The salient feature of Samuel Stanhope Smith's career was his effort to unite the rational and the spiritual. In his capacity as a Presbyterian minister and as a distinguished educator, Smith sought to reveal and strengthen the bond which he believed to exist between the world of the senses and that of the spirit. He most clearly enunciates this concern in his well-known An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787), but it is evident in much else which he wrote and in many of the activities of his life. For instance, in 1795 Smith was responsible for bringing John Maclean, the first undergraduate teacher of chemistry and natural science in America, to Princeton, at that time a bastion of Presbyterian orthodoxy. Although opposition to Smith's liberal policies eventually cost him the presidency of the college, by his action he ensured...