Excerpt from Memoir of Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford: With Notices of His Daughter My Dear Sir: - In inscribing this volume with your name, without having asked your permission to do so, I must seek your indulgence after the act. There is no name which, more fitly than yours, could be thus brought into connection with the subject of the volume. As the first incumbent of the Rumford Professorship in Harvard College, you paid a most felicitous and discriminating tribute, in your Inaugural Address, to the distinguished man who founded that Professorship by a generous endowment, and by making the College his residuary legatee. You initiated and directed a method of fulfilling the duties of your office in strict accordance with the wishes and purposes of Count Rumford, especially with a view to those ends of practical public good which he so ardently and successfully pursued. Your published lectures, The Elements of Technology, have recently had the title which you assigned to them adopted by an Institution of highest promise with us in its field and objects. This Institution, also, you most happily inaugurated. You presided for seventeen years over the American Academy of Arts and Sciences with an ability and urbanity of which the Fellows expressed to you their heartiest appreciation when you declined to be longer a candidate for that position; where also you had to direct the administration of another generous trust confided by Count Rumford to the Academy. Your lengthened life and professional devotion, while they have brought you to stand now as the oldest and most esteemed physician in the city of your residence, have likewise permitted you to indulge your taste and genius in the broadest culture of the many provinces of literature, art, and science in which you are an authority. I may not put into print the epithets and encomiums attached to your name by those who come nearest to you in the wide circles of your friendship and personal intercourse. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.