THE EARLY TEACHING OF ECONOMICS IN THE UNITED STATES 309 
later that an independent chair of Political Economy was estab- 
lished. 
While the teaching of Political Economy at Bowdoin preceded 
that of Dr. Cooper at South Carolina, the same fact can be 
shown in several other institutions in the North. 
In two of these, namely Princeton and Dickinson, the instruc- 
tion was due to the same man. 
Henry Vethake, born in British Guiana in 1792, graduated 
from Columbia College in 1808 and had a checkered professorial 
career. He taught Mathematics at Columbia in 1812, when Dr. 
Kemp died. In 1813 he went to Queens College, now Rutgers, 
and was transferred to Princeton College in 1817, where he 
remained until 1821. On his resignation from Princeton, he 
went to Dickinson College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he 
remained until 1829. He thereupon returned to Princeton, but 
three years later became a professor in the new University of the 
City of New York, where he remained from 1832 to 1835. In 
that year he accepted the presidency of Washington College at 
Lexington, Virginia. Finally, in 1836, he was called to the chair 
of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1846 he 
was made vice-provost at Pennsylvania and in 1854, provost, and 
shortly thereafter resigned the chair of Mathematics and became 
professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy. 
Although devoting himself primarily to mathematics, Mr. 
Vethake soon turned his attention to political economy. When 
he came to New York he published in 1833 An Introductory 
Lecture on Political Economy delivered at Clinton Hall before 
the New York Young Men’s Society, December 22, 1832, which 
is referred to by the corresponding secretary of the Society as an 
eloquent and profound address. A few years later, in 1838, he 
published a large volume on The Principles of Political Economy. 
In the preface to this work we find the statement that “the 
theories are now presented in the same form as that in which 
they have been delivered in the author’s courses of Political 
Economy, beginning so long since as the year 1822.” 
Knowing that he was at the time professor at Dickinson Col- 
lege, the present writer addressed the authorities of that college 
ni the hope of ascertaining some details on the subject. President 
J. H. Morgan was good enough to respond as follows: