110 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



happiness. From Jackson, whom I often saw at his house and 

 oftener in the Society of Natural History, I had much in the 

 way of information. I never went to him for help without find- 

 ing it, but my errands related solely to matters of fact, of which 

 he had a great store. He did not teach sympathy for his fel- 

 lows, but he needed it overmuch himself. 



Jackson had a great deal of divining power, with a limited 

 amount of field observation he was not zealous of seeing - 

 he could make safer inferences than any geologist I have ever 

 known. This is shown in his work on the Narragansett Basin 

 in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as I discovered when I fol- 

 lowed in his footsteps; he evidently saw but little, yet he cor- 

 rectly inferred the principal features of the structure of that 

 interesting field. I have measured a large part of the work 

 accomplished by my predecessors in this country and have 

 found no instance where a difficult interpretation concerning 

 the underground altitudes of a series of strata was so well done 

 as in his report on this region. It is, so far as I have learned, 

 the first piece of work in which a great syncline was adequately 

 determined from only limited outcrops, for the most of the area 

 is covered by the waters of the great inlet known as Narragan- 

 sett Bay. The constructive imagination which led him to fore- 

 see the value of the anaesthetic properties of ether, was clear in 

 all his geological work which I have traced in the field. 



My contacts with Asa Gray were limited; he and Agassiz 

 were in feud, so that except for hearing his lectures and now 

 and then a word concerning some plant I had trouble in nam- 

 ing, I saw but little of him until after I had become a teacher 

 in the School. Thenceforth until his death we were much to- 

 gether, for my grateful acceptance of Darwinism was a bond 

 between us, as was also my general interest in botanical ques- 

 tions. My separation from him in the earlier days was, as I see 

 it now, a misfortune, but inevitable; for in those primitive days 

 when the students in the Scientific School were members of 

 warring camps, each set against the others, in a desire to win 



