360 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the Government Laboratory for the Manufacture of Medicines, and 

 afterward as Chemist of the Nitre and Mining Bureau. 



After enduring the privations and hardships (including the total 

 loss of property) consequent upon the breaking up of the Confederacy, 

 on the reorganization of the college as the University of South Caro- 

 lina, he was again appointed to the chair of Chemistry and Geology, 

 in the undergraduate department, and of Chemistry and Pharmacy 

 in the medical department. But the utter prostration of the material 

 resources of the State, falling first and most heavily on institutions of 

 higher education, compelled him to seek employment in a more pros- 

 perous region. He therefore, in 1868, accepted a call to the chair of 

 Geology and Natural History in the University of California then 

 about to be organized, and removed to that State to assist in the 

 opening of the first session of the new institution, in September, 1869. 

 He has continued to occupy this chair up to the present time. 



From this time commenced the most active period of Prof. Le 

 Conte's strictly scientific life. The boundless field for geological stud- 

 ies presented on the Pacific coast incited him to pursue his favorite 

 department with renewed ardor. Every summer vacation was spent 

 in a geological ramble with a party of students and graduates in the 

 high Sierras, or in a geological tour through Oregon, Washington 

 Territory, and British Columbia. As much of the region of the high 

 Sierras is wholly uninhabited, camping-parties were organized ; and 

 thus studies of Nature were combined with a life of adventure full of 

 delight, amid the finest scenery in the world. Many scientific papers 

 on the origin and structure of mountain-chains, and on the ancient 

 glaciers of the Sierras, were the result of these studies. Meanwhile 

 other and more abstract subjects were not neglected ; for he contrib- 

 uted during this time also many papers on the theory and phenomena 

 of binocular vision. 



Prof. Le Conte can hardly be called a specialist in any depart- 

 ment, in the narrow sense of that term ; for, although his chief ac- 

 tivity has been in the field of science, yet his interest in literature, 

 art, and philosophy, is almost equally great, Association alone seems 

 to have determined his life-work in the direction of science. Until 

 thirty years of age his intellectual culture was almost perfectly gen- 

 eral. Only after~that did it commence to concentrate first on science, 

 and still later on special departments of science. While this may 

 have been a disadvantage in the pursuit of special narrow lines of in- 

 vestigation, it had also its advantage in giving that comprehensiveness 

 so necessary in the more complex departments of science which he 

 had chosen. 



In his theory of education, therefore, Prof. Le Conte was always 

 an earnest advocate of the general or liberal education of the cultured 

 man, rather than the special education of the mere expert. His ideal 

 of education was a general culture first, and as high as circumstances 



