From the time of the election of the Princess Daschkof, in 1789, the society has always had a Russian membership, generally from among the members of the St. Petersburg Academy. In 1864 it was presented with a superb copy of the Codex Sinaiticus, published in St. Petersburg in 1862, from the parchment rolls found by Tischendorf in the monastery of St. Catharine on Mount Sinai.
A day never to be forgotten by the members of the Philosophical Society—and there are some persons living whose memory runs back to that period—was that upon which the Marquis de Lafayette was welcomed to its hall, on his return to America in 1824. No words can more fitly describe the emotions of the hour, certainly none can bring back more perfectly the aroma of that olden time adulation, than the address of welcome pronounced, on this occasion, by Mr. Charles J. Ingersoll:
“America does not forget the romantic forthcoming of the most generous, consistent, and heroic of the knights of the old world to the rescue of the new. She has always dwelt delighted on the constancy of the nobleman who could renounce titles and wealth for more historical and philanthropic honors; the commander renouncing power, who never shed a drop of blood for conquest or vainglory. She has often trembled, but never blushed, for her oriental champion, when tried by the alternate caresses and rage of the most terrific mobs, and imposing monarchs. She knows that his hospitable mansion was the shrine at which her citizens in France consecrated their faith in independence. Invited to revisit the scenes of his first eminence, the very idolatry of welcome abounds with redeeming characteristics of self-government.... They raise him before the world as its image, and bear him through illuminated cities and widely-cultivated regions, all redolent with festivity and every device of hospitality and entertainment, where, when their independence was declared, there was little else than wilderness and war.”
Could tongue or pen say more?
An old Philadelphia lady, who, in her youth, had the honor of walking to church with Lafayette, vividly recalls her keen disappointment when she first saw him,—short and stout, not by any means the typical hero of her romantic dreams. His son, George Washington Lafayette, was with him, and at a dinner given him, when called upon to respond to a toast, arose, and, struggling with his emotion and his feeble command of English, placed his hand upon his heart, and said, “I am zo happy to be ze son of my fadder!”—words which so touched the sympathetic chord in the hearts of all present that they felt that the entire vocabulary of the language could have furnished him with no more fitting phrase.
Among later members of the society have been such men as Noah Webster, Josiah Quincy, Washington Irving, Elisha Kent Kane, the Arctic explorer, the Count de Lesseps, Mr. Gladstone, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Bancroft, the historian, James Russell Lowell, and the two great naturalists, Louis Agassiz, and Joseph Leidy, both of whom, with their vast learning, retained through life a childlike frankness and simplicity that endeared them to all who approached them. Those who met Professor Agassiz by the sea, during his vacation seasons, and heard from his own lips of the wonders of the shore, and those who listened to a popular lecture of Dr. Leidy, in which he described the life and customs of the minute creatures to be found in a drop of pond water, will always rejoice that it was their privilege to journey even a little way into the fairy-land of science with such masters for their guides. Of the pleasure and profit of a more thorough penetration into its mysteries and enchantments under such preceptors, those who were fortunate enough to be numbered among the students of Agassiz and Leidy speak with enthusiasm.
The Philosophical Society, grown gray and venerable, now celebrates, May, 1893, its one hundred and fiftieth birthday. Although numbering a large corps of native and foreign members, working in various branches of knowledge, and contributing to its regularly issued publications valuable papers, the present fraternity feel that the society’s proudest claim to distinction lies in the fact that it fostered literature, science, and invention in the young nation, and thus became the alma mater of many institutions that have gone forth from its protecting arms to become, in their turn, centres of light and usefulness.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Benjamin Franklin as a Man of Letters, by John Bach McMaster, p. 137.