1921] Weatherby,— Old-time Connecticut Botanists 125 



So important a period, he felt, should have a special name and he 

 coined for it the resounding title of " Kalorimazoic. " In his last 

 publication, a little pamphlet issued in 1874, Barratt sets forth his 

 conclusions and so anxious is he that his newly delimited age and its 

 name shall have due emphasis that, whenever that name occurs 

 in his discourse, he prints it in large capitals and on a line by itself. 



It is said that as early as 1845 Barratt exhibited drawings of puta- 

 tive human foot-prints at a geologists' meeting at New Haven. As 

 his theories developed and grew wilder, ridicule was the natural 

 result. Tiere was one grotesque incident when, refused a hearing 

 at a convention of geologists, he somehow, at night, got into the 

 hall where they were to meet and covered the face of the gallery 

 with an impromptu frieze of his drawings, which were to greet the 

 assemblage in the morning, mutely convince the sceptical and con- 

 found him whom he esteemed his chief rival, Edward Hitchcock. 



Two brief quotations may serve to give some notion of the man 

 in his latei years. His geological interests, says the writer of an un- 

 signed newspaper obituary, "became his one object in life. His 

 business was neglected and his many friends, and his room became 

 one grand museum, whose walls and tables were covered with draw- 

 ings, specimens and relics of all kinds. Twenty years ago he in- 

 terested and amused by turns any group that he could get to listen 

 to him. " John Fiske describes him as a courtly and lovable " gentle- 

 man of th? old stripe." He lived, at this time, in rooms over a 

 drug store in an old building which still stands on Main Street in 

 Middletown. In them, says Fiske, there was such confusion as "has 

 not been seen since this fair world weltered in primeval chaos — 

 specimens of all kinds, chemical apparatus, books and papers sprawl- 

 ing and tumbled all about Never did he clear a chair 



for me without an apology, saying that he only awaited a leisure 

 day to put all things in strictest order. . . That day never came. " 



Toward the end, Barratt's mind gave way ; he died in the hospital 

 for the insane just outside of Middletown, January 25, 1882. He 

 never married. He is buried in Indian Hill Cemetery in Middletown 

 and over his grave has been placed an irregular block of his beloved 

 Portland sandstone containing two bits of fossil tree-trunk — sym- 

 bolic at once of his botanical and geological interests. 



(To be continued.) 



