Leander Firestone 1889 sketch

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Commemorative biographical record of Wayne County, Ohio, containing biographical sketches of prominent and representative citizens, and of many of the early settled families ... (Chicago: J. H. Beers & Co., 1889), 358, 361-370 (Leander Firestone, M. D., LL. D., with portrait/image at 358+; digital images, InternetArchive, emphasis added below as to genealogical significant items.

Commemorative biographical record of Wayne County, Ohio, containing biographical sketches of prominent and representative citizens, and of many of the early settled families ... (Chicago: J. H. Beers & Co., 1889), 358, 361-370; digitized text from, Library of Congress--modified for readability, below.

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Leander Firestone (1819-)

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LEANDER FIRESTONE, M. D., LL. D. (deceased). The following sketch is from the pen of Ben. Douglass, of Wooster.

Man's sociality of nature evinces itself in spite of all that can be said with abundant evidence, by this one fact, were there no other: The unspeak- able delight he takes in biography. — Carlyle.

Lord Bacon expressed his regret that the lives of eminent men were not more frequently written; and added that, "though kings, princes and great personages be few, yet there are many excellent men who deserve better than vague reports and barren elegies."

The history of the world is principally the record of conspicuous names and the biogra- phy of illustrious characters. The history of Rome is little more than the biography of twelve men who were contemporaries, and all enclosed within the walls of the Eternal City. No marvel that the proud metropolis that can boast of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Brutus, Cato, Atticus, Livy, Cicero, Horace, Yirgil, Hortensius, Augustus and Marcus Yarro, should aspire to the proud title of mistress of the world, and vaunt herself secure from all mortal wounds, save only those that might be inflicted in an evil hour by parricidal hands.

Mankind delights to register the acts and syllables of men who risk investments in the thought exchanges of the world. The standard of civilization and the advancement of human progress has been made and determined by the augmentation in the proportion of those who achieve intellectual triumphs, and by a corresponding decrease in the ratio of those who are consecrated to pleasurable pursuits, and neglect the higher moral and mental development and discipline. The principle of leadership is acknowledged and universal. It commands our respect and veneration. Among the North American Indians each tribe has its oracular leader, who summons to the camp-lire the dusky faces, and regales them with chapters from the unwritten bible of savagery.

When King Harold went westward, followed by the chosen men of Norway, to con- quer France and England, though his men were distinguished for wisdom and courage as a body, yet they recognized and rewarded the leadership of those most prominent in energy and valor. The true Briton of to-day venerates the names of Hengst and Horsa, his Saxon prototypes, for the inspiration and memory of their horsemanship is ever present at the boiling heats of Ascot and Newmarket. Through the grim galleries of the centuries, the Deity has spoken through his own chosen interpreters. It is the few indeed, who are genius-anointed. The lines of history from the first records of Grecian story to the moment when Elsinore heard the war moan along the distant sea, and, further on to later combats amidst hieroglyphic obelisks and near the shadow of the Sphynx, vividly expose the records of grand men who clenched opportunity and forced her to decree and command their triumph. In the progress of events marching on with power and grandeur, we discover the hand of Phidias among the features of the gods; the trowel of the Egyp- tians; the philosophy of Socrates and Plato; the swords of Ciesar and Alexander; the ora- tions of Cicero, Burke and Webster; the speculations of Newton, Copernicus and Kant; the metaphysical wisdom of Bacon and Locke; the prowess of Charlemagne, Murat and Sheridan; the achievements of Sir William Hunter and Sir Astley Cooper; the legal pro- fundity of Blackstone, Erskine and Story; the religious zeal of Baxter, Hooker and Bossuet; the military skill of Wellington, Von Moltke and Grant; the statesmanship and martial grandeur of Washington; the astute and overmastering sagacity and judg- ment of Lincoln; the romantic intrepidity of Columbus and Hudson; the grand poetic out- bursts of Sophocles, Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Longfellow. Their lives, their thoughts and deeds have imparted stability, character, example and inspiration to human- ity and civilization, and, in their individual histories, in their recorded work and the thoughts they have furnished, can almost be found the material for a history of the race.

Wherefore, it may properly and naturally be affirmed, that history may be contemplated as but the biography of a few earnest, toiling, self-reliant men.

