546 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The foregoing remarks are intended to apply mainly to ques- 

 tions connected with the more recent geological periods. The 

 older epochs have happily been treated as beyond the barriers, 

 and consequently have enjoyed and made good use of their greater 

 freedom. It is to be hoped that, when the phenomena of these 

 later periods are judged of by the evidence of facts rather than by 

 rules, they will receive more independent interpretations inter- 

 pretations that may escape the dwarfing influence of uniformi- 

 tarianism. Nineteenth Century. 



SKETCH OF DAVID STARR JORDAN. 



By Pkof, MELVILLE B. ANDERSON. 



DAVID STARR JORDAN was born in 1851, at Gainesville, 

 New York. His father was a farmer who devoted far more 

 attention to the elder poets than to the Rural New-Yorker. His 

 mother is characterized by strength of will, depth of feeling, and 

 pithiness of speech. Goethe tells us that he owed to his father his 

 stature and his seriousness, and to his mother his happy disposi- 

 tion and his delight in story-telling. In Jordan's case this order 

 was reversed. From the mother he seems to have inherited his 

 executive power, and from the father his literary instinct. He 

 grew up a very unusual farm product a shy, observant lad, 

 much given to lonely excursions with a copy of Gray's Botany 

 in one pocket and Longfellow's poems in the other. He early 

 exhibited his instinct for classification by attempting a catalogue 

 raisonne of the Assyrian kings, but as his teacher could supply 

 him with data for but two categories, viz., the good and the had, 

 his labors were not very fruitful. Owing to his distaste for the 

 severe manual labor generally expected of boys on a farm, young 

 Jordan was considered lazy by the neighbors, and doubtless some 

 of them blamed his parents for allowing him to loiter and dream 

 his time away. 



Not that he was idle. He attended first the village school, and 

 afterward, no secondary school for boys being accessible, was 

 admitted to the academy for young ladies in the neighboring 

 town of Warsaw. He learned French and Latin ; he made a cata- 

 logue of the plants of his native county ; he read a good deal of 

 history, and grew intimate with the best American and English 

 poets. But he was the victim of no rigorous system of academic 

 routine. He came to his studies, as a boy comes to a well-spread 

 table, with a healthy appetite. A stranger to " cram," his mind 

 assimilated its own, rejected what was not food, and was never 



