MEMORIAL OF CHARLES A. DAVIS 15 



fanned into flame by the principal of the Portsmonth High School, who, 

 on her marriage to the principal of the Auburn High School, offered him 

 a chance to go there and live with them, brush up his Greek, and enter 

 Bowdoin College. This he did after a year, in 1882, at the age of twenty. 



He largely Avorked his way through college, though he had one of the 

 scholarships assigned to students who had no bad habits. He was a 

 member of the Alpha Delta Phi and of Phi Beta Kappa fraternities, 

 steward of a dining club, and also curator of the Cleveland Mineral 

 Cabinet, which contained Haury's famous collection. He thus gained a 

 knowledge of mineralog}^, which often surprised me in later life, long 

 after his main work had gone in other directions. He sold bicycles, and 

 was proud all his life of the fact that he was the first appointed consul 

 of the League of American Wheelmen. No doubt his bicycling career 

 was aided by that Yankee mechanical knack at tinkering — a strong trait — 

 AA'hich made him an expert repairer of old mahogany furniture and a 

 diviser of mechanical contrivances like his peat sampler. The cunning 

 hand added to the artistic eye, inherited from his father, also made him 

 good at water colors and in drawing, which was especially convenient in 

 the preparation of illustrations. 



While in Bowdoin he met Frances Margaret Humphreys, on whom he 

 ever after lavished a devotion, a care, and an admiration which was its 

 own great reward. She was also of old New England stock, and had the 

 wide sympathy, brilliancy of conversation, and social intuition which not 

 only make an ideal wife, but were qualities most helpful in the entertain- 

 ing of undergraduates. 



At AI.MA 



He graduated at Bowdoin in 1886 (A. B.), married that summer, Au- 

 gust 29, 1886, and went to the Hyde Park High School, in the suburbs 

 of Chicago, Illinois. But though a good teacher, a big city was not his 

 proper place, and in 1887 he gladly went to the college at Alma, near the 

 center of lower Michigan, his remarkable breadth of scientific interest 

 and training making him an exceptional teacher of natural science and 

 chemistry in a small institution. In 1889 he took his A. M. from Bow- 

 doin. In 1894 he assisted in organizing the Michigan Academy of Sci- 

 ence and was its first secretary. Associated with him in this work were 

 Sherzer, Jefferson, Eussell, and other well known men. 



Learning that Professor Davis had preserved the drillings of the then 

 remarkably deep well of the Alma Sanitarium, I went to Alma to study 

 them, and thus met him for the first time. An atmosphere of plain living 

 (tempered by a delicious sauce of mushrooms that he gathered on the 

 college campus) and high thinking surrounded his home. His Alma 



II— Bull. Gkol. Soc. Am., Vol. 2S, 1916 