It has been said that the hardy growths of nature are those which battle the storms ; the fiercer the conflict the more robust becomes the trunk, and the deeper down do the roots descend. Man is biit a segment of nature. The successful one is not he who dreams or toys with images, but he who acts, and when we see a man who has hewn his way through difficulties and endured the storms of life from childhood, he is the strong man, the man of will and genius. Such was the subject of this memoir.

Dr. Firestone was born in Salt Creek Township, Wayne Co., Ohio, April 11, 1819. His father, Daniel F. Firestone, removed from Beaver County, Penn., to Wayne County, in 1815. With him he remained until he was fourteen years old, performing such work as he could on the farm in the Slimmer, and attending the country school in the winter. He then entered the academy at Salem, Columbiana County, and under the tutorship of Mr. Mills and Mr. Kingsbury, received prelibations of that education which he had an ambition to acquire, but which was beyond his power to then attain. He thence went to Portage County, Ohio, where he contracted with a farmer for three months to chop cord wood, at three shillings per cord. His stout arras felled the forest monarchs., notwithstanding the lines of Morris:

Wooilnian. spare tlitit tree,

Touch not a single bough.

Who knows but his youthful, imaginative and poetic mind, as he looked upon the prostrate oak, did not dwell on masts of navies in its ribs; of storms; of battles on the ocean; of the noble lyrics of the sea; of Robin Hood and his merry men; of old baronial halls with mellow light streaming through diamond-shaped panes upon floors of oak, and wain- scotings of carven oak? I doubt not that his boyish fancy saw all this.

At the age of sixteen he returned to Wayne County, going to Chester Township, where, with his uncle, John Firestone, a few miles north of New Pittsburgh, for two years, he made his home. He was penniless, but eager and earnest. The history of these two years could be given in a line — "The short and simple annals of the poor." Thrust upon his own resources, he became the architect of his own fortune. He toiled in the fields during the day, and after the drudgery of it was over, he devoted himself to his books by the light of the tire of kindlings carefully prepared as a substitute for lamp or candle. With him it had to be nothing, or, self-schooling, always the firm, sure sub- stratum upon which the successful student, whether at home or school, or at the univer- sity, must erect his superstructure. In whatever he engaged, whether in contact with the products of the soil, or the resistance of the forest, or in the path of mental improvement, he was distinguished for unquailing diligence and energy. Under such circumstances and surroundings he laid the basis of his education and life, and that a man who can thus educate himself, possesses intellectual morale, no one, however captious, will deny.

During the winters of these two years spent with his uncle, he taught school, his first term being in the region now known as Perry Township, then in Wayne, but now in Ashland County. For his services he received S12 per month. He was now equipped for teaching, was a good grammarian and mathematician, exceeding, in fact, the stand- ard of the average English scholar. By the reading of standard authors, such as Tacitus and Plutarch, Hume and Gibbon, Shakespeare and Milton, Dr. Johnson and Field- ing, etc., which he had borrowed, he was introduced to the best style and thought of these brilliant writers, and in early life acquired a degree of familiarity with their language, and found sincere pleasure in the companionship of their reflections. Mean- time, he had not circumscribed the area of his studies to such as merely equipped him for the service of the teacher. His range of penetration and vision was lifted to wider and higher skies. He had been making periodical recitations to Rev. Thomas Beer, a scholarly Presbyterian minister of Ashland, familiarizing himself with botany, geology, philosophy, chemistry, and natural science in other departments. His inquiring mind impelled him to make researches in germs and plant-life, and its organic and inorganic nature, and into flowers, their organs and food, and the physiology of the vegetable world; to explore Olil Red Sandstone and the Cosmos; to sit with Plato in the academy, or Seneca at the Symposium of death; to wander with Silliman and Berzelius amid reactions and relations, the composition of substances and the mysterious laws of com- bination.

At the age of nineteen, August 26, 1838, he was married to Miss Susan Firestone, a lady of dignified and affable manner much esteemed by her acquaintances as a wife, mother, friend and Christian. The intimacy which resulted in this union was formed in early life, and his ardent attachment to his wife was evinced on all occasions to the period of his death. By this marriage eight children were born, five boys and three girls, all of whom are dead, except W. W. Firestone, M. D., who inherits many of the strong traits of his father, and under whose tutorage he studied his profession and its collateral sciences.

At the age of twenty, Dr. Leander Firestone began the study of medicine with Dr. S. F. Day, a noted practitioner and eminent surgeon, under whose care and instruction he continued for three years, when be attended a course of lectures at Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. When he received his diploma, unlike many students who re- linquish or abridge their reading and hours of study upon graduation, he realized that he was but

An infant struggling on its mother's lap,

and that he was just in the first stages of discipline which would ultimately enable him to grapple with the broad and almost illimitable field of medical and surgical literature. His passion for these investigations was manifested in his writhings in the grip of his first clench with life, and continued until time bad faintly blurred into gray back- ground the splendid picture of his former years. His steadfast assiduity and zeal in his professional work gave him the applause of co-laborers and brothers, and won him lead- ership where to win it was to be crowned ; won him believers and imitators, where to be imi- tated and to be recognized as an example, was to have attained to the eminence of human- ity's benefactor.

But the time had come when he must lift his shield and bare his arm to "the sad, stern ministry of pain," and on March 28, 1841, he opened an office in the village of Congress, where he continued for thirteen years, acquiring a wide and remunerative practice, and a degree of popularity and eminence not confined to his visiting circuit. During this time, and expanding the horizon of his aims, he graduated from the Medical Department of the Western Reserve College, then located at Cleveland, Ohio, and in 18-17 was summoned to that institution as demonstrator ot anatomy, which position he held until 1853. Here he achieved new honor and distinction, and bore the reputation of being one of the most popular, fluent and instructive lecturers in the colleges. In the same year he was appointed first superintendent of Northern Ohio Asylum for the Insane, at Newburgh, now a part of the city of Cleveland.

In 1859, being vice-president of the Ohio Medical Convention, then in session in Co- lumbus, Ohio, in the absence of the president he presided, appointing all the committees, and otherwise controlling its deliberations. June 7, of the same year, he was elected president of the convention, and "in remarks accepting the office tendered him, thanked the society in a brief but manly speech, and urged the members to consider carefully and earnestly the importance of the work before them."*

June 13, 1860, he delivered his valedictory address to the Convention. In ISG-t he was promoted to the professorship of obstetrics and diseases of women in Charity Hospital Medical College, Cleveland, Ohio. In 1808 he was elected to the chair of surgery. In 1870 the college at Cleveland was made the medical department of Wooster University, where he continued as professor of obstetrics and the medical and surgical diseases of women, and class lecturer on anatomy, physiology and hygiene, to the students at Wooster University.

June 24, 1874. the title of LL. D. was conferred upon him, at Athens, by the University of Ohio. Gov. William Allen appointed him, February 1, 1875, one of the trustees

• From the Medical Report.

for three years, of the Northern Ohio Hospital for the Insane. In 187S, Gov. Bishop designated him as superintendent of the Institution for the Insane at Columbus, Ohio, and during his administration of the office, he established a reputation in the public benevolent circles of the States, as being one of the successful and efficient professional and executive superintendents, of which any State might be consistently jealous.

In private life he was characterized by great benevolence of character. Other re- markable traits were his disinterestedness, his regard for the rights and enjoyments of others, his generous disposition, his gentle and forbearing temper, his plain, easy and unostentatious manner. He was an unswerving friend and a delightful companion. In social circles he charmed with the grace and full, rich naturalness of his expression. "Con- versation to him was the music of the mind, an intellectual orchestra, where all the in- struments should have a part, but where none should play together." He was possessed of warm and wide and ardent sympathies, and his genial natiire unconsciously called for sympathy; yet, he was heroic and independent, and bore the occasional uneven fric- tions of circumstance with placid etpianimity and stately strength. He had the ability to sustain the mind's tone under adverse environments and preserve it sensitive to work, study, meilitatioa, nature and to God. In the relation of father and son, of husband, brother and friend, lie always displayed the highest excellencies of feeling and character. Expanding our view to the comprehensive circle of his personal friends, rarely did any man win a stronger hold upon the confidence of those with whom he was associated. He has with o(|ual propriety mingled in the free and open exchanges of private life, and sus- tained the dignity and honor of official station.

In professional life we may speak of him in the language of eulogy employed l)y him on the death of Prof. Delamater, who occupied a chair in the medical college with Dr. Firestone:

He was no ordinary man. Indeed he was a great man, in possession of learning without pedantry, and skill without ostentation. He never was known to harbor hatred or ill-will, had a pleasant smile of approbation and a word of encouragement and hope for everv man in the faithful discharge of his duty. He was eminent aa a physician, and his lectures were clear, forcible and logical. In conversation he was agreeable, instructive and illuminating, imparting pleasure and intelligence to all around him. The mementoes of his example are a rich boon to posterity, and, while benevolence, philanthropy, social order and religion survive, the virtues of this great and good man will shine in all the majesty of light.

