MUS. COMP. ZOOL 
LIBRARY 
MAR 2 6 1964 
Published monthly by The Agassiz Association, ArcAdiA: Sound Beach, Connecticut. 
Subscription, SI. 50 a year Single copy, 15 cents 
Entered as Second-Class Matter June 12, 1909, at Sound Beach Post Office, under Act of March 3, 1897. 
Acceptance for mailing at special rate of postage provided for in Section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917, 
authorized on June 27, 1918. 
Volume XIII. APRIL, 1921 Number 11 
How I Became Interested in Geology. 
By Theodore H. Cooper, Batavia, New York. 
«TT TE all miss congenial people, 
\\f people who are going our 
’ way, and whose companion- 
ship would make life sweeter for us. 
Often we are a day too early, or a day 
too late, at the point where our paths 
cross. How many such congenial souls 
we miss we know not, but for my part, 
considering the number I have met, I 
think it may be many.” 
The foregoing extract from John 
Burroughs’s “The Summit of the 
Years” applies to books as well as to 
people. 
My interest in geology was aroused 
by finding an old copy of “Steele’s 
Fourteen Weeks in Geology in a sec- 
ondhand shop. 1 would have missed a 
great deal if I had never become inter- 
ested in this subject and yet what slight 
chances there were that I shoidd. I had 
a vague notion of what geology is, for 
I had seen samples of “rock” in a cabi- 
net in a high school room. But these 
rocks had always looked pretty dead to 
me, and their names and all the names 
connected with this science which I 
had noticed at the bottom of pictures 
of prehistoric animals were so unpro- 
nounceable and meaningless that I had 
become a little prejudiced against 
geology, supposing it to be so dry that 
if used in small words it would float 
away in the air. 
They sounded when pronounced to 
me something like Walt Mason’s 
“Thor-dineriomegantosaur-megopium- 
permastodon - letheriumsohelpmejohn,” 
or like a friend that came to me re- 
cently with the startling fact that he 
had read of a carnivorous mastodon’s 
tooth weighing twelve pounds. “Are 
you sure it was a carnivorous one or 
was it the insectivorous kind?” 1 asked. 
“I dunno, it had one of them long 
names, but anyhow it weighed twelve 
pounds.” 
I opened the book and turning over a 
few pages came to a picture of two 
extraordinary looking sea monsters, 
one with a whalelike body and a croco- 
dile’s head, the other looking like a 
huge swan without feathers. “Ichthy- 
osaur and Plesiosaur” was written be- 
low. This meant nothing to me of 
course, but something else did as I 
glanced at the opposite page. “The 
eyes were often two feet in diameter.” 
Some animal ! I bought the book for 
ten cents, took it home and read what 
Copyright 1921 by The Agassiz Association, ArcAdiA: Sound Beach, Conn. 
