Alerander Winchell. 145 
aspirations, Dr. Winchell’s life and work stand to the young geolo- 
gist as a monument to the altruistic and humane side of science, 
a field too often forgotten by investigators in the pursuit of ab- 
stract knowledge. His life and all his struggles were for the ele- 
vation of his profession, and the extension of its acceptance by 
humanity, upon whose support its progress depends. 
V. CONCLUSION. 
By the death of the senior member of the editorial board of 
the AMERICAN GEOLOGIST, the science for whose furtherance the 
magazine was instituted and has been maintained, lost one of its 
most earnest and successful students and teachers. Alexander 
Winchell was well known on both hemispheres as a philosophical 
geologist of no mean rank, a member of that company—always 
small in comparison with the main body—who do not limit their 
energies to one narrow field, but delight to range over the whole 
of their favorite science. No student now-a-days can be an ‘‘Ad- 
mirable Crichton,” master of the whole of human learning. In 
early times such marvels were possible. Nature was nearly un- 
known, and the earnest worker, favored with leisure, money and 
brains, could traverse the entire field and gather the crop which 
others had raised. 
But with the rapid outward advance of the boundary line of the 
known and the correspondingly rapid increase in the number of 
the laborers, the task of even hastily running overso vast an area 
became, too great for all save the few colossal intellects that the 
human race occasionally brought forth, and who tower above the 
heads of their fellows as,intellectual giants. Kven these few 
grow fewer with the passing years, and ere long it will tax or 
transcend the highest powers of nature to produce such prodigies 
—not that nature is failing, but that life is too short and faculty 
too weak to recollect or systematize the mighty mass of detail. 
Hence the rapidly increasing specialization of the present day. 
The limitations of power, time and means imposed on most 
students confine their labor within narrow areas, that can be kept 
well within their mental purview. By the multitude of such 
workers is the careful cultivation ‘of the whole field secured. 
Hence the great and increasing value of the few gifted by nature 
