MEMORIAL OF ALEXANDER WINCHELL. 11 



influence public opinion. He was conspicuous in the State Teachers' 

 Association, of which he was soon elected president. He wrote numerous 

 reports and appeals and resolutions, and in 1858 he was charged with 

 the editorship of the Michigan Journal of Education, which, with great 

 tact and distinguished ability, he made to tell the story of the natural 

 sciences and to plead for scientific instruction in all the schools. His 

 objective point was to introduce natural science in a systematic manner 

 into the secondary schools of the state, and through them to feed the 

 state university with a class of students that would expect and demand 

 a higher grade of scientific instruction from that institution. He never 

 wearied in this effort, some of his latest publications (e. g., " Shall we 

 Teach Geology ? ", 1889) voicing the same plaint in louder and more 

 immediate appeals. He urged the university authorities, who to him 

 manifested a lethargic indifference, to consider the needs of the institu- 

 tion in this particular, to plan for greater facilities for teaching the sciences, 

 and to build up greater attractions to the student scientifically inclined. 

 He pointed, with a tinge of humiliation, to the newer institutions of like 

 grade further westward which have outstripped the university of Michi- 

 gan in scientific appliances, having caught the moving spirit of the times 

 and having made provision for a future career in natural science which 

 has yet to be entered upon at Ann Arbor. " That, also, goes for nothing," 

 said he, not ten days before his death, as he sorrowfully pointed to some 

 rejected plans for a new science hall at Ann Arbor, which had been 

 devised jointly and had been {presented unsuccessfully to the authorities 

 of the university. I understood that the legislature, then in session, 

 had not been asked to make provision for it in the stated appropriations. 

 Future years, however, will reveal to the people of Michigan, and espe- 

 cially to the regents of the university, the great difficulties with which 

 ho had to contend, and they will hasten to repair the great defect which 

 his sagacity pointed out and which his labor aimed to remedy. 



Cognate with his efforts to build up directly a scheme of higher 

 scientific instruction in the schools were his efforts to popularize science 

 among the citizens at large. His work " Sketches of Creation " (1870) 

 has had an enormous sale. It proves the eagerness of the enlightened 

 American citizen to penetrate, albeit not through the avenues of technical 

 science, into the recesses of profound scientific truth and imagination. 

 One of flu' greatest services which lie rendered to geology was to clothe 

 its great truths in attractive words adapted to the masses. The thousands 

 who have read " Sketches of Creation " or " Walks and Talks in the Geolog- 

 ical Field," will, should occasion arrive, testify to the cultural as well as the 

 economical value of geology. Such occasions arise annually in the 

 state legislatures and in our educational hoards, and no one can esti- 

 mate the influence which his beautiful popular essays have had in 