He was not a specialist in any branch of the profession, but in all of its apartments vindicated his title to pre-eminent distinction. In surgery he particularly excelled, and to bo an expert in that domain is to approximate the mastery of the profession, as in its several branches are compassed all the other departments of the healing art. In the sick room he seemed to engender and radiate health, as if he were the possessor of a superabundance of it. He was pervaded, if we may feebly reach out after a receding idea, with the mysterious odic force of the healer, which is above science and beyond experience and behind theory, and which we call magnetism, or vitality, or tact, or inspiration, according to our assimilating power in its presence, or our reverence for its mission.

As a politician he had no full defined or cherished aspirations. He was a member of the Ohio Constitutional Convention of 1850-51 which assembled at the State Capitol, May 6, 1850, and of which Hon. William Medillwas president, W. H. Gill, secretary, and J. Y. Smith, reporter. It was composed of 115 officers and delegates, in which there were eight physicians besides himself. In his representative capacity it will be observed that Dr. Firestone aided by his vote and voice in advancing measures which, by legislation, were crystalized into the salutary laws of the State, and under which its citizens have been happy and prosperous for nearly forty years. It was, indeed, no paltry honor to occupy a seat in such a deliberative assembly, presided over by a subsequent governor of the State, and which was composed of the Ranneys. Groesbecks, Nashes, Kennons, Stan- berrys, Kirkwoods, and Peter Hitchcock, "the father of the Ohio bar," some of whom became supreme judges of the State, governors, authors in the law. United States Sena- tors and cabinet ministers. During his membership of the convention he participated act- ively in the discussion of questions before it for deliberation. He was a champion of the right of petition, the purity of the ballot, economy in the administration of the affairs of the State, advocating biennial sessions of the Legislature, and antagonizing the increase of salaries of public officials. He signalized his opposition to corporations in a speech, of June 11, which brought him to prominence, and fixed his status before the convention as an extemporaneous debater and orator. He exhibited an accurate and comprehensive knowledge of public affairs and great readiness and resources in disputation. A Dem- ocrat, and yet Republican in habits and principles, depending for the maintenance of his dignity upon the esteem of others, and not upon his own assumption, his manners at once conciliated the good will of the convention. When he was elected to this position he was a young man of thirty-two summers, the age of Lord Clive when he established the British power in India, and of Hannibal, when at Cannse, he dealt an almost annihilating blow at the Roman republic. He resigned his seat before the labors of the convention terminated, on account of a pressure of professional work demanding his exclusive time, when Elzy Wilson, of Ashland County, was chosen his successor.

He kept thoroughly enlightened upon all the issues and matters of political interest before the public, and was a Democrat in his political affiliations. He was one of the best cami^aign orators in the Democratic organization in Ohio, and in several State and national conflicts he entered the arena with the avowed Titans of his party. In open assault he could lash his political enemies with a whip of scorpions, or punish them over a prostrate hero, as Marc Antony did Brutus over the dead body of Csesar. He was once a candidate for Congress, and came within a few votes of obtaining the nomina- tion, when Hon. H. H. Johnson was chosen and elected from this district.

As a patriot his allegiance to his country is immutably written upon the record. When the first gun flung its iron challenge at Fort Sumter, as a true American, Dr. Firestone felt the insult. He realized that war was upon us, and with Dr. Holmes believed that "war is the surgery of crime," and that the disease of the nation was not functional but organic, and demanded the knife and not opiates and lotions. It must not be that the most beneficent of all governments must fall by the basest of all conspiracies. Better, if it must, that all should be pushed into that ocean whose astonished waves first felt the Mayflower's kiss and keel. There was no middle ground then: the conditions were for or against the Union. To bo a neutralist was to have pointed against you " the stony finger of Dante's awful Muse." Dr. Firestone at once declared for the Union, in prompt, eloquent, and unmistaken tones.

