INTRODUCTION TO GEOLOGY 55 



senoria; it is most often found rolled up, so that it distinctly 

 resembles a gigantic oniscus, or sow-bug. This likeness caught 

 my eye and led to the notion that there were such creatures 

 turned to stone. My father knew in a general way what it was, 

 and so I found the path to the idea that the strata of the country 

 about me had been made on old sea floors and that the queer 

 things they contained were the shapes of creatures which had of 

 old been alive. This conception I came to when I was about 

 fourteen years of age. It at once took a firm hold upon me. It 

 was one of the shaping understandings of my life. I soon found 

 access to certain geological books in the Mercantile Library in 

 Cincinnati, and among them there was a two-volume edition of 

 Murchison's "Silurian System/' the first geological book I ever 

 saw. Most of it came beyond my comprehension, but the figures 

 gave me a clue to names of fossils, and at fourteen years a lad 

 has enough of the primitive in him to set a great store by names. 

 Probably the most effective source of enlargement for me 

 in these passage years was a series of events which turned me 

 toward astronomy. Mitchel, the well-known astronomer, had 

 established an observatory on the river bluff in the eastern part* 

 of Cincinnati, the buildings of which I saw, and the uses of 

 which I had heard. I had also heard an interesting Irishman, 

 by the name of Vaughan, 1 who taught in the government school 

 that I attended, kept at the barracks for the children of the 



i This guileless Irish dreamer excited the sympathy of the community, and my father 

 invited him to spend several summer vacations at his house. During one of these visits he 

 volunteered to teach my sister and me something of astronomy. The lessons were usually 

 given outdoors under the grape arbor, the ground serving for blackboard ; on it he drew 

 with his cane diagrams commensurate with the sweep of his thoughts, so that before the 

 hour closed his illustrations compelled us to perambulate the garden a good many times 

 over. Although beginning simply enough, his talks soon became t^o abstruse for us to fol- 

 low, and lured by the shade of a big tree it was our habit to steal away and amuse our- 

 selves with terrestrial objects, while he, all unconscious of the desertion, would continue 

 to wander alone in celestial spaces. At table he was so absent-minded that dishes would 

 be passed before him unheeded, until some member of the family would put food upon his 

 plate and tell him decidedly that he must eat, whereupon he would mechanically go 

 through the process of filling his empty stomach. Now and then he would disappear, and 

 after a search be found in some humble lodging where the only evidences of sustenance 

 were a number of empty paper bags which originally held the peanuts that for days had 

 kept body and soul together. S. P. S. 



