Hobart College - Echo of the Seneca Yearbook (Geneva, NY)

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To our loved and respected senior professor, HAMILTON LANPHERE SMITH, this volume is affectionately dedicated as a token o{ our esteem.

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Prof. H. L. Smith It is with, great pleasure that we dedicate this volume of the JCcflo to Professor H. L. Smith, Hobart’s Senior Professor; and knowing the deep interest that all connected with Hobart feel in him, we have gotten together a few facts connected with his life and work that may aid to show how well he deserves that interest. Hamilton Lanphere Smith was born at New London, Connecti cut, Nov. th, i8t8. Here he lived- until he was sixteen years old when he entered, as freshman, the class of ’39, Yale. Even in his school-boy years he began to show an aptitude for scientific and mathematical pursuits and constructed a telescope of no small size with which lie made some tolerably accurate observations. These school-boy tendencies were encouraged by liis father who presented him, upon his entering college, with a large and handsome telescope. Many of his classmates are men well known in the world. Among them may be mentioned Kbenezer P. Mason, Charles Bristed, author of ‘'Four Years at an English University Ilenry K. Coppee, Professor of Literature at' Lehigh University; Senator Henry L. Dawes ; Henry R. Jackson, once U. S. Minister to Austria ; J. G. Lamed, afterwards Professor at Yale; Chas. J. Stille, Provost of University of Perm., and Rev. Francis ■Wharton, Professor at Kenyon and afterwards at Cambridge Theological Seminary, the two last mentioned being the authors of the standard work on criminal jurisprudence. Contemporaneous with him were Senator W. M. Evarts, David Tappan Stoddard, who died at Ooromialr, Persia, and the Rev. Dr. J. P. Thomson. Ebeuezer Porter Mason, who died in 1840 and whose biography has been written by Prof. Olinstead, and Mr. Swhth were class friends, doing much of their astronomical work together and at one time having entire charge of the Yale observatory. Their observations of Hal- ley’s comet received special notice among the leading scientific journals of the day and those on certain nebulae, published in the transactions of the American Academy of Science at Philadelphia, were highly commended by Sir John Herschel, as beiug the most reliable nebulas observations given up to that time. These observations were all made with a telescope constructed 4