528 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



would never give up the privilege of honestly expressing liis 

 opinion. He declined several invitations to deliver addresses at 

 Oberlin College, because his views were opposed to the beliefs 

 held in that institution. But he finally consented to deliver 

 the alumni address in 1879. He was never controversial, but sim- 

 ply and earnestly sought the truth. He entered Oberlin College 

 about 1850, and was graduated from the literary department in 

 1854. Very soon after entering college he became a student of 

 mark, and one of the few who, Mr. W. G. M. Stone, of Denver, 

 a fellow-student in his last year, says, were " head and shoul- 

 ders above their fellows, and himself second to none." The 

 College Record of Deceased Alumni says of him that " when in 

 college he was an enthusiastic cultivator of oratory and of a fine 

 literary style. He had a marvelous command of words, a most 

 fertile imagination, and was a skillful artist with crayon and 

 chalk, so that his lectures were often enchanting as a dream. In 

 his scientific facts he was accurate, but these were always 

 subordinated to his philosophizing. He was an ardent devo- 

 tee of the evolution theory. In religion he was of the liberal 

 school." 



After graduation he went to Natchez, Miss., where he had two 

 brothers in business ; taught in an academy ; and studied law 

 a year. His social relations there were all pleasant ; but the in- 

 dependent Oberlin man, who in his boyhood had systematically 

 aided fugitive slaves in escaping, could not make himself at home 

 in the very center of the slaveholding region. Returning to 

 Ohio, he exerted himself in behalf of the election of Mr. Chase, 

 the Free-Soil candidate for Governor ; and afterward engaged in 

 geological work in Illinois, of which he kept no personal record. 

 He took a course of comparative anatomy in New York, some 

 time previous to 1862, but in what school or college is unknown, 

 though he often bore testimony to the value of the instruction he 

 received there. 



Prof. Gunning's continuous career as a scientific author and 

 lecturer began in 1862, and his earliest known publication was a 

 paper on the Age of the Human Race, based on the discovery of 

 relics of man in the caves of France, which was published in the 

 Nevada (California) Journal. In the same year he was married 

 and removed to Massachusetts ; and about this time he began 

 lecturing in and around Boston. He spent the summers, between 

 the lecture seasons of several years, in physical and biological 

 studies at Falmouth, Gay Head, Nantucket, Portland Harbor, and 

 Eastport, a part of the time under the direction of Agassiz. Ge- 

 ology was the principal subject of his lectures, but as they went 

 on they "expanded till they covered a variety of subjects relating 

 to life, evolution, American antiquities, and social theories. His 



