SAMUEL WENDELL WILLISTON 677 
my father built a better house about a quarter of a mile away. It was two 
full stories in height, and twenty by thirty, a large house then for the village. 
It was built chiefly of black walnut lumber, sawed by the little “‘Emigrant Aid” 
sawmill, and was long known as the “ Black Walnut House.” Its shingles and 
floors were of pine, brought up the Kaw River on a steamboat, one of the three 
that ever went so far up the river. I remember especially the boat, because 
its name in large letters spelled to me “Col-o-nel Something,” and it worried 
me not a little that everyone persisted in calling it ““Kernal.”” The pronuncia- 
tion of the English language was a very mysterious and incomprehensible thing 
to me in those days. 
We had been in this home but a very short time, not long enough to get 
settled, when there came up one evening one of those “‘cyclones”’ for which 
Kansas was long notorious. It threatened to blow down the house, and did 
destroy the house from which we had just moved, distributing some of its 
lumber quite into our back yard... . . 
In 1860 my father bought the ‘Emigrant Aid Saw and Grist Mill.” .... 
This was the year of the great drought, when practically no rain fell for fifteen 
months, and the crops were almost a total failure. Our subsistence for many 
months was almost exclusively corn meal and sorghum. There was no coffee 
except barley coffee, no tea, and no sugar. I have never been fond of corn 
bread since that time. When after more than a year my father obtained a 
sack of flour, the biscuits that my mother baked linger in my mind as the 
greatest delicacy and luxury of my life. .... 
It was during this time that I got my second lesson in natural history. 
My father was very fond of fishing and hunting and went fishing every Sunday 
in the Blue River. Among the fishes that he brought home, chiefly catfish, 
shad, and buffalo, were river sturgeons. I usually helped him clean and pre- 
pare them for cooking. I observed that the sturgeons had no backbone like 
the other fishes, but instead, a long fibrous rod, the notochord. I puzzled 
greatly over it, but no one could give me any enlightenment. It was one of 
the things that later directed my interest to natural history. 
Blue Mont College, founded by the Methodists in 1859, became merged 
into the State Agricultural College in 1864, and I was a very happy boy when 
in 1866 I was permitted to enter it. 
Williston was now fourteen years of age, but it was not until 
a year later that he came under the influence of real scholarship 
and of a truly great work of science: 
It was about this time, when I was fifteen years old, that Professor Mudge 
loaned me Lyell’s Antiquity of Man. I remember the night I brought it home 
there was a dance at our house, in which I was not included, but it gave me 
the opportunity in an upstairs room to read the book until the guests departed 
in early daylight hours. I was thoroughly convinced, when conviction meant 
