University of North Carolina, and after resigning his tutorship at New Haven, Mr. Olmsted engaged in private studies in geology with Prof. Silliman. He found at his new post two of his old friends, Yale men like himself, occupying professorial chairs: Elisha Mitchell, his former classmate, that of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, and Ethan A. Andrews that of Languages, and here he spent seven happy years.
In 1821 he laid before the Board of Internal Improvements of North Carolina a proposition to undertake a geological survey of the State, offering to perform the entire work himself gratuitously, but suggesting an appropriation of one hundred dollars to defray his necessary expenses in traveling, to be afterward renewed or not at the pleasure of the board. The proposition was declined by the Board of Internal Improvements, but the survey was afterward made under the direction of the State Board of Agriculture. To this board Prof. Olmsted addressed his report, which was published in two parts, in. 1824 and 1825, and filled in all about one hundred and forty octavo pages. The American Journal of Science observes of this survey that, regarded especially as the gratuitous vacation work of a single individual, and in view of the state of geological science in this country at the time, it "must certainly be looked upon as creditable in the highest degree both to the enterprise and to the scientific ability of its projector; and it has undoubtedly been of great benefit, not only to the State which authorized it, but to the country and to science generally, by the stimulus which it afforded to similar enterprises in other States." It was the first instance of one of the United States instituting a geological survey.
In the course of his work Prof. Olmsted gave the first geological description of the Deep River coal beds and of the new red sandstone accompanying, and referred the strata correctly to the same age with that of the Richmond coal beds and the Connecticut River sandstones.
Prof. Olmsted began researches to determine the practicability of obtaining illuminating gas from cotton seed, but removed to the North before he had secured definite results.
In 1825 Prof. Olmsted was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in Yale College. In 1836 this chair was divided at his request, and the professorship of Mathematics was assigned to A. D. H. Stanley. As a professor in Yale he performed an unbroken service of thirty-four years, till it was interrupted by his illness. His labors as a teacher during the last twenty years of his life consisted, as described by Dr. Woolsey in The New-Englander, "in teaching astronomy by a text-book, and in three courses of lectures—experimental ones on natural philosophy and optics, historical ones on the progress of astronomical discovery.
