Some Cranks and their Crotchets 457 



chair for me without an apology, saying that he 

 only awaited a leisure day to put all things in 

 strictest order. Dear soul ! that day never came. 

 Dr. Barratt was of course intensely interested 

 in the Portland quarries, and they furnished the 

 theme of the monomania which overtook him at 

 about his sixtieth year. He accepted with enthu- 

 siasm the geological proofs of tho antiquity of man 

 in Europe, and presently undertook to reinforce 

 them by proofs of his own gathering in the Con- 

 necticut Valley. An initial difficulty confronted 

 him. The red freestone of that region belongs to 

 the Triassic period, the oldest of the secondary 

 series. It was an age of giant reptiles, contempo- 

 rary with the earliest specimens of mammalian life, 

 and not a likely place in which to look for relics 

 of the highest of mammals. But Dr. Barratt in- 

 sisted that this freestone is Eocene, thus bringing 

 it into the tertiary series ; and while geologists in 

 general were unwilling to admit the existence of 

 man before the Pleistocene period, he boldly car- 

 ried it back to the Eocene. Thus, by adding a 

 few million years to the antiquity of mankind and 

 subtracting a few million from that of the rocks, 

 he was enabled at once to maintain that he had 

 discovered in the Portland freestone the indisputa- 

 ble remains of an ancient human being with only 



