34 



therefore, that in 1866, despite the high recommendations 

 from Lyell, Murchison, the Rogers, Dana, Silliman and others 

 with which he backed his application, that he was rejected 

 in favor of Newberry for the Chair of Geology in Columbia 

 College. And a sense to a certain extent of his unfitness, 

 owing to his aversion to mere collegiate teaching and 

 academic administration, induced him to refuse a better posi- 

 tion than the one he occupied at the Institute of Technology. 

 Though he never wrote in full a lecture or even a scientific 

 paper before its delivery, he never appeared before an audi- 

 ence, even the most uncritical and uneducated, without care- 

 ful preparation and until he had written out ample notes. He 

 rarely looked at these notes, but nevertheless he followed 

 them sufficiently closely to avoid wandering from the train 

 of argument he had mapped out, and so enlarging on any 

 section of the subject that his lecture lacked an appropri- 

 ate peroration, when the allotted time had expired. His 

 lecture notes are valuable, not only on account of their con- 

 tents, but as models. A correct list of his single unpublished 

 lectures and courses out of college it would be difficult to 

 make, but the appended list is approximately complete. The 

 following notes of a lecture " On the Chemistry of the Sea " 

 at 1'oyd a good sample of his method of preparation : 



" Chemistry of the Sea. Aphrodite life and beauty and fer- 

 tility true and more than true. A vast history. Some pages 

 from it. Decipher some lines of the inscription by the fingers 

 of the sea. We must go back to when sea was not; look 

 forward to the time when it shall have disappeared. All 

 things are of the sea, the sands, the clays, the gravels, solid 

 rocks, great granite hills, foundations laid in the sea. In its 

 earliest form of life, or at least, earliest preserved. The secret 

 of our mineral wealth is all there ; its history is that of the 

 building of a world. Origin of the sea, time when no sea 

 was, primeval ocean, first-formed rocks, our land has all been 

 beneath the ocean. Compos, of the early sea limestone, 

 clay, salt, carbonic acid ; their relation ; purification of the 

 early atmosphere ; progressive changes of air and climate 



