BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SCIENTIFIC WRITINGS 

 OF R. E. C. STEARNS 



By miss MARY R. STEARNS 

 (With One Plate) 



I. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF ROBERT EDWARDS 

 CARTER STEARNS' 



By Dr. W. H. DALL 



Dr. Robert Edwards Carter Stearns died at Los Angeles, Cal., 

 July 2"], 1909, in his eighty-third year. He was a native of Boston, 

 Mass., a son of Charles Stearns, and was born February i, 1827. 

 He was educated in the public schools, followed by a course of 

 mercantile training, and from his earliest years evinced a deep love 

 of nature, fostered by his father, with whom similar tastes led to a 

 degree of comradeship in rambles and hunting expeditions which 

 he always remembered with appreciation. The boy had an unusual 

 artistic ability, and, though his early avocations were services in a 

 bank and on a farm, when only twenty-two years of age he painted 

 a panorama of the Hudson River from the mouth of the Mohawk 

 to Fort William, which was sold and exhibited. He turned his 

 attention to mining, explored the coal fields of southern Indiana, 

 and in 1854 v/as appointed resident agent of several copper mines 

 in northern Michigan, on Lake Superior. In 1858 he went to Cali- 

 fornia, where he became a partner in a large printing establishment 

 of a brother-in-law of his wife, in San Francisco. This firm pub- 

 lished the Pacific Methodist, a weekly religious paper, and in the 

 troubled times preceding the civil war the reverend editor of this 

 journal was obliged to visit the east. Stearns was requested to fill 

 his place during his absence. The fate of California hung in the 

 balance, many of the immigrants from the southern states urged 

 independence for that territory when hostilities broke out. Stearns 

 took the responsibility of making his paper an enthusiastic advocate 

 of the Union cause, and to this call and the eloquence of Thomas 

 Starr King, old Californians believed the decision of the people to 



1 Printed also in Science, N. S. Vol. 30, No. 765, Aug. 27, 1909, pp. 279-80. 



Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 56, No. 18 



