IO JOHN WESLEY POWELL. 



any animal he desired. This reputation clung to him for years ; 

 the incident got into the country papers and was repeated until the 

 story became greatly exaggerated. When last repeated, the young 

 naturalist learned for the first time that he had appropriated the 

 upper story of his father's house for a museum, and had it full of 

 all sorts of reptiles ; and that he could go to the woods and fields 

 any day and find any reptile, mammal, or bird that pleased his 

 fancy, and that he lived in a house full of them and was constantly 

 employed in studying their habits. To be sure he had a large col- 

 lection, and was very familiar with it ; but the story was much 

 larger than the collection. 



About this time he was probably more interested in mollusks 

 than in any other department of natural history. He had a very 

 large collection made by himself from the Great Lakes, the small 

 interior lakes of Wisconsin and Illinois, the Mississippi River, and 

 from most of the rivers of Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, and 

 Kentucky, besides a good representation of the land shells of all 

 that region of country. His greatest difficulty was in obtaining 

 books to enable him to identify species. There were many speci- 

 mens which he was never able properly to identify, but he gave 

 them names according to the locality where they were collected, 

 and from the characteristics of the shells. He had collected some 

 fossils, also, and had studied minerals sufficiently to become famil- 

 iar with the use of the blow-pipe. 



During the summer of this year he continued his travels, espe- 

 cially along the Ohio River and across to the lakes, and then 

 through Michigan. In the fall he went to the Iron Mountain re- 

 gion, south of St. Louis, Missouri, for the purpose of collecting 

 minerals. He found the country so interesting . that he continued 

 his stay in the field until he barely had the funds necessary to take 

 him to St. Louis, where he hoped to earn enough to pay his ex- 

 penses home. Not finding work at once, he pawned his watch and 

 went to Decatur where he had previously lived. Later he engaged 

 to teach at Hennepin, Illinois, and continued teaching for six 

 months, receiving one hundred dollars per month. 



It was his intention at the time to earn a sum of money suffi- 

 cient to enable him to study in some Eastern college one or two 

 years and graduate, but when the spring time came the old fasci- 

 nation for natural history studies predominated, and he made geol- 

 ogy a specialty. 



The town of Hennepin standing on a bluff of the Illinois River, 

 was of itself a study. The underlying country for miles around 



