RECORDS OF MEETINGS OF 1906 285 



countries for specimens. Mines, now abandoned, were then being opened, and 

 every promising gulch was explored, the glades yielded flowers and the ponds snails, 

 and amongst surroundings so congenial to his tastes, the young Jefferis grew to 

 manhood imbued with an abiding affection for the wonders of the mineral world. 



At a very early age, under the tutelage of his father, Mr. Jefferis entered the 

 Bank of Chester County, which afterwards became the National Bank of Chester 

 County. He rose in the service of the bank until in 1857 he succeeded to the cashier- 

 ship, which position he retained until his resignation in 1883. 



Throughout his life he was an omnivorous collector, and the accumulation of 

 mineral material which formed the Jefferis Collection represented the results of over 

 half a century of personal efforts, exchanges and purchases. He became well known 

 to the mineralogists of the world; and in America, Dana, Shepard, Genth, Clarke, 

 J. Lawrence Smith and Cooke were indebted to him for material and information, 

 and especially Genth's "Mineralogy of Pennsylvania" owes to Mr. Jefferis many of 

 its facts and locahties. He has himself thus recounted his efforts in the field: "In 

 the days when I first began collecting minerals, Chester, Delaware and Lancaster 

 Counties were fine fields for collectors. The country was comparatively new, and 

 at that time very little of it was under cultivation. Seventy years ago I used to go 

 over the hills south of West Chester, to himt for amethysts, and it well repaid me, 

 for some of my best specimens came from there. I found garnets in the serpentine 

 range north of West Chester; zircons on the BrandyT\-ine, a mile west of the to^Ti; 

 from the south west came orthite and aquacreptite, a very interesting mineral, 

 named by Professor Shepard. 



" Chester County at that time, was rich in mica crystals in many colors. At 

 Birmingham Serpentine Quarries, I found a new species, which Professor Brush 

 decided was a new mineral and he named it after the discoverer, now known as 

 Jefferisite." 



It is this latter circumstance that has signally made his name a mineralogical 

 possession, but his name is also associated with the discovery or extension of knowl- 

 edge of aquacreptite, euphyllite, zaratite, melanosiderite, roseite and painterite. 



After his resignation from the National Bank of Chester he Uved in Philadelphia, 

 where he soon participated with Leidy, Vaux, Wilcox, Dixon and Rand in minera- 

 logical conferences. In Philadelphia he was made Curator of the Vaux Collection 

 of Minerals which had been bequeathed to the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences. 

 About 1900 he came to New York, which was his residence to the time of his death. 



His large collection has become the property of the Carnegie Museum at Pitts- 

 burgh. Mr. Jefferis has thus described it: "It contained over 12,000 catalogued 

 specimens, in the general collection, not including the cut gems, the microscopic 

 mounted specimens and 150 boxes of choice and rare specimens of minerals consisting 

 of 3,500, each not over li inches in size, selected and put up similar to the original 

 Smithsonian Collection." 



Mr. Jefferis was a member of the American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science; the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia; the American Philo- 

 sophical Society; the Department of Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania; 

 Buffalo Society of Natural History, and an honorary member of the New York 

 Mineralogical Club. 



Mr. Jefferis was enamored of flowers, and it may surprise those who only regarded 

 him as a mineralogist that he sent over 3,000 specimens of plants to Paris, and also 

 prepared a collection for the Smithsonian Institution. 



