Mineral Industry Education In The United States

SUGGESTIONS that existing schools give instruction bearing on the mineral industry, or that schools for that purpose should be established in the United States, began to be made early, and it would require too much space to catalogue them all. Some of the more important may be mentioned to indicate their general character. In the "advertisement to such parents as have now (or expect to have) children prepared to be educated in the College of New York," which appeared in the New York Mercury of June 3, 1754, Samuel Johnson, the first president of King's College, the predecessor of Columbia, said that it was the "design of this college to instruct and perfect the youth," among other things, "in the arts of Numbering and Measuring of Surveying, and Navigation and Geography. . . . and in the Air, Water and Earth around us, and the various kinds of Meteors, Stones, Mines and Minerals, Plants and Animals; and in the knowledge of all Nature in the Heavens above us, and of everything useful for the Comfort, Convenience and the Elegance of Life . . . " Though the concept that natural science should be used to enlarge the bounds of human life was thus implicit at Columbia from the , very beginning (John Stevens graduated from it in 1768, James Renwick in 1807, Horatio Allen in 1833, and A. W. Craven in 1899), it was only during the period of Renwick's professorship of Natural and Experimental Philosophy and Chemistry (1830- 1853) that much attention was given to applied science.* Among the Austin papers, published by the American Historical Association,~ there is a draft in Stephen F. Austin's handwriting of a proposed memorial from the legislature of , Missouri to Congress, not only urging "the propriety and utility * See chapter 4 for early interest in this subject in Philadelphia.