Fox, as he was sometimes called. With a large force Colonel Thompson made a very successful attack upon Marion, near the Santee river. This was his chief success here. We next find him with the British fleet at New York. At Huntington, Long Island, he built a fort and recruited his regiment. At the presentation of colors to this regiment, the third son of the king was present and placed the flag in Colonel Thompson's hand. In regard to his course in Long Island, the fact cannot be denied that he has been severely criticised by Henry Onderdonck, Benjamin F. Thompson and Nathaniel S. Prime, historians of Long Island. He was charged with disregard of the complaints of the people, whom, it is said, his soldiers treated with harshness. It is to be feared that some of these stories are too true.

The only possible justification of his course may be found possibly in the idea that he regarded it as a sort of reprisal in part for the very great insult and severity which he received from his countrymen when consciously innocent of all ill-will towards his native land, and even desirous of serving in her defense. Certainly his conduct, notwithstanding his great provocation, was not marked by that exalted patriotism which would endure wrong rather than resent it.

Upon the close of the war, Thompson had acquired a fine reputation as a quick, alert, bold and faithful soldier, although his actual service had been short. He is soon appointed colonel in the regular army on half pay, for the remainder of his life. Having in his capacity as "Under Secretary of State," made many acquaintances, we soon find him traveling on the continent, where he is very courteously treated by many titled people. Among these friends of noble birth-one stands pre-eminent— Charles Frederick, elector and reigning Duke of Bavaria. This prince, in 1784, invites him to take up his residence with him in Munich, his capital. Permission is granted by the English king to do so, and the monarch is graciously pleased to confer the honor of knighthood upon our "soldier of fortune." Sir Benjamin, as we may now call him, is now well prepared for success in Germany. Although scarcely past thirty, he has already been recognized in England as a rising scientist as well as

soldier. Given more and more power by his prince, he revolutionizes one thing after another with surprising rapidity, and happy results following the innovations. The army is drilled and disciplined finely, but strange to say, made self-supporting. Huge work-houses and eating-houses for the military bear ocular proof of his reforms. The men were never so well clothed and fed before. Soon a still greater work is successfully grappled and accomplished by our industrious, self-supporting Yankee. To the titles of soldier and scientist, he is now henceforth to bear prouder ones still-he is philanthropist and reformer on a huge scale. Armies of beggars, swarming everywhere through the streets, under his wonderful management become quiet, orderly, self-respecting and self-supporting citizens. It is most evident that these wondrous changes for the better in the condition of the people are most pleasing to his mind, and he reverts to them again and again. Although such a friend and benefactor of the poor, he is more and more courted and honored by kings and nobles-literary and scientific men. He becomes member of the Academies of Munich, Manheim and Berlin, Councillor of State, Lieutenant General, Minister of War, and not stopping even here, his steadfast friend, the Elector, makes him "Count of the Holy Roman Empire," with all the privileges and immunities which such a title bore with it. With a pleasing grace, as his mind reverts to Rumford, N. H., now Concord, and his happy life and marriage there, short-lived though his happiness was, he chooses to be known as the Count of Rumford. Soon war breaks out-from London where, although a visitor, he is most actively engaged in scientific pursuits, he hurries home to Munich. The Elector flees from the city, but not until he has appointed his friend "Regent." In full command of the Bavarian army he so impresses the invading armies with respect for himself and his city, that they retire, having neither sacked nor injured the city. More gratitude and more honors in return for this great service follow, from the grateful prince and people. As a slight return, and to show as it were, his sense of pleasure in their appreciation of his favors, he now, by his engineering skill converts a large tract of

waste, barren land into one of the most pleasing pleasure grounds in Europe. The city of Munich becomes the gainer by a park, whose circuit was at least six miles. The park now contains one of the monuments erected in his honor. Much more still lies before Rumford, in the way of gratifying his thirst for scientific research. Paper after paper from his pen are read at the Royal Institution, London, which he had the honor of founding in 1799, and similar societies for advancing science elsewhere. Generous sums of money are given by him to the Royal Institution.

