220 Memoir of Rev. John Prince, LL. D. 
REMARKS BY THE EDITOR. 
It would be quite superfluous to attempt to add any thing to the 
receding account of the late Dr. Prince, were it not that some cir- 
cumstances fell under my own observation, which evince that his 
character sustained its pie ate peculiarities, to a very late period 
of his life. 
About one year before the death of Dr. Prince, (in May, 1835,) 
I was called to give a course of geological lectures in Salem, (Mass.) 
the town in which he resided. Dr. Prince was among my constant 
hearers, and also among the most attentive of a large and very intel- 
ligent audience. Although he had some acquaintance with mine- 
rals, geology was to him a new science. He had indeed been long 
accustomed to look beyond this planet, and to scrutinize other 
worlds ; but he had not been habituated to study the structure of 
this earth. To him, then in his eighty fifth year, this was an ex- 
periment, like that made at an earlier period of life, by the celebra- 
ted Dr. Johnson, who, it is said, after he was seventy years old, 
learned a new language, for the sake of trying the soundness of his 
mind and memory. 
Dr. Prince became deeply interested in the surprising develop- 
ments of geology, and with the ardor of early life examined the 
drawings and the specimens, and attended to the experimental illus- 
trations. Nor was he satisfied with the evidence of the lecture 
room. He took a party of gentlemen to see the beautiful jasper at 
Saugus, near Lynn, several miles from Salem, and being unwilling 
to relinquish any part of a more extensive geclevical excursion that 
was proposed, he passed over, by the beach that leads to Nahant, 
and with the writer of these remarks for an expounder of the sur- 
prising geological facts that abound in this ocean-barrier of rock, he 
followed the sea shore to Marblehead, and was particularly impressed 
by the magnificent dykes of trap that here invade the firm cliffs of 
sienite, and with the granite veins which rival those of Skye and Ar- 
ran, (the classical ground of British geologists,) in their wonderful 
intrusions, tortuous ramifications, and abrupt displacements ; while 
the broken veins are again recovered, at no great distance, and by 
their exact accordance in structure, color and form, evince that they 
were once connected, and were removed by convulsions from the po- 
sition where they were first congealed after their igneous injection. 
ere was one enormous dyke in particular, upon the beach be- 
tween Lynn and Salem, which excited so much interest in Dr. 
