1848, The Past, the Present, and the Future, a further refutation of the statements of the ordinary school of political economists.

We may indicate the spirit of these volumes by two or three of their prominent theorems, which are in most marked contrast with the dogmas prevailing in Europe.

First, in time, was the demonstration that the progress of social wealth is in the normal order concomitant with and more rapid than that of population.

This proposition was connected with one even more adverse to the faith in the fixed demarkation of rank, class, and privilege, which the traditions of a social life founded on and adapted to military activity have sanctioned for so many ages, that it has grown into credence as a providential law. The doctrine to which we allude may be termed the law of Distribution, of a distribution, however, not mechanical, but organic, and as inseparable from growth as the distribution of sap in the branches, leaves, and buds, is from the life of a tree. It is, that in the natural growth of population and wealth, the share of the laborer in each successive increment increases, both relatively and absolutely, in proportion as well as in amount; while that of the capitalist, though increasing in amount, diminishes in proportion. In other words, there is in the growth of capital-the machinery by which man subordinates to his service the gratuitous powers and agencies of nature-a constant accelerating force, which, steadily increasing the productiveness of any given amount of toil, and therefore cheapening the result, or what in the converse is precisely equivalent, enhancing the value of labor,

secures a product enlarged to the degree that a diminished proportion thereof gives a greater quantity than the capitalist formerly obtained from his large proportion of a smaller product. The enlarged proportion of an increased product provides the laborer an enhanced quantity, and not in spite, but in virtue, of increased cheapness to the consumer. This may be translated from the abstract into the concrete facts, patent upon the smallest examination of history, that commodities of all kinds are constantly falling in price while wages are rising, and that the rate of interest declines, while the mass of capital constantly receives larger accretions.

Mr. Carey has reached these vital conclusions while yet admitting the plausible hypothesis of Ricardo, that in the occupation and culture of the soil men pass from those of superior to those of progressively deteriorating fertility. If this hypothesis were well founded, there would be a diminishing product for the agricultural toil of each successive generation, and consequently an increasing proportion of laborers required to devote their energies for an ever declining remuneration. Mr. Carey has shown the existence of a power, in the growth of capital other than land, more than compensating the tendency to retrogression from the supposed deereasing productiveness of the soil. In 1848, however, he was led by the direct observation of facts to the discovery, that the course of individuals and communities in the occupation and culture of the soil, is diametrically opposite to that imagined by Ricardo; that men always, from the necessity of their unfurnished condition, subject the inferior lands to culture first, and constantly proceed as they acquire the power to those of superior fertility. In his Past, Present, and Future, he demonstrated the fact, historically, by the contrast of the same nation in its different stages, and geographically by the contrast of contemporary communities which now stand at the different grades of social progress. The question is treated in precisely the same method as any other question of natural history in respect to the habits and habitats of a plant or an animal would be treated. And herein is the first example of the distinctive method of his school, which, abandoning as fruitless the metaphysical idea of introspection into laws of human nature to find what man would do, aims at discovering the relations between man and physical nature, and the modes by which the former is to derive the greatest advantage from the latter-the field and problem of Political Economy-by studying the external world to learn what man can do, and following the same methods of investigation which have given certainty and the power of prediction in the positive sciences. The result of this discovery was to confirm and explain the law of Distribution, by absorbing it into a more general and comprehensive one. It is palpable, that the widest divergence must exist in the consequences flowing from this theory and that of Ricardo. The latter necessitates an increasing inequality of physical condition, therefore of intellectual and moral culture, and of political privilege, between the classes of landowners, capitalists, and laborers. It is the firmest support of the hoary abuses of despotism; for it traces them to an imagined law

of the all-beneficent Creator. The American system, on the contrary, shows them to be the result of tyrannous human interference with the divine economy. We leave the reader to seek in Mr. Carey's volumes the exposition of the differences on the minor questions of Political Economy, which must attend so profound a contradiction in the premises, methods, and main conclusions of the European and American sys

tems.

Mr. Carey has also published several pamphlets on literary property, in which he takes a view of the subject opposed to the passage of an International Copyright Law.

