On our original tour over Ohio we happened once in the office of the Cleveland Herald, when there came in a youth scarcely twenty years.  We were at once interested in him, though we had never before met, for our fathers had been friends, and he was a native of our native town, New Haven, Conn., where he was born July 31, 1825.  The young man was pale, slender, with keen, dark eyes, nimble in his movements, quick
 

as a flash with an idea, and enthusiastic.  This was GEORGE HOADLY; upon his high history, blood and training have since asserted their power.  He is of the old Jonathan EDWARDS stock; his great-grandmother, Mary EDWARDS, married Major Timothy DWIGHT, was a daughter of the great divine.  His father, George HOADLY, was a graduate of Yale; was for years mayor of New Haven; moved in 1830 with his family to Cleveland, where he was elected five times mayor, 1832-1837, during which time he decided 20,000 suits; mayor again in 1846-1847.  He was a horticulturist, arborist, botanist, and learned in New England family history—a gentleman of unusual elegance and accomplishments.  His mother was a sister of the late President WOOLSEY, of Yale.

George HOADLY graduated at Western Reserve College and Harvard Law School, and in 1849 became a partner in the law-firm of CHASE & BALL, Cincinnati.  In 1851, at the age of twenty-five, he was elected a judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati, and was city solicitor in 1855.  In 1858 he succeeded Judge GHOLSON on the bench of the new Superior Court.  His friend and partner, Gov. Salmon P. CHASE, offered him a seat upon the Supreme Court bench, which he declined as he did also, in 1862, a similar offer made by Gov. TOD.  In 1866, he re-signed his place in the Superior Court and resumed legal practice.  He was an active member of the Constitutional Convention of 1873—74, and in October, 1883, was elected governor of Ohio, defeating Joseph B. FORAKER, by whom he was in turn defeated in 1885.  During the civil war he became a Republican but in 1876 his opposition to a pro-tective tariff led him again to affiliate with the Democratic party.  He was one of the council that successfully opposed the project of a compulsory reading of the Bible in the public schools and was leading counsel for the assignee and creditors in the case of Archbishop Purcell.  He was a professor in the Cincinnati Law School in 1864—1887, and for many years a trustee in the University.  In March 1887, he removed to New York and became the head of a law firm.’’

GEORGE ELLIS PUGH was born in Cincin-nati, Nov. 28, 1822, and died July 19, 1876.  He was educated at Miami University became a captain in the 4th Ohio in the Mexi-can war; attorney-general of Ohio in 1851; and from 1855 until 1861 served the Democratic party in the United States Senate.  In the National Democratic Convention, in Charleston, S. C., in 1860, he made a ,most memorable speech of indignation, in reply to William L. YANCEY, in the course of which, alluding to the demands of the ultra pro-slavery partisans upon the Northern Democracy, he said (we write from memory):  “You would humiliate us to your behests to the mouths, and our mouths in the dust.”  His plea in behalf of Clement L. VALLANDINGHAM was regarded as one of his ablest efforts.  This was in the habeas corpus proceeding before Judge LEAVITT, involving the questions as the power and the duty of the judge to relieve Mr. VALLANDINGHAM from military confinement.  Mr. PUGH was gifted with a very strong voice, a power of vehement, earnest (840) utterance, and with a marvellous memory  that was of great advantage over all opponents, enabling him, as it did, to cite author-ity after authority, even to the very pages, so  that he could at any time, when prepared, go into court without any yellow-array breast-works, in the form of piled-up law books.  His last years were greatly marred by exces-sive deafness.

At the age of seventy-one, on July 14, 1883, on his beautiful place at North Bend, there died DR. JOHN ASTON WARDER, a

most beneficent character.  He was born in Philadelphia of Quaker parentage, and in early life saw at his father’s house and asso-ciated with those eminent naturalists, Audu-bon, Michaux, Nuttal, Bartram, and Dar-lington, from whom he acquired great fond-ness for nature and how to woo her sweet delights.  He studied medicine in Philadel-phia, practised eighteen years in Cincinnati, and then moved to North Bend to give his entire attention to horticulture.  Meanwhile he did everything in his power to advance education and science, and was a leader through his capacity and love.  The public schools, the Astronomical Society, Western Academy of Natural Sciences Horticultural Society, Ohio Medical College, and Natural history Society all felt his guiding power.

