We have ample passages from
Professor Silliman's journal, and from an autobiographical memoir
written during his last years, as well as extracts from his letters and
the letters addressed to him. It is an easy and pleasant way of writing
personal history, and it would be an easy and pleasant way of reading
it, if life were as long as art. But we fear that the popular usefulness
of this work--and the biography of the eminent man who did so much to
popularize science should be in the hands of all--must be impaired by
its magnitude; and we are disposed to regret that Professor Fisher did
not think fit to reject that part of the correspondence which
contributes nothing to the movement of the narrative or the development
of character, and condense much of that material which has only a value
reflected from the interest already felt in Professor Silliman. These
are faults in a work from which we have risen with a clear sense of the
beauty and goodness, as well as the greatness, of the eminent scientist.
It is admirable to see how his career, begun in another century and
another phase of civilization, ended in what was best and most
enlightened and liberal in our own time. A man could hardly have started
from better things, or been subject at important points of his progress
to better influences. Benjamin Silliman was of Revolutionary stock,
which had its roots in the soil of the Reformation. The Connecticut
Puritan came of Tuscan Puritans, who fled their city of Lucca, and
finally passed from Switzerland through Holland to our shores. Brain and
heart in him were thus imbued with an unfaltering love of freedom,
chastised by religious fervor; and when he became a man, he married with
a race of kindred origin in faith, sentiment, and principles. He
advanced with his times in a patriotic devotion to democracy and
equality, but he seems to have always kept, together with great
simplicity of character, the impression of early teaching and
associations, and something of old-time stateliness and formality. His
youth, like his age, was very sober, modest, and discreet. The ties
which united him to his family were strong; and he loved his mother, who
long survived his father, with the reverent affection of the past
generation. He inherited certain theological principles from his
parents, and never swerved from them for a moment. Some friendships came
down to him from his father which he always honored; and the institution
of learning wi