HENRY COGSWELL KNIGHT

Was born at Newburyport, about the year 1788. He was early left with his brother an orphan, and found a home with his maternal grandfather, Dr. Nathaniel Cogswell, at the family seat in Rowley, Massachusetts, the beauties of which he has celebrated in one of his poems. Entering Brown University, he took his degree there in 1812, and prepared himself for the ministry of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in which he took orders. He began to preach, and published two volumes of sermons, but was never settled over a congregation. He was much occupied in literature. A collection of his youthful poems appeared in 1809. It is headed by The Cypriad, in two cantos, a celebration of the tender passion, which he subsequently worked over in his poem, The Troph es of Love. In 1815, he pubished at Philadelphia a volume of poems, with the title The Broken Harp, containing "Earl Kandorf and Rosabelle, a Harper's Tale," a number of grave and light pieces, and translations from the classical and modern Latin poets. A third collection of his poems, in two neat volumes, appeared from the press of Wells and Lilly, at Boston, in 1821.

We are not aware of any published account of Henry Knight's life. From the recently issued Memorial of his brother Frederick, to be noticed presently, it appears that he died early in life, and that he left behind him an Autobiographical Sketch, full of humor and character, which, judging from the specimens given, deserves to be published at length.

Mr. Knight's poems, if not always highly finished, are at least elegant and scholarlike performances. He took for his subjects, when he was not writing cantos on love, topics involving thought and reflection, though he handled them in a light vein. His Crusade" has an elaborate "argument," setting forth the subtleties of theology. It is a playful satirical poem, on a serious theme. Another, "The Grave," is emulous of the didactic fervors of Cowper. In his "Sciences in Masquerade," an amusing illustration of the old theme of Sir Thomas More's "Praise of Folly," he sports gaily in a light rhyming measure. his classical tastes he was fond of Horace, Ovid, the Epigrammatists, and such modern Latinists as Bonefonius. His muse was equally ready for the grave or gay-a sonnet or an epitaph.

THE COUNTRY OVEN.

I sing the Oven-glowing, fruitful theme. Happy for me, that mad Achilles found,

In

And weak Ulysses erst, a servile bard,

That deigned their puny feats, else lost, to sing.
And happy that Eneas, feeble man!
Fell into hands of less emprise than mine;
Too mean the subject for a bard so high.
Not Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, dared

Sport their gross minds in such grand element.
Nor he, dame nature's master-journeyman,
Who nimbly wrought a comic tragedy,

As poet woos a muse, one Shakespeare called!
Nor Milton, who embattled Devils sung;
Nor bold Sir Blackmore, who an Epic built,
Quick as can mason rear a chimney-stack;
Nor later these, Klopstock and Wieland famed,
Who sung, this King of Elves, that King of Kings;
Dared the prolific Oven blaze in song.

Expect not now of Furnaces to hear,
Where Eolus dilates the liquid glass;

Nor where the THREE, testing their God could save,
Walked barefoot thro' the lambent heat, unseared;
Nor where the Hollanders, in nests of tow,
With mimic nature, incubate their eggs;
For the Domestic Oven claims my powers.

Come then, from kilns of flame, and tropic suns, Each salamander Muse, and warin my brain.

Need I describe ?-Who hath a kitchen seen,
And not an arched concavity called Oven?
Grand farinaceous nourisher of life!

See hungry gapes its broad mouth for its food,
And hear the faggots crackling in its jaws,
Its palate glowing red with burning breath.
Do not approach too near; the iugulphing draught
Will drink your respiration ere you list.

Glance now the fire-jambs round, and there ob

serve

Utensils formed for culinary use.

