shall be judged absolutely necessary by the Majority of the Subscribers)" No particular species of goods are excepted, nor no method pointed out whereby the mind of the majority of the Subscribers is to be known. If their Judgment is to be collected by a general meeting why is not that method taken at first, either by calling Town-meetings or a Convention of the Province by their respective Committees to deliberate upon the Propriety of the measure & determine what articles shall be excepted, that so the merchants may know what articles to import & not run the risque of importing prohibited goods & exposing themselves to the Odium of their Countrymen But if the Opinions of the Majority are to be known by every one's putting down a number of excepted articles with his name to the Covenant, what a strange Confusion will this make? Who is to judge & how are we to know what the mind of the majority is? And is this important Committee of Correspondence to determine after all what Goods are to be excepted & give out their Orders accordingly? 6. Because the Covenant supposes that no persons can refuse to join in the measure hereby imposed but from "preferring their private Interest to the Salvation of their now almost perishing Country" which is a supposition utterly void of any Foundation in Reason & Truth & breathes a spirit of imposition & Cruelty equal to any Species of Tyranny temporal or spiritual that ever disgraced mankind as it pretends to judge the secret tho'ts of mens hearts & the motives of their Conduct which can only be scrutinized at ye supreme Tribunal. 7. Because this is a measure which nearly concerns all the Colonies upon this Continent & if it is necessary to be done it will doubtless be agreed upon at the approaching general Congress it is therefore highly improper & assuming for any one or more single Colonies to be beforehand of the others in their Determinations. DOVER, July 4. The Selectmen & Committee of Correspondence of this Town met & agreed to suspend this matter till they shall hear what is the Result of the approaching Congress, upon the Subject. The PRESIDENT announced that the Council had reappointed the members of the committee for publishing the Proceedings, which consists of the Recording Secretary, exofficio chairman, and Messrs. Clement Hugh Hill and Alexander McKenzie. Dr. PEABODY presented a memoir of our lately deceased associate, John Langdon Sibley. MEMOIR OF JOHN LANGDON SIBLEY, A.M. BY ANDREW P. PEABODY. THE name Sibley is supposed to be compounded of sib, which denotes kindred and also peace, and lea, which means field. Peace-field is, therefore, not an improbable signification; and, like many English surnames, it may have originated in some incident of local history of which there remains no other memorial. The arms of the family, according to Burke, are "Per pale azure and gules a griffin passant between three crescents argent." The name is found in records of several counties in England as far back as the thirteenth century. The first person of the name who is known to have come to America was John Sybley, who arrived at Salem in 1629, and became a citizen of Charlestown. Richard, the ancestor of the subject of this memoir, is supposed to have been the son of John. In the fourth generation from Richard was Jonathan, who was born in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, in 1773, studied medicine with Dr. Carrigain, of Concord, New Hampshire, in his time a man of high and extended reputation, received in 1799 the earliest diploma given by the New Hampshire Medical Society, and subsequently became a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society. In the autumn of 1799 he settled in Union, in the then District of Maine, a town at that time of less than six hundred inhabitants, and was the first, and for nearly forty years the only, physician resident there. In 1803 he married Persis Morse, of Sherburne, Massachusetts, who had two brothers, already residents of Union. She was born in 1772, and died in 1847. Dr. Sibley had a practice more extensive than lucrative, his patients being scattered over a large and very sparsely settled site of the Rewe under the gorenante estely, of Massachusers wi f Malne, and took a baling pan in dis enterprises for me per en good. He was in every respect a man of exempuny alten, and is especially remembered for his inferible mem As a farlier he was affectionate and self-sembling, yet at the mme time a rigid disciplinarian of the earlier rope, and espe Cally stren los in exacting of his sons the maximum of stolt and of school-work. His wife was intelligent, well edpeated kind and genial in her temperament, gentle and tender in her domestic relations, and capable of supplying to her children what might have been deflient in her bustand's sterner mould Our late associate and munificent benefactor, the eldest chil of Jonathan and Persis (Morse) Sibley, was born at Union. Dec. 29, 1804. His name indicates his father's political creed. John Langdon was, not without reason, the most popular man in the anti-Federalist or Republican party in New England; and the preponderance of that party in the District of Maine, while Federalism, though moribund, still had the ascendency in Massachusetts, was not the least among the inducements for the people of Maine to seek a separate State government. That Dr. Sibley should have named his oldest child for a political leader, and his second, William Cullen, for an eminent Scotch physician, is of some interest, as showing him to have been a man whose sympathies transcended his very limited sphere of active duty, and who hoped for his sons a larger life than his own,-in fine, whose ambition for them merged the instincts of kinship, which oftener than not give name, especially to a first-born. Dr. Sibley must have been his son's principal educator till he was fifteen years of age. The only schools in Union were district schools, kept but for a small part of the year, and if we may judge from their cost, of a very low grade of their kind. We find that while more than once the town voted to refund the school-tax, on certificate that an equal amount had been expended-probably in some other town-in tuition "by a master or mistress duly qualified as the law requires," a petition of Dr. Sibley "to have his proportion of the school-money, and apply it to schooling his own children in his own way," met with no favor. The inference is that his children received the whole or the greater part of their instruction from their parents. On the Doctor's rare visits to Boston the stage-coach, in which passengers had leisure to inspect and talk about every object on the way, had taken him through Exeter; and his attention had been drawn to the old Academy edifice, then the most ample and stately educational structure on the road, though to a later generation unattractive but for the precious. memories that hallowed it. On inquiry he ascertained that the Academy had a charitable foundation on which deserving students received free tuition, with a weekly allowance sufficient to defray the cost of board and lodging,—a foundation which has on its records some of the most distinguished and honored names of the dead and the living. With his limited means of subsistence, aid of this kind alone could enable Dr. Sibley to realize his earnest wishes in behalf of his son John, who was accordingly sent to Exeter in 1819, and remained there till the summer of 1821. Two years were then sufficient to fit a boy for college; not that the requirements for admission were so very much less in Greek and Latin they were greater than now, but vacations were short, athletic and social recreations few, and study was the student's chief occupation, instead of being, as it is now to a deplorable extent, a collateral pursuit, so that two years of school-work were fully equivalent to three at the present time; and students enter college at a later age now, not so much because they have learned more, but because they have spent more years often in learning less. Young Sibley must have maintained a blameless reputation and a high standard of scholarship at Exeter, else he would have been dropped from the foundation, which from the first has never given a foothold to youth who could not or would not do it honor. He entered Harvard College in 1821. He took at once and maintained throughout his course a high rank as a scholar, was rigidly faithful in all college exercises and duties, and received honorable appointments at the exhibitions of the Junior and Senior years and at his graduation. At the same time he |