nd La Salle; Cabot and Cook; Speke,
Baker, Livingstone and Franklin; and our own Ledyard, Lewis,
Clarke, Kane, Hall and Stanley. And this evening will appear
before you another of these irrepressible _discontents_ who would
know what is still hidden at any risk or privation.

Impelled by this spirit of enterprise in search of Truth, Captain
Willard Glazier has discovered, at last, the true source of our
grand and peerless river, the "Father of Waters," down which he has
floated and paddled in frail canoes, a distance of more than three
thousand miles, to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. One of these
canoes is now placed here in your view, and will be presented
to-night by its navigator to our Historical Society.

Nearly two hundred years ago La Salle discovered the mouth of the
Mississippi, yet only now in this year of grace, 1881, was
ascertained its true fountain source.

This, the latest achievement of Captain Glazier, is only in the
natural course of his antecedents. Born as late as 1841, he has
already gone through the experiences of the Adamic labors of a
tiller of the soil, the hard toils of the student and of the
successful teacher; of the dashing and brilliant cavalry officer in
the Union army through the whole period of our late war, from its
disastrous beginning to its successful ending; of the sufferings of
capture and imprisonment in the notorious "Libby" and other
prisons, and of a daring and perilous escape from their cruel
walls; of an adventurous tourist on horseback through the most
civilized and savage portions of our continent, beginning with the
feet of his horse in the waters of the Atlantic, and ending with
their splash in the waters of the Pacific. He delivered lectures
along his route wherever a civilized audience could be collected,
and suffered capture by the Indians, with all its sensational
romance and hideous prospects.

From the material of these antecedents he has written and published
several books of singular interest and national value.

From this brief sketch we would naturally expect to see a stalwart
man, massive and powerful in form and muscle. Our conception of men
of big deeds is that they also are big. But David was a stripling
when he slew Goliath of Gath. Napoleon was characterized by the
s