838 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cess, and with no special knowledge beyond the fundamental 

 principles, the production of a working instrument, which he ex- 

 hibited at a public lecture. 



His ambition was now extending beyond mathematics. De- 

 clining offers of a tutorship in that science in Wesleyan Univer- 

 sity and of continued position in Pennington Seminary, he ac- 

 cepted the chair of Natural Science in Amenia Seminary. Here 

 he gave his first public geological lectures ; explored the flora of 

 the vicinity, of which he contributed a catalogue to the regents 

 of the university; observed solar spots; and began a series of 

 meteorological observations. 



He removed in 1850 to take charge of an academy at Newbern, 

 Ala. Finding the prospects of the institution not equal to his ex- 

 pectations, he undertook to revive a suspended institution at Eu- 

 taw in the same county. Here he began a course of scientific in- 

 vestigations which he had been indefinitely projecting for some 

 time. He communicated to the American Journal of Science 

 notes on the cold of January at Eutaw, and on the aurora bore- 

 alis of September 29, 1851 ; opened a correspondence with the 

 Smithsonian Institution, to which he sent collections of plants, 

 alcoholic specimens, and preserved skins, including the new species 

 of fish, Hybopsis Winchelli ; and communicated to the American 

 Association in 1853 the first scientific description of the Creta- 

 ceous Choctaw Bluff, on the Black "Warrior River. In 1853 Prof. 

 Winchell became President of the Masonic University, Selma, 

 Ala., and made a tour of the southern part of the State, to interest 

 the people in the institution. The tour was also a geological one, 

 and took him through a country rich in Cretaceous and Tertiary 

 fossils, where Hippurites encumbered the ground and were burned 

 into lime, and the " precious vertebrae " of Zeuglodon were used 

 for andirons, stiles, and gate-weights. He sent a collection of 

 fishes to the Smithsonian Institution, in acknowledging which 

 Prof. Baird predicted that in not many years he would be called 

 to a big professorship somewhere North or East. " Nine days 

 after these words were penned/' says his biographer in the Amer- 

 ican Geologist, " he was elected to a chair in the University of 

 Michigan." This was in 1853; the professorship was that of 

 Physics and Civil Engineering. He found on taking his chair, in 

 January, 1854, that no good elementary text-books on civil engi- 

 neering were in existence, and that he had to originate matter 

 and methods. As a branch of physics he attended to the keeping 

 of a complete series of meteorological observations, which, while 

 he held the chair, he reported to the Smithsonian Institution. In 

 the next year he was transferred, in accordance with an under- 

 standing that was had when he first went to the university, to the 

 newly created chair of Geology, Zoology, and Botany. In a paper 



