4 GEOLOGY OF OLD HAMPSHIEE COUNTY, MASS. 



cerning the geology of the Connecticut Valley was discovered by him, and 

 the whole body of knowledge on the subject was systematized in his suc- 

 cessive reports. So frequent mention will be made of his work in the 

 following pages, and its progress may be followed so fully in the Chrono- 

 logical List, in Chapter XXIII, that special mention may be omitted here 

 and attention called to the many physicians, teachers, and laymen who 

 became enthusiastic mineralogists and scoured the hills so thoroughly that 

 it is now exceedingly rare that one finds a new locality for minerals within 

 these bounds. Prominent among these was Dr. David Hunt, of Northamp- 

 ton, to whom President Hitchcock acknowledges great obligation for 

 assistance in mineralogy as early as 1818, and of whom Amos Eaton said 

 that he had every mineral in this part of the State at his call.^ 



Dr. Jacob Porter, of Cummington; Emerson Davis, principal of the 

 Academy of Westfield; Dr. William Atwater, of Westfield; Simeon Colton, 

 of Monson, and Dr. Ebenezer Emmons,^ of Chester, who commenced his 

 scientific work here, were among the professional men who pursued min- 

 eralogy with great energy, and the last of this band of men, Mr. W. Morris 

 Dwight, died in extreme old age in Williamsburg only a few years ago. 



Prof Amos Eaton, Dr. George Gibbs, Prof Chester Dewey, and Prof 

 J. T. Webster extended their studies over this region from without, so that 

 already in 1 825 Mr. A. 0. Hubbai'd, wi-iting from Yale in commendation of 

 Mr. Hitchcock's "excellent description of the Connecticut Valley," says the 

 region "is becoming, or rather has already become, the rallying point of 

 all the mineralogists in Massachusetts." 



There appeared in Silliman's Journal for 1827 an article on the lead 

 mines and veins of Hampshire County by Mr. Alanson Nash. Prof C. U. 

 Shepard was then assisting in the publication of this journal, and he once 

 described to me the difficulty he had in deciphering the crabbed script of 

 the author and in bending his sentences to the common rules of grammar. 

 Little knowledge of the distribution of the lead veins has been added, 

 however, to what is contained in that article, and several of the veins 

 described by him I have not been able to find, though I do not doubt their 

 existence. He was the forerunner of a great body of natural prospectors — 

 men without learning, books, or assistance, who, from a strong love of the 



' ludex, 1820. 



-Sketch of life, by .1. B. Perry: Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., Vol. XII, p. 214; also by Jules 

 Marcou: Am. Geologist, Vol. VII, p. 1, with tine portrait. 



