this part of northeastern Virginia, and particularly for the
Rappahannock Valley; and from pre-Revolutionary times, when tobacco was
legal tender and ministers got roaring drunk, down to the Civil War,
there came rolling into the town the coaches of the great plantation
owners of the region, who used Fredericksburg as a headquarters for
drinking, gambling, and business. Among these probably the most famous
was "King" Carter, who not only owned miles upon miles of land and a
thousand slaves, but was the husband of five (successive) Mrs. Carters.

Falmouth, a river town a mile above Fredericksburg, where a few
scattered houses stand to-day, was in early times a busy place. It is
said that the first flour mill in America stood there, and that one
Gordon, who made his money by shipping flour and tobacco direct from his
wharf to England, and bringing back bricks as ballast for his ships, was
the first American millionaire.

Besides having known intimately such historic figures as Washington,
Monroe, and Robert E. Lee, and having been the scene of sanguinary
fighting in the Civil War, the neighborhood of Fredericksburg boasts the
birth-place of a man of whom I wish to speak briefly here, for the
reason that he was a great man, that he has been partially overlooked by
history, and that it is said in the South that the fame which should
justly be his has been deliberately withheld by historians and
politicians for the sole reason that as a naval officer he espoused the
southern cause in the Civil War.

Every one who has heard of Robert Fulton, certainly every one who has
heard of S.F.B. Morse or Cyrus W. Field, ought also to have heard of
Matthew Fontaine Maury. But that is not the case. For myself, I must
confess that, until I visited Virginia, I was ignorant of the fact that
such a person had existed; nor have northern schoolboys, to whom I have
spoken of Maury, so much as heard his name. Yet there is no one living
in the United States, or in any civilized country, whose daily life is
not affected through the scientific researches and attainments of this
man.

Maury's claim to fame rests on his eminent services to navigation and
meteorology. If Humboldt's work, published in 1817, was the first great
contribution to meteorological science, it remained for Maury to make
that science exact.

While it is perhaps an exaggeration to say that Maury alone laid the
foundation for our present Weather Bureau, he certainly shares w