220 Memoir of Rev. John Prince, LL. D. 



REMARKS BY THE EDITOR. 



It would be quite superfluous to attempt to add any thing to the 

 preceding account of the late Dr. Prince, were it not that some cir- 

 cumstances fell under my own observation, which evince that his 

 character sustained its interesting peculiarities, to a very late period 

 of his life. 



About one year before the death of Dr. Prince, (in May, 1835,) 

 I was called to give a course of geological lectures in Salem, (Mass.) 

 the town in which he resided. Dr. Prince was among my constant 

 hearers, and also among the most attentive of a large and very intel- 

 ligent audience. Although he had some acquaintance with mine- 

 rals, geology was to him a new science. He had indeed been long 

 accustomed to look beyond this planet, and to scrutinize other 

 worlds ; but he had not been habituated to study the structure of 

 this earth. To him, then in his eighty fifth year, this was an ex- 

 periment, like that made at an earlier period of life, by the celebra- 

 ted Dr. Johnson, who, it is said, after he Was seventy years old, 

 learned a new language, for the sake of trying the soundness of his 

 mind and memory. 



Dr. Prince became deeply interested in the surprising develop- 

 ments of geology, and with the ardor of early life examined the 

 drawings and the specimens, and attended to the experimental illus- 

 trations. Nor was he satisfied with the evidence of the lecture 

 room. He took a party of gentlemen to see the beautiful jasper at 

 Saugus, near Lynn, several miles from Salem, and being unwilling 

 to relinquish any part of a more extensive geological excursion that 

 was proposed, he passed over, by the beach that leads to Nahant, 

 and with the writer of these remarks for an expounder of the sur- 

 prising geological facts that abound in this ocean-barrier of rock, he 

 followed the sea shore to Marblehead, and was particularly impressed 

 by the magnificent dykes of trap that here invade the firm cliffs of 

 sienite, and with the granite veins which rival those of Skye and Ar- 

 ran, (the classical ground of British geologists,) in their wonderful 

 intrusions, tortuous ramifications, and abrupt displacements ; while 

 the broken veins are again recovered, at no great distance, and by 

 their exact accordance in structure, color and form, evince that they 

 were once connected, and were removed by convulsions from the po- 

 sition where they were first congealed after their igneous injection. 



There was one enormous dyke in particular, upon the beach be- 

 tween Lynn and Salem, which excited so much interest in Dr. 



