248 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



attendance. At last one day when the fragments of a huge ele- 

 phant were dug out, he exclaimed, "That knocks Moses/' and, 

 in a disgusted frame of mind, walked away, never to return. 

 In a letter to Agassiz, dated Cambridge, July 6, 1868, Mr. 

 Shaler sets forth his plan of work at the Museum. Some ex- 

 tracts from this letter will show the general trend of his thought 

 at an early period in regard to teaching. He writes : - 



. . . That I may the better explain the objects I shall have in view 

 during my connection with the Museum in the years to come, I will con- 

 sider the work as divided into two parts which need be described separately. 

 The first relates to the teaching which I shall undertake to do. The second 

 to the work of carrying forward the arrangement of the collection of fossils. 



In setting before me a plan for my work in the first of these lines I have 

 been guided by the desire to do all in my power to render apparent to the 

 public generally, and especially to the authorities of Massachusetts, to whom 

 we owe so much, the eminent value of natural history as a branch of a general 

 education, and the extent to which our Museum, by the organization and 

 its resources, is capable of effecting the dissemination of sound knowledge 

 of this science. . . There are two subsidiary means of giving value to 

 our labor which seem to me to promise good results. The first is to organize 

 lectures of such a character as the people may comprehend, to be given 

 on Sundays, Saturday afternoons, or some such hours as would admit the 

 presence of the laboring public; further than this, short excursions from 

 Boston, on Sundays, if public opinion would permit, open, with certain 

 restrictions, to the public. The other plan is to begin the formation of 

 type collections of specimens intended to illustrate descriptive catalogues, 

 in the form of text-books if it should be considered desirable. . . . 



I see my way more clearly in all that regards the strictly scientific 

 teaching. This should be divided into lecture teaching, which must be a 

 process of imparting knowledge, and field teaching, which shall be so ar- 

 ranged as to train observation. ... I expect to give two courses of lectures 

 each year belonging to this plan, of about twenty lectures each. I shall 

 avoid a textbook arrangement of the matter by the effort to embody some 

 one object in each course. Thus the first course on geology shall be so 

 arranged as to give preeminence to the greatest phenomenon in the history 

 of our earth's surface, viz. the formation of the continents with the attend- 

 ant differentiations of the sea-basins. Without excluding the ordinary 

 matter of geological lectures, I expect to group my facts so that the great 

 scheme of land and sea can be watched in its development and studied in its 



