54 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



the staurolites with polished ends showing the cross shape, set me 

 to thinking as to what shaped them so. A specimen of " stink- 

 stein/' with its peculiar odor when struck or rubbed, gave me a 

 sense of the hidden properties of things. I wore it out in repeat- 

 ing the experience, and for a time went about making like 

 experiments on all the kinds of stone I could find, in which I 

 detected a great variety of odors, and pleased myself with the 

 notion that each variety had its own distinct smell. As there 

 were practically no crystalline rocks in any place within three 

 hundred miles of my abode, all these specimens of my father's 

 collection were to me as from another world. I began to search 

 for the like in my endless ramblings afield, and to my great joy 

 found some gravel beds just to the east of the town of New- 

 port, in which there were granitic and other pebbles from the 

 Archaean rocks. The question as to what these pebbles meant 

 came to me with its revealing power. 



I well recall my father's explanation as to the origin of these 

 bits of peculiar rock in the mill-bottom gravels, an explanation 

 which shows that he had some knowledge of the general geology 

 of the Ohio Valley. It was that they had been brought down 

 from the mountains by the waters of the Ohio River and depos- 

 ited where I found them, when the bed of the stream was higher 

 than it now is. As a matter of fact, these gravel beds are a part 

 of the frontal deposits made by a tongue of ice in the last glacial 

 period, and the crystalline pebbles were brought from the 

 Archaean district of Canada. Yet the explanation served me 

 well ; as a means of mental expansion more than any other con- 

 cept, it led my mind to conceive of the far-reaching actions, of 

 the world as a place where work was done. It was practically 

 through this my first attention to rocks in the field, that I first 

 came to discern that the plentiful fossils in the lower Silurian 

 rocks about me had a meaning. I must have seen them from 

 an early age, for they were everywhere in the fields, and I was 

 by instinct a mouser after things in the earth. The first found to 

 attract my attention was a common trilobite, the Calymene 



