1885.] 289 [Lesley. 



intense vitality ; his forehead was high and massive ; his voice was pitched 

 low, and his speech was decisive ; he had no hesitations. One could 

 divine at a glance why he was an ardent Christian and why he was a 

 powerful legal pleader. He lived the life of a perpetual thinker, whose will 

 was as urgently exercised as his reason and his imagination ; for he lived 

 in the thick of the general battle of life. Such men always come to the 

 fore, and formulate events, and qualify the next generation. They hold 

 the plough by both handles, and deepen the furrow at every tillage, turn- 

 ing up the subsoil sooner or later ; doing all things thoroughly. 



I speak of James Macfarlane warmly as a personal friend to whom I owe 

 much ; but I may be permitted to say that I regard with a sentiment akin 

 to veneration the Scotch courage which could suffice to deliberately face 

 and execute such an enterprise as the description of all the Coal Regions 

 of America, and follow it with such another enterprise as his geological 

 guide to the Railways of the United States, he, a practising lawyer and 

 practical coal operator, as if he were a man of leisure. Such operations 

 are only for the world's workers, born and bred to much thought and 

 many deeds. 



His first home was in Gettysburg, where he was born, Sept. 2d, 1819, 

 and graduated at Pennsylvania College in 1837. That same year he 

 joined the corps of civil engineers on the line of the North Branch canal, 

 with headquarters at Towanda. After several years of this employment, 

 he went to Carlisle, read law with Judge Graham, was admitted to the 

 bar in 1845, and settled to practise in New Bloomfield, Perry county, for 

 eight years, serving three years as District Attorney. Here he married 

 Mary Overton, daughter of the late Edward Overton, who survives to 

 lament his loss. In 1851 he returned to Bradford county to practice law 

 at Towanda, being in 1852 elected District Attorney of the county, until 

 1859. He then accepted the position of General Superintendent of the 

 Barclay Coal Company, which he relinquished, in 1865, to organize the 

 Towanda Coal Company, which afterwards passed under the control of 

 the Erie Railroad. He then became General Sales Agent of the Associa- 

 ted Blossburg Coal Company, with offices at Rochester, Syracuse and 

 Elmira. In 1880 he organized the Long Valley Coal Company and devel- 

 oped its mines. In 1885 he was selected, as I have already said, to be 

 Arbitrator of the Bituminous Coal Combination at Buffalo. When the 

 combination was broken up, he returned to Towanda to work on a second 

 and enlarged edition of his Geologists' Traveling Hand-book, or Ameri- 

 can Geological Railroad Guide, when, without warning, he died of heart 

 disease, Oct. 15th, 1885. 



He leaves his work half done, about 200 pages being in type, and many 

 pages of MS. in a more or less finished state. 



The Coal Fields of America is his most noted work and has had a large 

 sale on both sides of the Atlantic. This brought him a considerable prac- 

 tice as an expert in coal operations. He wrote several geological articles 

 for the American Encyclopedia, and one on the Bituminous Coal Fields of 

 Pennsylvania for Gray & Walling's Atlas. He wrote also for the Evan- 

 gelical Review. 



PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXIII. 122. 2K. PRINTED MARCH 8, 1886 



