have some idea of what the Board has done as he sees the domes and spires of that great cluster of buildings, forming a vast caravanserai in which the poorer class of emigrants are temporarily lodged, before they can be sent into the interior or find employment here. Here are barracks for the men, a spacious building for the women and children, a nursery for children of a tender age, Catholic and Protestant chapels, a dispensary, workshops, a lunatic asylum, fever wards, surgical wards, storehouses, residences of the physicians and other persons employed in the care of the place, and out-houses and offices of various kinds. Here, too, rise the stately turrets of the spacious new hospital styled the Verplanck Emigrant Hospital, in honor of the great philanthropist, for such his constant and noiseless labors in this department of charity entitle him to be called.

The Commissioners found that they could not protect the emigrants from imposition without a special landing place from which they could wholly exclude the rascal crew who cheated them. It took eight years to obtain this from the New York Legislature, but at last, in 1855, it was granted, and the old fort at the foot of Manhattan Island, called Castle Garden, was leased for this purpose. This is now the Emigrants' Landing, the gate of the New World for those who, pressing westward, throng into it from the Old. Night and day it is open, and through this passage the vast tide of stranger population, which is to mingle with and swell our own, rushes like the current of the Bosphorus from the Black Sea towards the Propontis and the Hellespont, to help fill the great basin of the Mediterranean. What will be the condition of mankind when the populations of the two hemispheres, the East and the West, shall have found, as they must, a common level, and when the human race, now struggling for room in its ancient abodes, shall look in vain for some unoccupied region where a virgin soil is waiting to reward the laborer with bread?

As he enters Castle Garden the emigrant undergoes inspection by a competent physician, and if he be aged, sick, or in any way disabled, the master of the vessel must give a special bond for his maintenance. He is introduced into the building--here he finds one department in which he is duly registered, another from which he receives such information as a stranger requires, another from which his luggage is dispatched to its destination, another at which attend clerks, skilled in the languages of continental Europe, to write his letters, another at which railway tickets are procured without danger of extortion, another at which fair arrangements are made with boarding houses, another from which, if sick or destitute, he is sent to Ward's Island, and half a dozen others, important as helps to one who has no knowledge of the usages of the country to which he has come. I refer to these arrangements, among a multitude of others, in order to show what administrative talent and what constant attention were necessary to ensure the regular and punctual working of so vast a system. To this duty Mr. Verplanck, aided by able and disinterested associates like himself, gave the labors of a third of a century, uncompensated save by the consciousness of doing good. The composition of this Board has just been changed by the Legislature of the State, in such a manner as unfortunately to introduce party influences, from which, during all the time of Mr. Verplanck's connection with it, it had been kept wholly free.

Yet Mr. Verplanck had his party attachments, though he never suffered them to lead him out of the way he had marked for himself. He would accompany a party, but never follow it. His party record is singular enough. He was educated a federalist, but early in life found himself acting against the federal party. He was with the whigs in supporting General Harrison for the Presidency, and claimed the credit of suggesting his nomination. Mr. Clay he would never support on account of his protectionist principles, and when that gentleman was nominated by the whigs he left them and voted for Mr. Polk, though he was disgusted by the trick which obtained the vote of Pennsylvania for Mr. Polk under the pretence of his being a protectionist. Subsequently he supported General Taylor, the whig candidate for the Presidency, but the nomination of Mr. Buchanan, in 1857, saw him once more with the democrats, from whom he did not again separate. When the proposal to make government paper a legal tender for debts was before Congress, he opposed it with great zeal, writing against it in the democratic journals. I agreed with him that the measure was an act of folly, for which I could find no excuse, but he almost regarded it as a public crime. He vehemently disapproved, also, of the arbitrary arrests made by our government during the war, some of which, without question, were exceedingly ill advised. His zeal on these points, I think, made him blind to the great issues involved in our late civil war, and led his usually clear and liberal judgment astray.

I have not yet mentioned various capacities in which he served the public without any motive but to minister to the public welfare. He was from a very early period a Trustee of the Society Library, in which he took great interest, delighting to make additions to its stock of books, and passing much time in its alcoves and its reading rooms. He was one of the wardens of Trinity Church, that mistress of mighty revenues. He was for some years one of the governors of the New York Hospital, and I remember when he made periodical visits to the Insane Asylum at Bloomingdale, as one invested with authority there. During the existence of the Public School Society he was one of its Trustees from 1834 to 1841, and rendered essential service to the cause of public education.

His useful life closed on the 18th of March last. For some months before this date his strength had declined, and when I met him from time to time it seemed to me that his features had become sharper and his frame more attenuated, yet I perceived no diminution of mental vigor. He took the same interest in the events and questions of the day as he had done years before, his apprehension seemed as quick, and all the powers of his mind as active.

On the Wednesday before his death he attended one of those weekly meetings which he took care never to miss, that of the Commissioners of Emigration, But in one of his walks on a rainy day he had taken a cold which resulted in a congestion of the lungs. On Thursday evening he lay upon a sofa, conversing from time to time, after his usual manner, until near midnight. On Friday morning, when his body servant entered the room and looked at him he perceived a change and called his grandson, who, with a grand-daughter, had constantly attended him during the past winter. The grandson immediately went for his physician, Dr. Carnochan, who, however, was not to be found, and whose assistant, a young man, came in his stead. Mr. Verplanck, in a way which was characteristic of him, studied the young man's face for a moment and then asked: "From what college were you graduated?" The reply was--"Paris;" on which Mr. Verplanck turned away as if it did not much please him, and in a moment afterward expired. He was spared the previous suffering which so many are called to endure. His son had visited him from time to time, and was with him the day before his death, yet this event was unexpected to all the family. His father, in his old age, had as suddenly passed away, having fallen dead by the wayside.

The private life of our friend was as beautiful as his public life was useful and beneficent. He took great interest in the education of his grandchildren; inquired into their studies, talked with them of the books they read, and sought with great success to make them fond of all good learning, directing their attention to all that was noble in literature and in art. His mind was a storehouse of facts in history and biography on which he drew for their entertainment, and upon occasion diversified the graver