SKETCH OF ALEXANDER WINCH ELL. 837 



SKETCH OF ALEXANDER WINCHELL. 



WHILE lie was industrious and versatile as an original in- 

 vestigator, Prof. Alexander Winchell was best known as a 

 successful, instructive, and entertaining lecturer on subjects of 

 science, especially of geology and evolution, and as the author of 

 numerous books which have found their way into the households 

 of our country, describing in a style interesting and comprehen- 

 sible to all the latest results of research and of his own labors in 

 those fields. 



Alexander Winchell was born in Northeast, Dutchess Coun- 

 ty, N. Y., December 31, 182-4, and died in Ann Arbor, Mich., Febru- 

 ary 19, 1891. His family were in moderately comfortable circum- 

 stances. His father and mother had been teachers in the public 

 schools of the town. He showed a taste for mathematics at an 

 early age, which was illustrated by his having completed the first 

 part of Emerson's arithmetic and his reciting the entire multipli- 

 cation table without mistake on the day he was seven years old. 

 When a little more than ten years old he had completed Willett's 

 arithmetic, and had transcribed all the definitions, rules, prob- 

 lems, and full solutions in a manuscript book. He attended the 

 Stockbridge Academy and the village school. It had been in- 

 tended that he should study medicine, but on his expressing, when 

 sixteen years old, a desire to teach, his father engaged a district 

 school in which he taught during the winter of 1840 and 1841. 

 As by-pursuits he collected and solved arithmetical problems, and 

 began the practices, which he never discontinued, of recording 

 the results of his reading and study, and keeping a diary and a 

 strict account of expenditures. He continued his mathematical 

 studies, soon acquired an enlarged idea of the preparation needed 

 to fit him to become a doctor, became more attached to the pro- 

 fession of teacher, and had " his imagination fired " by the study 

 of astronomy. In 1843 he became assistant in Amenia Seminary, 

 where he had attended for a year as a student. Having entered 

 Wesleyan University in 1844 as a sophomore, "he encountered 

 with indignation," says his editorial biographer in the American 

 Geologist, " the first check in his educational ardor and success in 

 a rigorous ' marking system,' which at that time laid special stress 

 on the literal reproduction of the words of the text-books. 

 Though ambitious for honors, he refused to compete for them 

 under those conditions. Having been graduated in 1847, he was 

 appointed teacher of natural science in Pennington Male Semi- 

 nary, New Jersey, " when he entered with irrepressible zeal and 

 delight upon the study of the flora of the vicinity. The Morse 

 telegraph having just come into operation, he attempted with suc- 



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