SAMUEL WENDELL WILLISTON. 

 1852-1918. 



By RlCHAKD SWANN LULL. 



Part I. — Biographical Sketch. 



In his immediate family, Prof. Williston stood as a conspicuous figure, as a scholar, a man 

 of research, and one who by an innate superiority made himself what he was. For he owed 

 little to his forebears other than the heritage of those sterling qualities which have made New 

 Englanders in general so vital a force in the evolution of our national character and prestige; 

 his scientific tendencies were an individual characteristic, and he stands as the only recorded 

 Williston to follow lines of scientific research. 



Williston's father, Samuel Williston, was a blacksmith, and, although a man of considerable 

 native ability, was totally untrained in the affairs of book men. He possessed, however, that 

 pioneer spirit which impelled so many eastern men to migrate to the developing West and seek 

 in a new environment the elusive fortune which the East did not provide. Hence, while Will- 

 iston was born in Boston, his development, in so far as environment exerted a control, was due 

 almost exclusively to the stimulating conditions of the newly invaded West. Here he spent 

 his boyhood. Of less robust physique than were his three older brothers, he sought compan- 

 ionship in whatever books came his way, reading without discrimination, largely because the 

 volumes were so few. His was a laudable ambition, however, for he very soon announced his 

 determination of being the most learned man in Kansas. 



His schooling was necessarily erratic, but none the less progressive, beginning with the 

 alphabet, which was learned from the lettering on the cookstove, and continuing through the 

 elementary schools of Manhattan, Kans., coupled, as has been said, with the most omnivorous 

 reading. It was largely due to the influence of his mother, Jane Turner, that Williston and his 

 brothers had any opportunity for schooling, for she determined that they should not suffer 

 the handicap of illiteracy against which her husband had to contend. 



Williston's first interest in paleontology was aroused in his seventh year. The boys had 

 often gathered clams in the Blue River near Manhattan, but he found fossil clamshells on the 

 summit of a hill known as Blue Mont. He knew clams could not crawl on land, and accordingly 

 sought of his father and Sunday-school teacher the solution of the mystery. Their explana- 

 tion, had they but known, was like that by which the ancient Greeks sought to reconcile the 

 presence of mollusks' shells high upon the hills around the Mediterranean, and to the boy the 

 simple Biblical explanation of their being relics of the Deluge seemed at that time sufficient 

 and served to awaken an interest in the Book of Genesis which he had not had before. There 

 were also large stones filled with fossil shells of lower Permian age in the boys' favorite swim- 

 ming hole, and these constituted Williston's first subjects for paleontological study. 



Fishing and hunting were the father's favorite recreations, and the preparation of the 

 fish for cooking was young Samuel's task. Catfish, shad, and river sturgeon, the last with its 

 apparent lack of a vertebral column, in place of which there was a long fibrous rod, the noto- 

 chord, gave rise to much speculation on the part of the boy, and this also served directly to 

 stimulate his interest in natural history. 



Blue Mont College had been founded in 1859, but was merged into the State Agricultural 

 College in 1864, and two years later Williston was permitted to enter it as a student. Stim- 

 ulated by his reading, he soon decided to become an author, but the nearest approach possible 

 at this time was to aid in the printing of a semiweekly newspaper at Manhattan. It was during 

 this service that Williston's first literary contribution appeared— a supposedly humorous 



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