OF TMC 
UNIVERSITY of ILLINOIS. 
THE 
AMERICAN GEOLOGIST. 
Vol. XX. AUGUST, 1897. No. 2 
CHARLES THOMAS JACKSON. 
By J. B. Woodworth, Cambridge, Mass. 
[Plate IV]. 
Charles Thomas Jackson, the first state geologist of Maine, 
Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, was born in Plj^mouth, 
Mass., June 21st 1805, the son of Charles Jackson, a merchant 
of that historic town by the sea, and Lucy Cotton, his wife. 
To which of his parents, if to one more than to the other, 
the youthful Jackson owed his taste for scientific investiga- 
tion and the grown man his genius for fruitful suggestion, it 
can not be stated with certainty ; but it is believed that his 
ready memory was a gift from the Cottons. 
Dr. Jackson's education and early training were of that lib- 
eralizing kind, gained in the attainment of medical lore, 
which has given to American science so many well-known 
names. Before the period of the professional scientific schools, 
an opening to the career of an educated naturalist and geolo- 
gist was more largely through the study of medicine than by 
any other means. Medicine alone required at that time an 
acquaintance v/ith laboratory methods in chemistry and an 
intimate knowledge of physiology or natural history. He be- 
gan the study of medicine under the private tutorage of Drs. 
James Jackson and Walter Channing, who prepared him for 
entrance to the Harvard Medical school. He graduated as 
