Miles Rock. 

 1840-1901. 



Miles Rock, born October 10, 1840, at Ephrata, Lancaster 

 County, Pennsylvania, came of humble German stock. He 

 was the youngest but one of nine children. The father was a 

 tailor, a frugal and industrious man who managed to feed and 

 clothe his family until his untimely death, when Miles was left 

 fatherless at five years of age. The child was cared for by one 

 David Shirk, a large-hearted Mennonite farmer, and in that 

 delightful country grew to boyhood, developing a love of nature 

 and a questioning keenness of observation that were to serve 

 him well in later days. He not only saw that the soils on differ- 

 ent sides of a ravine on his foster-father's farm were unlike in 

 color, but he asked why, and from that question sprang the 

 desire for knowledge. 



At the age of fourteen, he left the farm and walked to Lan- 

 caster where he was given work in the shop of a book-seller 

 and began his serious education by devouring Lyell's Principles 

 of Geology. The lad continued his studies, later supporting 

 himself by teaching school. At the outbreak of the Civil War 

 he was a student at Franklin and Marshall College. 



He served with the Pennsylvania volunteers throughout the 

 war, and afterwards entered Lehigh University, graduating as 

 one of the three members of the first class, in 1869. He taught 

 mathematics and mineralogy at his alma mater for a year after 

 his graduation. 



In 1870, he married Miss Susan Clarkson, and, accompanied 

 by his wife, went to the newly founded observatory at Cordoba, 

 Argentine Republic. Here with William Morris Davis (now 

 Sturgis Hooper professor of geology at Harvard University) 

 he worked for three years, mapping the stars of the southern 

 heavens under the direction of Dr. B. A. Gould. 



From 1874 ^o 1877, Mr. Rock was engaged in the deter- 

 mination of latitude and longitude in the West Indies and Cen- 

 tral America for the U. S. Hydrographic Office, and in 1878 



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