84 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ALBANY MEETING - 



work would have been in a different field. That he would have succeeded 

 in any one of many professions no one who has studied his career can 

 doubt, for he had a remarkable versatility. It was not chance that led 

 liini into science, but it was more or less fortuitous that his choice was 

 g-eology. 



It must not be supposed that Hayes's boyhood was passed in following 

 the bent of his own inclinations. What has been recorded above consti- 

 tuted his pastimes in idle moments, which, as he grew older, were all too 

 few, for he was brought up to work. Besides the home duties that fall to 

 the country lad, he spent much time working on his grandfather Wolcott's 

 farm near Granville. Here he gained that love and knowledge of farm- 

 ing that was always a passion with him. When seventeen he spent one 

 summer working in a machine shop in the neighboring town of Newark. 



The community of prosperous farmers in which Hayes grew up has 

 transferred to Ohio the intellectual traditions of I^ew England, which 

 there took root. This is made evident by the number of collegiate insti- 

 tutions founded in Ohio during the early history of the State, of Avhich 

 one, Denison University, was in the town of Hayes's nativity. This fact, 

 combined with the more direct influence of his home life, was most favor- 

 able to intellectual growth, though the immediately accessible opportuni- 

 ties for education were by no means brilliant. 



Hayes began his education in the ungraded school at Hanover, where 

 the standards of teaching were not high. Yet he was, no doubt, there 

 well grounded in the elements of learning. His work is stated to have 

 been steady and successful, and he never complained that any lesson was 

 "too hard," just as in after life he never found any problem too difficult. 

 The elementary schooling was later extended by a term at the preparatory 

 school of Denison University, where he began his preparation for college. 

 At the age of nineteen he entered the subfreshman school of Oberlin 

 College, where his sister Ellen was then a student. His college prepara- 

 tion was more or less broken by the necessity of earning money to con- 

 tinue his studies, but he finally entered Oberlin as a member of the class 

 of 1883. 



At Oberlin College 



At the time of Hayes's entrance Oberlin College included some 600 

 students, most of whom were from the Middle West. It is probable that 

 the percentage of these students who had come to college with the purpose 

 of serious work was far greater than that of the undergraduates of the 

 average college today. Hayes entered as a student in the classical and 

 scientific department, but the Oberlin catalogue of 1879 indicates that 



