A very valuable museum of Egyptian antiquities we believe is now on the way to the United States; but it embraces no such great works as have been transported to Rome and Paris. Is it not worth while for the New-York merchants to set up in Union or Washington Square, the great statue of Memphis?
Or it would not be altogether inappropriate for the Smithsonian Institution to have it imported into Washington. How much the diffusion of "knowledge" would be promoted by such a movement it is not easy to say: but a figure of this kind on Capitol Hill would have such an effect on our eloquence! and our juvenile poets could go there and in its shade invoke the presence of twenty centuries.
HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT.
Mr. Schoolcraft is of English descent by the paternal side, his great-grandfather having come from England during the wars of Queen Anne, and settled in what is now Schoharie county in New-York, where in old age he taught the first English school in that part of the country, from which circumstance his name was not unnaturally changed by the usage of the people from Calcraft to Schoolcraft. Our author recently attempted in his own person to revive the old family name, but soon abandoned it, and concluded to retain that which was begotten upon his native soil, and by which he has long been so honorably distinguished. He is a son of Colonel Lawrence Schoolcraft, who joined the revolutionary army at seventeen years of age, and participated in the movements under Montgomery and Schuyler, and the memorable defence of Fort Stanwix under Gansevoort. He was born in Guilderland, near Albany, on the twenty-eighth of March, 1793. In a secluded part of the country, where there were few advantages for education, and scarce any persons who thought of literature, he had an ardent love of knowledge, and sat at home with his books and pencils while his equals in age were at cock-fights and horse-races, for which Guilderland was then famous. He is still remembered by some of the octogenarians of the village as the "learned boy." At thirteen he drew subjects in natural history, and landscapes, which attracted the attention of the late Lieutenant-Governor Van Rensselaer, then a frequent visitor of his father, through whose agency he came near being apprenticed to one Ames, the only portrait-painter at that time in Albany; but as it was demanded that he should commence with house-painting the plan was finally abandoned. At fourteen he began to contribute pieces in prose and verse to the newspapers, and for several years after he pursued without aid the study of natural history, English literature, Hebrew, German, and French, and the philosophy of language.
Mr. Schoolcraft's first work was an elaborate treatise, but partially known to the public, entitled Vitreology, which was published in 1817. The design of it was to exhibit the application of chemistry to the arts in the fusion of siliceous and alkaline substances in the production of enamels, glass, etc. He had had opportunities of experimenting largely and freely by his position as conductor for a series of years of the extensive works of the Ontario Company at Geneva in New-York, the Vermont Company at Middlebury and Salisbury in Vermont, and the foundry of crystal glass at Keene in New Hampshire. In 1818, and the following year, he made a geological survey of Missouri and Arkansas to the spurs of the Rocky Mountains, and in the fall of 1819 published in New-York his View of the Lead Mines of Missouri, which is said by Professor Silliman to have been "the only elaborate and detailed account of a mining district in the United States" which had then appeared. It attracted much attention, and procured for the author the friendship of many eminent men. In the same year he printed Transallegania, a poetical jeu d'esprit of which mineralogy is the subject, and which preceded some clever English attempts in the same vein. It was republished in London by Sir Richard Phillips in the next year.
Early in 1820 he published a Journal of a Tour in the Interior of Missouri and Arkansas, extending from Potosi toward the Rocky Mountains. His writings having attracted the notice of the government, he was commissioned by Mr. Calhoun, then Secretary of War, to visit the copper region of Lake Superior, and to accompany General Cass in his expedition to the head waters of the Mississippi. His Narrative Journal of this tour was published in 1821, and was eminently successful, an edition of twelve hundred copies being sold in a few weeks. In the same year he was appointed secretary to the commission for treating with the Indian tribes at Chicago, and on the conclusion of his labors published his sixth work, entitled Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley, in which he described the country between the regions of which he had given an account in his previous works. His reputation was now widely and firmly established as an explorer, and as a man of science and letters. From this time his attention was devoted principally to the Red Race, though he still cultivated natural history, and wrote occasionally for the reviews and magazines.
In 1822 he was appointed by President Monroe agent for Indian Affairs, to reside at St. Mary's, at the foot of Lake Superior. In the years 1825, 1826, and 1827, he attended the important convocations of the north-west tribes at Prairie du Chien, Pont du Lac, and Buttes des Morts. In 1831 he was sent on a special embassy, accompanied by troops, to conciliate the Sioux and Ojibwas, and bring the existing war between them to a close. In 1832 he proceeded in the same capacity to the tribes near the head waters of the Mississippi, and availed himself of the opportunity to trace that river, in small canoes, from the point where Pike stopped in 1807 and Cass in 1820 to its true source in Itasca Lake, upon which he entered on the thirteenth of July, the one hundred and forty-ninth anniversary of the discovery of the mouth of the river by La Salle. His account of this tour was published in New-York in 1834, under the title of An Expedition to Itasca Lake, and attracted much attention in all parts of the country.