On July 4, 1861, ten weeks after the red lights of war were kindled, he addressed his fellow citizens of Wooster and Wayne Counties, in a thrilling, patriotic and impas- sioned speech, from which we make a brief extract :

Shall the dawn of some future 4th of July find your watch-towers abandoned, your altars overthrown, your banners forsaken, your smiling land devastated by a storm of ruin, your peaceful hamlets resounding with the maiden's shriek, your fertile hills and sunny plains scathed by havoc and death, trodden by foreign hirelings, and desolated by internal strife? Look through the world and show me a clime so proudly matured in the days of her youth. Shall the freedom won by the mightiest of nations in the days of her feebleness be lost in the hour of her might? Shall we permit the bright foliage and buds of promise to be stripped from the Tree of Liberty — its blooming beauty in the rich spring of unclouded glory, and the banner of Washington desolated and trampled in the dust! Perish the thought forever!

That glorious banner that has waved in triumph amid the clash of arms and the din of battle, that has inspired the heart of heroes with deeds of noble daring, and been the antidote to danger at the head of charging squadrons, as they rushed with fearless tread to the field of death, must not be desecrated. That honored ensign, now the heirloom of the sons of freedom, consecrated through all coming time as a sacred memento of the dead, that has been baptized in blood, sanctified by the pure light of heaven, and wedded in undying memory with immortal names, illustrious deeds and ennobling recollections of all that true patriots deemed worthy of life or death, can never be desecrated by foreign foe, nor crushed beneath the heartless tread of a traitor's foot. Its sublime mission, its exalted destiny, is far higher and holier than this. The whirlwinds of war, of pestilence and devastation, may sweep the green earth, spreading destruction and death; proud monuments of grandeur may crumble into dust; but the glorious scintillations of living light and luster streaming from the starlit flag, like the countless lights in the constellation of heaven, are destined to shine on and on, illumining our hillsides and valleys, lighting the halls of genius and learning, penetrating the imperious sackcloth of bigotry, the veil of fanaticism, dissipating corruption, and challenging dissolution or decay.

Let us, the heirs of hallowed birthrights, again renew our pledges here this day, that we will be faithful in the discharge of the duties entrusted to us. Let us vow that, these stately columns of American liberty, erected by our fathers, shall not be broken by the rash acts of their inconsiderate and ungrateful sons; but that they shall still tower in unparalleled grandeur, raising their heads upward, high above the loftiest summits of the world. Nor shall moss nor ivy outstrip the builder's hand, till a free, prosperous and patriotic people arise in their omnipotent might, and, amid the shoutings and acclamations of millions, lay the corner-stone of glory and renown.

In 1861 he was chosen Chairman of the Wayne County Military Committee, which was empowered to appoint auxiliaries in the various townships to solicit donations, in cash and articles of food and wearing apparel, for the soldiers. It was authorized, also, to urge and encourage volunteering and report the names of those who desired to enlist in the military service. In this sphere of duty he was active and energetic, and beyond the fulfillment of these functions, he supplied appointments throughout the county and made the most intense and fervid war speeches. At the banquets and reunions of the old soldiers he was frequently present, and invariably extended encouragement to such occasions. His Decoration addresses were models of earnest, burning patriotic national devotion. Surely, if eloquence is lodged in the human soul, it should be aroused on that day, so prolific of gallant deeds and the memories of immortal heroes. The historian, Alison, relates that the statesmen of Athens, when they wished to arouse that tickle people to any great or heroic action, reminded them of the national glory of their ancestors and pointed to the Acropolis crowned with the monuments of their valor; and that the Swiss peasants, for live hundred years after the establishment of their independence, assembled on the fields of Morgarten and Laupen. and spread garlands over the graves of the fallen warriors, and prayed for the souls of those who had died for their country's freedom.

In 1882, as president of the Decoration ceremonies at the cemetery he said :

It is sorrow's day, and yet our mourning is mingled with some share of gladness in the reflection that those whom we mourn were the brave, honorable and manly, and fell with their armor on in the faithful discharge of their duty. Their sleep, but their deeds remain bright. They have fallen, but left a well-earned fame that will survive, unimpaired, the revolution of time. They commingle no more with companions they loved, enjoy no longer the pleasures and sweets of home, yet it is pleasing to know they left an undivided country, a Union preserved, a flag honored, and the constitution, as given b}' the fathers, respected. Among the fallen we recognize those who, as patriots, were fearless and devoted ; as gentlemen, polished and graceful ; as citizens, liberal and generous ; as hus- bands, kind and affectionate ; as fathers, tender and instructive; as Christians, consistent and pious, and as men, honest and brave. Flowers will be strewn on the sod beneath which slumbers the soldier in gray as well as the soldier in blue. This is in accordance with the promptings of the human heart, and would seem to be Nature's plan. The light of the sun, treasures of the clouds, pearls of the star-lit night, evening's zephyr and the fragrance of the flowers are distributed to all, and afford us lessons of wisdom, not alone on this occasion, but in every day life. As on Horeb, when the tempest, the flame and the earthquake had passed away, there came a still small voice