Shovel and tongs, like ancient man and wife,
He, with his arms akimbo, she in hoops.
There, dangling sausages in chains hang down;
As Sciences and Arts, distinct, allied;
Or, as in Union bound, our sister States.
Here, flayed eels, strung pendent by the waist;
So swing aloof victims in heathen climes;
O Algier hearts! to mock at writhing pain.
And, high in smoke-wreaths, ponderous ham to cure;
So may each traitor to his country hang!
And, thick on nails, the housewife's herbs to dry;
Coltsfoot for pipe, and spearmint for a tea.
Upon the hearth, the shrill-lunged cricket chirps
Her serenade, not waiting to be prest,
And Sue, poking the cinders, smiles to point,
As fond associations cross the mind,
A gallant, ring, or ticket, fashioned there.
And purring puss, her pied-coat licked sleek,
Sits mousing for the crumbs, beside black Jack.
He, curious drone, with eyes and teeth of white,
And natural curl, who twenty Falls has seen,
And cannot yet count four!-nor ever can,
Tho' tasked to learn, until his nose be sharp.
"Tis marvel, if he thinks, but when he speaks;
Else, to himself, why mutter loud and strange,
And scold, and laugh, as half a score were by?
In shape, and parts, a seed of Caliban!
He now is roasting earth-nuts by the coals,
And hissing clams, like martyrs mocking pain;
And sizzing apples, air-lanced with a pin;
While in the embers hops the parching corn,
Crack! crack! disploding with the heat, like
bombs.

Craunching, he squats, and grins, and gulps his

mug,

And shows his pompion-shell, with eyes and mouth,
And candle fitted, for the tail of kite,
To scare the lasses in their evening walk-
For, next day, and Thanksgiving-Eve will come.

Now turn we to the teeming Oven'; while, A skilful midwife, comes the aged Dame; Her apron clean, and nice white cap of lawn. With long lean arm, she lifts the griding slice, And inward slides it, drawing slowly out, In semi-globes, and frustums of the cone, Tanned brown with heat, come, smoking, broad high loaves;

And drop-cakes, ranged like cocks round stack of hay;

Circles and segments, pies and turn-overs,

For children's children, who stand teasing round, Scorching their mouths, and dance like juggler's

apes,

Wishing the pie more cool, or they less keen. Next, brown and wrinkled, like the good dame's brow,

Come russet-coated sweetings, pulp for milk;

A luscious dish-would one were brought me now! And kisses, made by Sue for suitor's pun.

And when the morrow greets each smiling face,
And from the church, where grateful hearts have
poured,

Led by the Man of God, their thanks and prayers,
To Him, who fills their granaries with good,
They hurry home, snuffing the spicy steams;
The pious matron, with full heart, draws forth
The spare-rib crisp-more savory from the spit!
Tall pots of pease and beans-vile, flatulent;
And puddings, smoking to the raftered walls;
And sweet cup-custards, part of the dessert.
These all, concreted some, some subtilized,
And by the generative heart matured,
A goodly birth, the welcome time brings forth.
Illustrious Oven! warmest, heartiest friend!
Destroy but thee, and where were festive smiles?
We, cannibals, might torrify and seethe;
Or dry blood-reeking flesh in the cold sun;
Or, like the Arab, on his racing horse,
Beneath the saddle swelter it for food.

And yet, ere thou give us, we must give thee.
Thus many an Oven barren is for life.
O poverty! how oft thy wishful eye
Rests on thine Oven, hungry as thyself!
Would I might load each Oven of the Poor,
With what each palate craves—a fruitless wish!
Yet seldom hear we Industry complain;

And no one should complain, who hath two eyes,
Two hands, and mind and body, sound and free.
And such, their powers to worthy ends applied,
Be pleased, indulgent Patroness, to feed.

FREDERICK KNIGHT, the younger brother of the preceding, and who for some time survived him, was born in Hampton, N. H., October 9, 1791. He shared with his brother the influences of the refined rural home of Rowley, and acquired a taste for the poetical beauties of nature, which became the solace of his disappointed career. He studied for a while at Harvard, but did not concentrate his attention sufficiently to pursue any settled plan of life. He was afterwards at the law school of Judges Reeve and Gould, at Litchfield, Conn. Subsequently he taught school for a while in the then partially settled region of the Penobscot, and pursued for a time the same vocation at Marblehead. His tastes and habits of retirement, however, constantly brought him back to the country-seat at Rowley, where he enjoyed a home with his amiable grandfather, Dr. Cogswell, an estimable physician, who retired from practice to the pleasures and pursuits of his farm. On the death of that relative, he was