MEMORIAL OF S. W. WILLISTOX bl 



alert to seize every chance to learn and to expand his horizon. We can 

 not imagine a life story more helpful than his to the youth predisposed 

 to science who has both to discover his own talent and to explore every 

 avenue of opportunity which presents itself. 



Williston was born in Eoxbury, now a part of Boston, July 10, 1852. 

 "The Williston family/' he writes, "has been traced back to about 1650 

 in Massachusetts; they were about the usual run of common people, no 

 one famous or even noted, whether for good or evil. . . . Some of 

 them served in the War of the Revolution and many were fishermen." 

 His father was born in Maine, and he remarks of this branch of the 

 family that "they knew little of schools. My father, if he ever went to 

 school, did not take kindly to study, for he never learned to read or 

 write. ... It was a great pity, too, for my father was a man of far 

 more than ordinary ability as a mechanic — he was noted always for his 

 skill. ... Of all his children I resembled him the most, both physi- 

 cally and mentally." His mother was from England, having come with 

 her parents. to New Jersey about 1812. She had a fair common-school 

 education, and the effects of her early English training and her accent 

 remained through life. 



The intellectual and social environment of Eoxbury probably never 

 would have produced a geologist or a paleontologist, and while the next 

 step in Williston's life was hard, yet it was propitious, as the events 

 proved : 



"In the spring of 1857 my parents decided to emigrate to Kansas. A colony 

 had left the year before for Manhattan, and the letters that came back had 

 infected many with the desire to go West. . . . The abolitionists were urg- 

 ing eastern people to colonize the territory in order to help John Brown pre- 

 serve it to the 'Free States.' . . . The trip was long and tedious by rail to 

 Saint Louis, then a small place, and thence by steamboat up the Missouri River 

 to Leavenworth. There was no Kansas City then. We reached Leavenworth 

 about the twentieth of May. Here we remained a few days in a very small 

 hotel, while my father bought a yoke of oxen and a wagon and such provisions 

 and household things as were indispensable, and we started on the slow and 

 tedious drive of 115 miles to Manhattan through a country but very sparsely 

 settled. For the most part we children rode in the covered wagon, while my 

 father and cousin walked and drove the oxen." 



In a small single room, with a loft, in a log cabin about fifteen feet 

 square, the family was brought up. The four boys slept in the loft above. 

 The Potawatomie Indians had a village in the immediate vicinity. The 

 first building erected in the new town was the stone school-house, to 

 which books were supplied by the Emigrant Aid Society. At the age of 

 seven young Williston made his first collection of fossil shells from de- 



