Alexander Winchell. 113 
measure and been adopted without dissenting votes. When, 
therefore, the unanimity of the Board in voting for his return was 
made known, and the general wish of the faculty of the university 
was understood to sustain the action, he did not hesitate to return 
to the institution from which he had been tempted six years 
before. The university had progressed in the previous seven 
years. The position now offered embraced much more favorable 
conditions for scientific advancement than the position he had 
left. His duties at that time were spread over the.whole field of 
geology, zoology, botany, museum and microscopical work. When 
he returned the faculty embraced a professor of geology and 
paleontology; a professor of mineralogy and economic geology; a 
professor of zoology; an assistant professor of botany; an 
instructor in the microscopical laboratory, and a curator of the 
museum, all of whose duties devolved upon one man in 1872. 
In his small pamphlet, Geology of the Stars, he presented the 
first generalization of the history which subsequently was expanded 
into World-Life. His conception of geology, as a history of the 
earth, led to a grasp of all its history—to the remotest limit of 
time, past and future. Thus geology was welded to cosmogony. 
The search for conditions still antecedent to those revealed by the 
remotest stretch of the vision of science led him into the field of 
metaphysics. The central idea of all his lectures of this class was 
the life-time of a world, Sometimes the great theme was com- 
passed in a single lecture, sometimes in two, and perhaps more 
frequently it was expanded, especially in his university courses, 
to six or eight, and in one of his later courses it was constituted a 
series that extended through the time of a whole term. Every 
separate lecture was a chapter in the grand story. No lecture had 
a fixed form of words, nor subject matter. . The selection of the 
topics and the degree of expansion to give them were determined 
always by the proprieties of the occasion, and the whole body of 
language, and many of the illustrations, were such as were 
prompted by the hour, 
He now began, on his return to the university to which he had 
given the labor of his earlier years, the preparation of an extended 
syllabus of a course of instruction in general geology. This is 
accompanied by copious references to sources of information—a 
sort of geological bibliography. The first part of this compilation 
relates to the facts of geology and the second to the theories of 