That spake of peace, it spake of love,

It spake as angels speak above,

So here, this still small voice is pleading the cause of man. and that equal rights, under the law of love, sustained by the love of law, shall be the order throughout the federation of the world When these things shall have been accomplished in spirit and in truth, we may walk about our political Zion, and go around about her, tell the towers thereof, mark well her bulwarks, consider her palaces.

In the domain of imagination and literary effort, genius had promised him her voice and the key to her sacred haunts, but in the rush and hurry of life he did not often court her smiles or seek her bower or wait the natural flowering of her thought. His muse was ready and sat near the Pierian waters. But, perhaps, the silence of the lover when he clasps his maiden is better than the passionate murmur of the song which celebrates her charms. He had the temper which animates the imaginative student and man. His intellect was dextrous, and, while he occasionally wrote genuine poetry, he indulged in rhyme like an apt craftsman who in different directions seeks to test his skill. His poems sort of grew and builded themselves.

One of his best poetic ranges is represented in his Decoration poem of 1 882, which was published and widely circulated by the press. It was contemplated at one time to make it the national song of the Grand Army of the Republic. It is here subjoined:

Air; — " Oh, Wrap the Flag Around Me, Boys! "

'Tis sorrow's day, the noisy din

Of labor hushed to rest,

Each face portrays the heart within

With grief so deeply pressed.

We mourn the loss of those we loved.

The noble and the brave —

Our hearts in sadness deeply moved

We weep beside the grave.

Chorus.

Then strew sweet flowers upon the spot

Where lie the true and brave

Who dared to face the foeman's shot,

Our country's flag to save.

In battle's din their shouts were heard

Upon the bloody field;

From one to one they passed the word

"The gray-coat foe must yield! "

But O, alas! with heaving breast

They met their dreadful doom,

And now they sleep in peaceful rest

Within the quiet tomb.

Chorus: Then strew, etc.

Let evergreens be lightly thrown

Upon their last abode. —

Fit emblems that the soul lives on,

To praise its maker, God.

Let soldiers sleep until the day

The trump shall bid them rise;

The victory sure, the battle won,

Their home is in the skies.

Chorus: Then strew, etc.

He possessed, in a high degree, all the requisites for a successful and popular plat- form lecturer, and in ISOO, the Boston Literary Bureau requested permission to make appointments for him for the ensuing season, which was declined. His intellectual equipments would have served him grandly in such a field. He was familiar with the best thoughts of the best thinkers and writers. and believed that a book was the best anodyne for either suffering or solitude. There is always a pleasure in sympathetic propinquity to the utterances of a great aitthor. Reading his book is but opening his grave, pressing your ear to his coffin and whispering through his dust, to his finer spiritual hearing. We do not see him, yet, through embattlements of earth and sky and space we know and hear him. We must converse with the dead in the unsealed testament of their thoughts and live among the unreal. Gibbon asserted that he would not exchange his enjoyment of books for the riches of the Indies. Montesquieu affirmed there was no annoyance or vexation he could not fly from in his library. Lessing said that, if the alternatives were offered him by the Creator, to acquire knowledge immediately by intuition, or in his usual way, by laborious study, he would choose the latter, for study is itself a felicity. His readings were extensive and varied. He studied Rembrandt to learn how to enjoy the struggles of light and darkness: Wagner to appreciate certain musical effects; Dickens to give a whirl to his sentimentality: Mark Twain to flavor his humor; Emerson to kindle new light within; Edwards to catch glances of the spiritual world, and Chalmers and Hotlge that he might touch the chain that led on to the hiding places of the soul. His public addresses, lectures and magazine publications if collected would make several volumes. At the dedication of Arcadome Hall, December 18, 1857 (destroyed by tire March 23, 1874), he responded to the toast: "Our orator — whether at driving out a fever with jalap, or a fit of the blues with a joke, tuning up a bass fiddle or a broken constitution, he is always equal to the emergency, and like a true flint (as his Dutch name indicates), strikes fire every time the steel touches him." In this hall, January 12, 1858, he delivered one of his most scholarly and scientific lectures on the completion of the laying of the Atlantic cable, entitled " The Marriage of the Old and New World." The parties were living on the two sides of an ocean, and were married by extending their hands across it, and the telegraphic cable was the wedding tie. The lecture was thoroughly scientific, and its treatment of electricity, the method of its generation by friction and chemical action, and the ma- chinery constructed to develop and intensify the subtle agency, the galvanic battery, and the researches of Le Sage in 1774, to the triumphs of Morse in 1844, was lucid, elaborate and instructive. Among all of his public platform performances none were more popular or evinced a profounder thought, or a keener analysis of propositions and subject matter, or gave him a wider reputation, than his disquisition upon the Reciprocal Influence of Mind and Body. He had in contemplation and partially completed for publication, a work on Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene, to be used as a text book in colleges and schools.