But now, freed from pressing political duties at Munich, thoughts of home, relatives and friends in America fill his mind. His daughter, by his first wife, who had long been dead in Concord, N. H., had long resided with her father in Europe, having been sent for to come to him. To his old mother and other relatives, he had long been sending the most ample pecuniary remittances for their comfort. Now, not only his own family, but the national government of the States invite him home. His boyhood's firm friend, Colonel Loammi Baldwin, writes him that he has a fine building site selected for him, almost directly opposite his own mansion. A large and imposing residence is built on this position for the Count's abode, when he once gets back again. This house is still standing, but Rumford never occupied its spacious apartments. Fever seized him at Auteuil, near Paris, the villa of his second wife, the widow of Lavoisier, the famous French chemist, and he died August 21, 1814, in the sixty-second year of his age, "thus depriving mankind of one of its most eminent benefactors and science of one of its brightest ornaments."

We have thus in the briefest and most hasty way endeavored to roughly indicate our countryman's wonderful career in Europe. This part of the tale is well known abroad. Americans, however, when gazing, in Munich, at the noble bronze presentment of Count Rumford's tall form and commanding features, are too prone to forget that the same person who in life tried in vain to serve his country as a soldier in her early struggles-did succeed in serving her nobly after his death-as the terms of his will

show most conclusively. When we consider that not only the highest scientific recognition of England, but also of America, are gold medals, given by him and bearing his profile, we may well admit that there is a debt of gratitude due from both the mother country and our own. That he had faults we make no attempt to deny, but we feel that despite these, he was originally and continued to be, a loving son of the old Bay State which gave him birth. One of the grandest proofs of attachment of a people to a ruler ever penned by a historian, were those words of our countryman, Motley, when speaking of the assassination of the Washington of the Low Countries in 1584 by Balthazar Gerard. "When William of Orange died all the little children cried in the streets for grief." When Rumford had succeeded in carrying out his noble schemes for making men and brothers of those once despised and loathsome Bavarian beggars, his life hung trembling in the balance by reason of a dangerous illness. Self moved, day after day at a given hour, the once brutalized pests of society, in a body, filed through the streets, as orderly, selfrespecting citizens to the great cathedral to supplicate God to spare the life of their great benefactor. In view of such facts, may we not be ready to claim Benjamin Thompson, not only as the greatest scientist that America as yet produced, as Prof. Tyndall says, but also as a friend to science, a friend to America, his native land, and to mankind.

NOTE. In the first volume of the Rumford Essays, we found the famous papers on the "Propagation of Heat in Fluids, and in Various Substances," and "An Experimental Inquiry Concerning the Source of the Heat which is Excited by Friction." In the latter paper the great scientist recounts his astonishment, while boring cannon at the government foundries, to find that the friction produced actually caused water to boil, and he finally says it is "difficult, if not quite impossible, to form any distinct idea of anything capable of being excited and communicated in the manner in which the heat was excited and communicated in these experiments, except it be Motion." Professor Tyndall of England, who some years ago visited the old birthplace of Rumford, and expressed his astonishment that the house should ever have been left by the American people to go to ruin, has himself taken, in 1864, the great gold Rumford medal of the Royal Society, for his researches upon the nature of heat. He generously ascribes to Rumford the honor of the seed-thought, which he himself has now expanded in his book, "Heat as a Mode of Motion."

APRIL 7, 1879.-ANNUAL MEETING.

MR. JOHN L. RICE read the following paper:

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE AND THE STATE OF NEW Connecticut, 1776-1782.

The State of New Connecticut, in the ordinary sense perhaps, can not be said ever to have existed outside the brains of its projectors; at least, it never took on such tangible form as to achieve a place in history separate and distinct from the other political bodies with which it was entangled and among which it lost such identity as it once had. Nevertheless, as conceived and wrought upon by the statesmen of the upper Connecticut valley throughout the entire period of the American Revolution, it became so far a reality that it was felt and recognized as a weighty factor in all the perplexing questions attending the admission of Vermont into the Union. In this view it may justly be said to have had a being and a history. And whenever that history shall be clearly eliminated from the mass of controversial records in which it has lain buried for a century, it will present one of the most exciting and instructive episodes in which the formative period of our institutions abounds.

That the project of erecting an independent state out of contiguous portions of the territory now comprised within New Hampshire and Vermont, once occupied the minds of men, is well known. It is also matter of history, that some initiatory steps were taken towards a realization of the scheme. But it is only as collateral and incident to Vermont's struggle for independence, that the annals of the time furnish any trace of what was done in this direction. The failure and abandonment of the movement, coming as it did in the very midst of the great achievements which assured the independence of the colonies, left it without a historian. The chroniclers of that era were busied with grander events; the scene was remote from the then centers of intelligence; the leading spirits in the ill-starred scheme were interested to cover up and obscure its interior history; and