Warren HIGLEY, President of Ohio State Forestry Association, wrote of him: “His early surroundings and associations were powerful allies in his education as a natural-ist.  He read and studied and mastered the book of Nature in its varied teachings as but few have mastered it.  A seed, a bud, a leaf, a plant, a branch, a tree, a shell, a rock, attracted his notice and elicited investigation.  He was a veritable student of Nature, and his love among men was as lovingly beautiful as it was among his plants and trees. . .  He justly called the Father of American Forestry.”

Associated for a time, about the year 1854, with Dr. WARDER, in the publication of the “Botanical Magazine and Horticultural Review” was JAMES W. WARD, a gentleman highly accomplished by varied attainments in science, literature, art, and both a poet and the nephew of a poet.  The best remembered of his verses by the older citizens is a parody of Henry W. Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” en-titled “Higher Water.’’ descriptive of a freshet  on the Ohio river;  other of his pieces were characterized by delicate  fancy and refined instincts.
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The mystery of the fate of Sir John Franklin for a long term of years aroused the sympathy of the civilized world.  He had sailed from England in May, 1845, in two British ships, the Erebus and Terror, on a voyage of discovery of the northwest passage across our continent, and never returned.  Several expeditions were sent in search, two from our country, DeHaven’s and Griffith’s in 1850, and the last under Dr. E. K. Kane in 1853.  The last under Mc-Clintock sailed from England in 1857 in the little steam-yacht Fox, purchased by Lady FRANKLIN, and brought back from the Es-kimos intelligence of the sad fate of the expedition with many relics.

Some of his townsmen, when they finally learned of his preparing to start off on a self-constituted expedition in search of the survivors of the FRANKLIN Expedition, and, moreover, heard that he designed making scientific observations of  natural phenomena, replied, with supercilious smiles: “Psaw!  what in the way of Arctic explorations and scientific investigations can this fellow do?  Why he is nothing but a common seal engraver,’’ they said.  “who has received but the common schooling, and perhaps only born a common Yankee school-marm at that, and who in all his life has accomplished no greater feat than engraving the initials of sundry nobodies upon wedding-rings, ‘With this do I thee wed!’”

Such commentators, with any amount of

scholarly drill, prove incapable of a fresh thought or else it would flash upon them, as it would upon any bright, well-read lad of fifteen, that the great names that come down to us from Moses to Socrates, from Shakes-peare to one Ben FRANKLIN, and almost the entire line of original inventors, Edison inclusive, are largely those of individuals who were powerless to display parchments of graduation.  They seem dead to the fact that upon the basis of a common school education, with the abundant printed aids of our time—advantages which “Moses and the prophet,” Socrates and the popes, had not—for the investigation of almost any single topic that the naturally clear brain when will and enthusiasm  absorb its entire power is capable of the most subtle fingerings, of giant grasps and the far-reaching conquests.  His townsmen little realized that in the person of this modest, quiet seal engraver was to be demonstrated from the days of the Norsemen to our days no greater hero in all Arctic history, and moreover  that he was to win the singular distinction  of penetrating nearer to the North Pole  than any human being before him, and then filling the northernmost grave on the globe.

When HALL returned from his first expedition, he brought two natives, the Eskimos Joe and Hannah, afterwards of the Polaris Expedition, and came to Cincinnati with them.  About that time, Lady FRANKLIN, who had come to this country to meet HALL, was also in Cincinnati and gave a reception to such of the citizens as desired to call upon her in the ladies’ parlor of the Burnet House, when John D. CALDWELL, Ohio’s Universal Secretary,’’ acted as chaperon..

