dred dollars, of which one hundred was given by the "Home Missionary Society."

In May, 1830, he married Margaret Tracy, daughter of William Gedney Tracy of Whitesboro.

For twelve years he was pastor, successively, in Salisbury, Herkimer Co.; Butternuts and Fly Creek, Otsego Co.; Winfield, Herkimer Co.; and Holland Patent, Oneida Co. During these twelve years he had only the small salary of four or five hundred dollars a year upon which to support his family.

Though suffering from constant ill health, his professional journal shows that he missed preaching only two or three sabbaths.

Besides preaching and performing the laborious duties of a country minister, he prosecuted various literary labors, (never quite completed however,) read and studied much, lectured to his people on chemistry and other sciences, and kept up his knowledge of agriculture by tilling the ground with his own hands.

The period of his pastoral duties was a time of excitement. The whole country was in a state of ferment. Temperance, anti-slavery, social reform, "new measures" with regard to revivals &c., were dividing churches and arraying christians against each other, while the controversy between the two parties in the Presbyterian church, resulting in the excision of the New School men, was at its height. All these things made the relation between pastor and people exceedingly precarious.

In these controversies he took a decided stand on the side of progress and reform, while the extravagant zeal of some with whom he was at first associated soon left him far behind, and he suffered considerable persecution from many others who thought he was going too far.

He was always active in establishing Sunday schools, Bible classes, temperance and missionary societies.

In 1841 his labors as a pastor terminated.

Soon after, he removed to Utica, and in 1843, started a market garden. Not content with the ordinary routine of sowing and reaping, he tried various experiments in raising peaches, grapes, sweet potatoes and other tender truits and tropical plants, which had never flourished in the cold. winters and changeful summers of Oneida county.

Most of his plans proved unsuccessful or too expensive, but he gained many premiums from agricultural societies, and laid up a fund of useful knowledge, which was of great service to him in after years.

The accurate habit of observation, and the close research which had hitherto marked his character, led him to study attentively the habits of plants, and the effect of climate and cultivation upon them; and when the potato began to fail, he soon discovered what he thought to be the true cause and the true remedy.

Relinquishing the cultivation of most other vegetables, he now devoted himself with untiring assiduity, to the restoration of this valuable plant.* Through his brother-in-law, Mr. Henry Tracy, he procured a few potatoes

It is worthy of note that Mr. Goodrich, from constitutional idiosyncracy, was never able to eat a potato, and that he tested the various varieties solely by chemical analysis, taste, and ●bservation of cooking qualities.

from Chili, at an expense of two hundred dollars, and from these he obtained seed, and commenced experiments, not only for the renewal of the potato from the seed, but to infuse new vigor into the plant by seed renewal from tubers grown in South America, where it is indigenous. For long years he experimented, holding the pen in one hand, and the hoe in the other, noting down on the field the most minute peculiarities of each individual plant, and all the circumstances of cultivation, soil and weather, which could influence its growth. He did not, however, give up the duties of his profession, but became Chaplain of the New York State Lunatic Asylum, a position which he held for about nineteen years. In this as in all other positions, he discharged his duties conscientiously and acceptably, and in his death the institution and the public have lost a valuable servant.

His winters were spent in arranging the facts learned during the sum mer into various essays and shorter articles. His communications to the Country Gentleman," and other agricultural papers, to the "Patent Office Reports," and the "Transactions of the New York State Agricultural Society," are known to all who read those publications, and the new varieties of potatoes which he introduced, attest the practical value of his labors.

During all this period, he was not idle in the literature of his profession. He not only kept himself well posted, but prepared a work on Pastoral Theology, the manuscript of which has been placed in the hands of one of his ministerial friends for publication.

Constantly increasing illness led him to give up, one after another, the pleasures and active employments of life, and at last obliged him to decide on committing the further progress of his experiments to other hands.

He had already given some new varieties to his friend Charles W. Gleason, Esq., of Holden, Mass., for experimental test before their introduction to the public. He subsequently transferred 130 younger varieties to another friend, D. S. Heffron, Esq., of Utica, and to the writer, 42, now in the fifth year of successful cultivation. Among the latter, the early Goodrich, the Calico, the Gleason, and the Harison, are most promising, while all were free from rot last year.

.

However, during the early part of the winter of 1864, feeling his strength failing, and advised by his physician that he could not long survive the steady progress of long disease, he devoted himself to the preparation of two valuable papers on the culture and disease of the potato, embodying all the results of his long experience and close observation which he completed a few days before his death, which occurred on the 11th of May.

His various communications to the several agricultural papers from the year 1848 to the day of his death, amount to one hundred and thirty, as far as the writer has been able to trace them. He has also left a large amount of unfinished work, mainly in notes, and observations on vegetable physiology and pathology, the result of careful and intelligent study, which it is to be regretted he was not spared to complete; and which, it is to be hoped will fall into the hands of some one with the ability and disposition to ren der them available to the world.

His failing health alone prevented his completing a work on vegetable

pathology, for which he had ample materials, and a subject to which he had long given great attention, and of which he had frequently conversed with the writer.

Mr. Goodrich, as has been stated, was for many years, a man of feeble health. He was however a constant worker, always giving to physical and intellectual labor the total of his strength. He rarely went from home, gave himself no recreation, and never attended places of amusement. He was a studious scholar, an earnest, practical, christian man, and a benefactor of his race in an eminent sense of the word. In all his labors he was unselfish and devoted to the single thought of permanently benefiting mankind. His investigations and experiments on the disease of the potato, and its renewal, were prosecuted for sixteen years, with the enthusiasm of a true lover of science, and with the patient perseverance characteristic of a scholar, and with the sole object of preserving this invaluable esculent to the world. During all this period, his annual expenses in cultivation, considerably exceeded the returns from his sales. The deficits were made good by the premiums awarded him by the State Agricultural Society, from time to time, and when he closed his work, a careful examination of his accounts showed a balance of about fifty dollars as his pecuniary reward. Some of the members of the State Agricultural Society, hearing for the first time of his straightened circumstances, and the unremunerative character of his successful efforts to advance the cause of agriculture, proposed at the annual meeting in February last, a memorial; and subscriptions were taken up amounting to the sum of seven hundred dollars.