He became a Free Mason, at Harrisville Lodge, Medina County, Ohio, in 1848, and was worshipful master of Ebenezer Lodge, Wooster. for eleven years. He was grand scribe of the Grand Chapter in 1860-61, and high priest of Wooster Chapter for fifteen years, and held the office until his death. In 1862 he was grand king of the Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons. He was a member of Massillou Commandery, No. 4, Knights Templar, for a number of years. At the laying of the corner stone of Wooster City Court House, October 9, 187S, which was conducted with high ceremony by the Ancient order, he delivered the address. It was a masterly effort, opulent in its reproductions of the traditions and antiquities of the Ancient order, and, withal, diffused with the soundest patriotism and the keenest intelligence upon the legal science and the maxims of jurisprudence.

He was a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows; the Independent Order of Red Men; of the Knights of Pythias, Rising Star Lodge, and holding its highest office, that of Chancellor of the State; of the Royal Arcanum, and was supervising medical examiner of Ohio for six years, and died maintaining that position. Dr. Joel Seaverns, medical examiner-in-chief, Roxbury Mass. , in a letter referring to his death, wrote :

The Doctor was active, earnest and faithful in his duties as supervising examiner, and thoroughly careful and scrupulous in seeing that instructions were complied with. His correspondence with me had always been brief but to the point, and I had learned to regard his opinions as conservative and valuable. It will be hard. I think, for us to select a successor as well qualified and as faithful as he had been.

He permanently settled in Wooster in 1856, where he lived and which was his home until his death, which occurred from apoplexy November 9, 1888. He was above the medium height, weighing over 200 pounds, with full projecting brows and sharp penetrating eyes. The expression of his countenance, in rest, was grave, but its serious cast was often relieved by a peculiarly pleasant smile, indicative of the geniality of his disposition. His face was plainly illustrative of the buoyancy and vivacity of his mind. He did not think the best way to become old was to let the heart grow gray. To the writer he said a few months before he died: "Yes, I am approaching seventy; the light is on. I am over the hill -top and hurrying down the slope to the river. " As he passed en the thought of the poem he so much loved flashed upon me, and I quote its first stanza:

Not yet, my soul, these friendly fields desert. Where thou with grass, and rivers and the breeze, And the bright face of day, thy dalliance had; Where to thine ear lirst sang th' enraptured birds; Where love and thou that lasting bargain made. The ship rides trimmed, and fromth' eternal shore, Thou hearest airy voices; but not yet, Depart my soul, not yet awhile depart.

The consciousness seemed upon him then that there were but a few remaining bars of rest between the strains of his remaining life. On matters of religion and the ultimate ex- istence, he gave the evidence of his utmost belief and faith in Christianity, a Savior, a Resurrection and a God of Redemption ; and this was emphatically confirmed for many years, by his visible union with the church. Many of his reflections, reverently indulged, on matters pertaining to the soul, its iuiinite possibilities and eternal destiny, are remem- bered, and many were unexpressed, which neither takes from nor adds to the abysmal depth of the mystery which surrounds us all.

Who made the heart 'tis He alone Decidedly can try us; He kuows each chord, its various tone. Each string, its various bias;

and it is within the sphere of the Christian gentleman to believe that he had suffered the inner martyrdom and preparation for death.