ONE of the best essays of the nineteenth century was read to the students of Hampden-Sidney College, Virginia, in 1837, by John W. Draper, at that time professor of Chemistry and Natural Philosophy in that institution. It gave what is, no doubt, the first recorded definition of the idea he afterward developed in his “History of the Intellectual Development of Europe,” 1862. The extraordinary faculty he had of comprehending seemingly isolated facts in their relation to a general intellectual movement is illustrated in it by such a massing of the phenomena of progress as it would be hard to find elsewhere.

  He was born near Liverpool, England, May 5th, 1811. Coming to the United States in his twenty-third year, he took his degree in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1836, and soon afterwards became professor of Chemistry, Natural Philosophy, and Physics, in Hampden-Sidney College. In 1839 he began a connection with the University of New York, which lasted until 1881. During this period of over forty years of scientific and literary activity, he made notable discoveries in physics, wrote a number of scientific text-books and “The History of the Intellectual Development of Europe,”—a work which gave him the international reputation in literature his discoveries had given him in science. He died January 4th, 1882.