This thoughtful and generous act smoothed the latter hours of Mr. Goodrich, and afforded him all the necessary pecuniary support, during the short remnant of his life.

He left four daughters, young ladies dependent on their own exertions. His friend, Mr. R., G., of Mass., in the brief obituary in the "Country Gentleman," already alluded to, justly remarks:

"Republics are, according to proverb, ungrateful. Under a monarchy or despotism, Mr. Goodrich would have received some substantial reward for his untiring efforts to promote the welfare of his race, and his family at his decease would have been placed under the tutelage of the State. But with us private munificence and enterprise usurps the ordinary duties of the State, and it remains to be seen whether his countrymen fully appreciate the lasting benefits conferred upon them by the untiring zeal and perseverance of Mr. Goodrich."

REPORT ON REV. C. E. GOODRICH'S SEEDLING POTATOES.

The Executive Committee of the New York Agricultural Society to the public: 1. It has been long and widely known that Mr. Goodrich is laboring for the improvement of the potato. (He began the investigation of its disease August, 1846, published his first essay in the Transactions of 1847, and raised his first seedlings in 1849.) The public are also aware of a few new varieties of potatoes that have been widely spread and favorably received. Such as the Black diamond, the Garnet Chili, the Pale-Blush Pink-eye, the New Hartford, and some others, which were donated and sold in 1855-9 inclusive; and others, such as the Cuzco, Callao, Central City, New Kidney, Copper Mine, Pink-eye Rusty-coat, Andes, Garnet Chili (brought from the earlier list), and some others in 1860-62, inclusive. Many of these sorts have been extensively sold by other persons, and sometimes at least under new names.

2. Some of the members of this board have known Mr. Goodrich for thirty years, and others of them for a considerable period of time. Occasionally he has exhibited his seedlings at our monthly meetings, and often at the fall and winter fairs of the State Society. Twice also during the present season has a part of our committee visited him to inspect his crops in the field and cellar.

3. We were early impressed with the importance of the improvement of this specialty of agriculture, and having hope of useful results from the efforts of Mr. Goodrich in originating and testing new varieties, we have, at various times, within the last twelve years, aided him to the amount of three hundred dollars.

4. We have learned from him that his mode of procedure is substantially as follows:

a. He gathers the balls in the fall from the existing old varieties, or from such as he has imported from South America, and takes from them their seeds.

b. These are sown in the spring in a hot-bed, or in other ways. At a suitable age the plants are removed to the field, and cultivated like potatoes planted in the ordinary way.

c. They are dug in the fall, and the most hopeful varieties are selected for further trial-experience having shown that sorts most hopeful the first year often subsequently rapidly decline and become worthless. The same process is repeated each year.

d. Such trial, it has been found, should always extend through four and

sometimes five years before the qualities of a new variety become stereotyped and reliable.

e. In the successive years of 1849-1863, inclusive, he has taken balls from seventy-four distinct varieties (a few of them old, but a large part of them his own new varieties.) From these he has grown, dug, and examined, in the first year, a little short of 15,000 varieties. After the labor and expense of carrying portions of these families through four or five years of trial culture, more than sixty entire families have been rejected as not affording one single variety in all respects worthy of public confidence. These numbers should not be considered large, when it is known that, in the improvement of the apple and the grape in a similar manner, a similarly small number of new valuable varieties have been obtained.

f. Of the remaining ten of the preceding seventy-four families of seedlings, all have produced some valuable new sorts, but only four of them. have produced many, viz., the Pale-blush Pink-eye, the Garnet Chili, the Pink-eye Rusty-coat, and the Cuzco; and of these, none of the last three families have yet been given to the public, although some of them are now ready for sale.

5. All his best bases (or sources of new valuable sorts) have been found in his own new seedlings-no highly valuable ones having been found in the old varieties.

6. Having produced and diffused such sorts as the Garnet Chili and Pink-eye Rusty-coat especially, two objects have occupied his attention of late years. First, to produce a highly valuable early sort to take the place of existing failing varieties; and secondly, to produce a variety for the general crop which shall be a little earlier than the two lastmentioned such being needed especially in the northern portion of our country. In both these efforts he thinks he has gained the desired end, and will soon be able to accommodate the public accordingly.

7. This long course of experimental culture has been laborious, perplexing, and costly, and has occupied more than one-half of his available. time for fourteen years.

Yet when it is considered that, after wheat, corn, and perhaps oats, the potato is the most valuable edible vegetable produced in our country, and that the average annual loss by its disease has been about $2,800,000, and possibly much more than this, the preceding account of labors for its restoration will be readily justified. The staying of such annual loss would be well worth the co-operation, wisdom, and industry of many persons, though we are not aware that any one has instituted extended and highly successful experiments, in this specialty, besides Mr. Goodrich.

8. The sales of Mr. Goodrich, though extended widely over all the Northern States, and through many years, have barely met his expenses of culture, importation, and sale, leaving nothing for his time as an experimenter and writer, through all these long years, but the aid afforded him by this society as already noticed.

9. Mr. Goodrich has long been failing in health, and now feels himself permanently laid aside from all gainful exertions. It seems to this committee that a generous and appreciating public, who are now reaping the