This was in the war time, the winter of 1863--4.  One evening at that period we saw HALL and Joe together in the Gazette office.  The Eskimo, or more properly Intuits, are a small race the men under five feet in stature.  Joe looked alongside of HALL as a pigmy be-side a giant.  HALL was a tall, fleshy man, with rather a small head, the last man one would pick out for a hero, possessing very little self-assertion or fluency of speech.  What may seem strange, his Eskimo companions Joe and Hannah on their arrival in this country, consequent upon the inhospital-ity of our climate, had caught severe colds.  As we looked upon Joe that winter evening in the Gazette office, we felt we would like to know his emotions on a first introduction to civilized life.  Ruskin said “What a thought; that was when God first thought of a tree.”  We felt we would like to know Joe’s emotions when he first saw a tree.  He was of a race of our fellow-creatures who never see a tree nor a shrub their entire lives through, but dwell in seeming utter desola-tion and solitude, where the whole earth lies dead under an eternal snowy shroud.
 

 for his enthusiastic, cheery disposi-tion and kindly manners.  He was so beloved by the soldiers that he induced a larger num-ber of veterans to re-enlist in his regiment than was secured to any other in the National army from Ohio.  He died Sept. 4, 1890.

In our boy days we often saw in our fa-ther’s bookstore in New Haven, ALPHONSO TAFT, then a Yale student.  He was tall, broad—even as a youth—heavy and strong, and then noted for his strong common sense and masculine grasp of intellect.  He was a warm admirer of Daniel Webster, whom in some important aspects he resembled, and of the many eulogies pronounced upon that great man his tribute to his life and services is regarded by the family and friends of Mr. Webster as the most truthful and masterly.  He once made a remark that is worth any printer’s ink, “it is a pretty bad case that has not to it two sides.”

Judge TAFT was born in Townsend, Ver-mont, November 5, 1810: graduated at Yale in 1833; tutor there, 1833—1837; in 1838 admitted to the bar and after 1840 practised in Cincinnati, where he won high reputation.  In 1856 he was a delegate to the National Republican Convention, and in the same year was defeated for Congress by George H. PENDELTON; from 1866 to 1872 was Judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati, when he resigned to associate himself in practice with two of his sons.  In 1875 he was a candidate for the Republican nomination for the governorship but a dissenting opinion that he had delivered on the question of the Bible in the public schools was the cause of much opposition to him.  The opinion that defeated his nomination was unanimously affirmed by the Supreme Court of Ohio, and is now the law of the State.  He became Secretary of War March 8, 1876, on the resignation of Gen. William W. Belknap, and on 22d May following was transferred to the attorney--generalship, serving until the close of Gen. GRANT’S administration.  Judge TAFT ap-pointed United States minister to Austria April 26,1882, and in 1884 was transferred to Russia, where he served till August 1, 1885, He has been a trustee of the University

RUBEN RUYAN SPRINGER, philanthropist, was a descendant of the early Swedes who settled in Delaware in the seventeenth century.  His father was a soldier under Gen. WAYNE in the Indian war, and later became the postmaster of Frankfort, Ky., where Reuben was born, November 16, 1800.  He in turn became postmaster, a clerk on a river steamboat, running between Cincinnati and New Orleans and then acquired an in-terest.  Later he became a partner in a wholesale grocery house in Cincinnati, and retired in 1840 from ill health, and never resumed active business.

He went abroad repeatedly, buying many works of fine art, which are now mostly the property of the Art Museum.  He gave to the Music Hall, the Exposition Building, the Odeon Theatre and the Art Museum, in all, $420,000: to private charities of the Roman Catholic church——of which he was a member—more than $100,000, and at least $30,000 annually in the way of benevolence, beside contributing liberally and regularly to various charities and public enterprises, he died in 1884, left by will about $3,000,000 to nearest of kin——having no children also annuities to the Collage of Music, the Music Hall and the Art Museum, and nearly $400,000 to the Roman Catholic charitable institutions among these $40,000 to the Cathedral School, $30,000 to St. Peter’s Benevolent Society, and $100,000 for the education of priests.   A fine statue to his memory is in the Music Hall, the work of Clarence Powers.  Mr. SPRINGER was in person tall and erect, with dark eyes, and dignified and quiet in manner, and impressed the casual observer as one of the highest type of gentlemen.

CALVIN WASHBURN STARBUCK, printer, born in Cincinnati in 1822; died there in 1870; was the fasted type-setter in Ohio; established the Times, the progenitor of the Star-Times; was remarkable for his philanthropy to various charitable institutions of the city both by cash and personal labor.  During the civil war he strove by voice and pen to establish the National credit.  To the families of his employes who enlisted he continued their full wages while they were in the service, and in 1864 volunteered and bore his musket as one of the one hundred-day men.