Lesley.l 4 A [April 3 



professional experts supplemented his own experiments and kept his in- 

 tellectual ability abreast of the public needs of each succeeding year. 



My friend Sheafer was a silent man, I should say reticent, always smiling 

 and cheery in conversation, but seldom or never allowing even to his enthu- 

 siasm more than a momentary flash of expression. He had the confirmed 

 habits of a good listener ; and what he himself had to say was said in the 

 fewest words the theme permitted or the occasion demanded. He was 

 intently sympathetic, and loved to hear others talk ; his own contributions 

 being chiefly made in the shape of facts. No man better appreciated 

 those whom he loved or respected, and this he owed to his poetic tem- 

 perament. 



One of the best instances of his ingenuity is his successful device for 

 gobbing up a mine by boring down to its heading from the surface and 

 causing a stream of water to carry down the bore-hole the fine slack or 

 braize coal from a neighboring dust-hill. The coal-mud thus introduced 

 into the abandoned workings is banked back behind loose brattices which 

 let the water flow through but retain the mud, which in some months 

 becomes solid and firm enough to hold up the roof ; and then the work- 

 ings are reopened and the mine is robbed of its pillars. The coal usually 

 lost by the crushing of the pillars is thus saved without danger to the 

 miners ; and the country is also saved from caving and settling ; which en- 

 tails a further profit, inasmuch as the coal beds above the one worked out 

 are preserved intact for future mining. Schuylkill county ought to erect 

 a statue to Peter W. Sheafer for this invention alone. 



He became a member of the American Philosophical Society, July 17, 

 1863. He was a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Phila- 

 delphia, of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, of the American Insti- 

 tute of Mining Engineers, and of the American Association for the Ad- 

 vancement of Science. His philanthropic feelings induced him to become 

 a member of the American Colonization Society. 



His death took place at Brown's Mills, Burlington, N. J., to which he 

 had been taken from Atlantic City in the hope of saving his life, and he 

 was buried at Pottsville, March 31, 1891. 



He was six months my senior in age ; and now I remain the last one of that 

 old set of the first geological survey of our State. They are all gone — H. 

 D. Rogers, Booth, Frazer, McKinuey, Trego, IIoll, Boye, R. E. Rogers, 

 Haldeman, Whelpley, Hodge, Jackson, Henderson, McKinley, Sheafer — 

 not one lives to tell the adventures of those early days of our science, 

 when the very foundation principles of it had to be laid, and the physical 

 constitution of Pennsylvania had to be discovered, without experience 

 and without instruction. The bare outlines of the story have been told ; 

 but the individual life of that story will never be told ; is, in fact, un- 

 tenable. 



