SKETCH OF WILLIAM FERREL. 695 



whom liis closer friendship was given prized it highly. From his 

 isolation as a boy and young man, he was diffident, even to his own 

 embarrassment, in going out to meet others ; but to those who 

 came to him he was generous and sympathetic in giving assist- 

 ance. He never pushed himself forward, and all his official posi- 

 tions came unsought. His earlier essays were inconspicuously 

 published, and never had a wide circulation, even in separate pam- 

 phlet form. Many who have received them must have passed 

 them by hardly noticed. The attention of scientific men turned 

 slowly to his work; only in later years than 1870 is his name 

 often mentioned abroad. His preference was always for original 

 methods, in his college demonstrations as well as in later inves- 

 tigations. He did little in the way of restatement of the conclu- 

 sions of others, but liked better to give his time to original re- 

 searches in which there was a prospect of discovering something 

 new or of explaining facts that had not been explained before. 

 When his interest was aroused in such work, he devoured every- 

 thing that he could find about it, " studying almost day and night," 

 and never giving up a problem until it was solved, or until he was 

 satisfied that his labors could not solve it. His conquest of physi- 

 cal problems was not the result of intuitive perceptions alone, but 

 followed patient and persevering work. This appears in his boy- 

 hood when he pondered over geometrical problems in the barn, 

 and in later years when his meteorological theories gradually 

 developed. 



Ferrel was a man whose teachings reach slowly through the 

 world. Many of the problems that he solved bear only remotely 

 on the lives of the millions of unmarked men from among whom 

 he won his way to eminence ; but all who read of him may under- 

 stand the lesson of his courageous perseverance, of his earnest 

 work and of his simple life. They will do well if, even without 

 adding much to the world's store, they can ^btj as he did at the 

 close of life, "I regret to leave my friends, but that is all I regret." 



Attention was drawn by Miss BacklaiKl, at the British Association, to nnmer- 

 ous points in which the Navajo myth entitled "The Mountain Chant" reproduces 

 customs and beliefs of the Old World. Among them were mentioned the singular 

 prohibition of food in the abode of spirits, such as appears in the classical story 

 of Persephone, and in modified shape in the fairy folk lore of Europe, in Aino and 

 Japanese tales, and in New Zealand. The author pointed out the great contrast 

 between the bloodless Navajo rites and the sanguinary ceremonies of the ancient 

 Mexicans, and the great dissimilarity in the forms of the Navajo and Mexican 

 gods, as denoting entirely different origins for the two religions, incompatible with 

 the belief commonly entertained of the wholly indigenous character of American 

 culture, and she urged that the Navajo rites point unmistakably to an Eastern 

 origin. 



