Day Jeremiah, Dd

Day Jeremiah, D.D., president of Yale College, was born in New Preston, Conn., August 3, 1773, and was educated at Yale College, where he graduated in 1795.

After some years spent as tutor at Greenfield School, Williams College, and Yale, he was licensed as a minister of the Congregational Church in 1800, and in 1801 he was elected professor of mathematics and natural philosophy in Yale College. His health failing, he spent a year or two in travel and retirement, and did not begin his labors in college until 1803. He held that office until 1817, publishing meanwhile a series of mathematical text-books well-adapted to the wants of the time, and which had great success. On the 22d of April, 1817, he was chosen president of Yale College, and held that office till 1846, when his sense of the infirmities of age induced him to resign, against the judgment and wishes of his colleagues, as his judgment and governing faculties were yet in abundant vigor. Notwithstanding chronic feebleness of constitution, his careful habits of life, formed after physiological study of his own constitution, enabled him to preserve his intellectual vigor, and a fair degree of bodily health, up to the year of his death, which occurred August 22, 1867. Besides his mathematical works, president Day wrote An Inquiry respecting the self- determining Power of the Will (1838; 2d ed. 1849), which was substantially a refutation of Cousin's view of the will as given in his Psychology: — Examination of Edwards on the Will (1841, 12mo), which is "an abstract of Edwards, made in a lucid and truth-loving spirit." He also contributed numerous articles to reviews and journals. As a college officer, his moral and intellectual qualities combined to make him a model. See an admirable sketch by president Woolsey, New Englander, Oct. 1867, art. v.