390 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



received during the day, and the inhabitants find it almost unbearable. 

 Many sleep on the house-tops, and many more on the sidewalks in 

 front of the houses, making their morning toilets in the open air. The 

 houses are built of adobe or mud-bricks, with heavy walls and flat 

 roofs, all of them but one story high. Taking everything into consid- 

 eration, Yuma is not a place to have a summer residence in, however 

 pleasant it may seem to one after a four weeks' journey over the Colo- 

 rado Desert. 







PEOFESSOE JOHN W. POWELL. 



PEOFESSOR JOHN W. POWELL, better known as Major 

 Powell, Ph. D., founder and director of the Bureau of Ethnol- 

 ogy of the Smithsonian Institution, and present director of the United 

 States Geological Survey, is a pattern of the American self-made man, 

 and well illustrates in his life and achievements what may be ac- 

 complished with honest, steady adherence to a definite purpose. He 

 was born at Mount Morris, New York, on the 24th of March, 1834, a 

 short time after the arrival of his parents from England. His father 

 was a Methodist clergyman, and was required to lead a very unsettled 

 life. In his early childhood the family removed to Ohio ; eight years 

 afterward, to Wisconsin ; and again, when he was fifteen years of age, 

 to Illinois, where young Powell remained most of the time until the 

 breaking out of the war. 



It was during this latter period that his mental characteristics were 

 developed. He was eager for knowledge, and used every opportunity 

 to pursue such courses of study as were accessible to him, or appeared 

 to be adapted to his case. He studied for a time at Illinois College, 

 Jacksonville, and subsequently entered Wheaton College. Unable to 

 attend school continuously, he alternated between teaching in the pub- 

 lic schools and studying, and in 1854 he went to Oberlin to pursue a 

 special course of two years. 



From the first he was strongly attracted to the natural sciences, 

 and particularly toward natural history and geology. He was fond of 

 making collections, which he studied for their own sake. He com- 

 menced with botany, to which he has made some valuable contri- 

 butions. Being much interested in nature, he acquired a roving 

 disposition, and lost no opportunity of making scientific excursions, 

 sometimes extending to long journeys. Having already made journeys 

 on the Mississippi to St. Paul and across the State of Wisconsin to 

 Mackinaw, in 1856 he descended the Mississippi River in a skiff and 

 alone from the Falls of St. Anthony to its mouth, making collections, 

 which he gave to the various museums of the State institutions. 

 The next year he rowed from Pittsburg to the mouth of the Ohio, 



