SKETCH OF ALEXANDER WINCHELL. 843 



Winchell was perhaps the very first man of science in America 

 "who descended before popular audiences from that high-caste 

 and stately but dry and unpopular style in which the older scien- 

 tists had thought it fit to cloak the dignity of science. . . . He 

 simplified zoological themes rather than popularized them, and 

 lifted up his voice only . . . where the select appreciators of sci- 

 ence were numerous enough to constitute an audience." Societies 

 for scientific culture, summer institutes, and similar organiza- 

 tions, formed a large part of the audiences. 



Prof. Winchell was a voluminous writer. The list of his 

 books and papers in the American Geologist includes two hun- 

 dred and fifty-five titles. A predominant idea running through 

 his Christian Theology illustrated from Nature was that of the 

 harmony between the indications and doctrines of science and 

 the central doctrines of the Christian religion. A similar thought 

 ran through several other of his works. His Geology of the Stars 

 and his World Life were attempts to extend the history of the 

 earth as recorded in the geological strata so as to include the 

 whole lifetime of a world, or to present, as he said in the preface, 

 " a thoughtful review of the processes of world formation, world 

 growth, and world decadence." Many of the thoughts in these 

 works were so novel that he was not able to get an expression of 

 opinion upon them from his fellow-students. A large proportion 

 of his books are scientific treatises for popular reading vivacious, 

 suggestive, embodying the accurate results of scientific investi- 

 gation, sparkling with original thoughts, and well adapted to 

 their purpose. 



The burden of his educational labor, according to his biog- 

 rapher, lay in the direction of widening the avenues of natural 

 science and of its introduction into secondary schools. " He in- 

 sisted that the young student is more observing than reflective or 

 analytic, that the education of the mind should be by an appeal 

 to its most accessible and most powerful impulses, and that the 

 influence of science on the human mind, especially in its forma- 

 tive stage, is more healthful to a normal growth, more conducive 

 to moral rectitude, and more stimulating toward a right ambition, 

 than any other field of knowledge. . . . He believed that there is 

 as much mental and ethical culture to be derived from the study 

 of natural science, when pursued with equal thoroughness and 

 exactness, as from the study of Greek or Latin literature or of 

 mathematics." 



