THE 
AMERICAN GEOLOGIST. 
Vol. XXV. APRIL, 1900. No. 4 
EDWARD ORTON. 
By I. C. White, Morgantown, W. Va. 
(Portrait.) 
"Edward Orton was well born. He had behind him not 
merely 'five generations of New England farmers', but an an- 
cestry of such virility and cleanness of life that its potency 
and promise remained unimpaired, and we feel no surprise that 
this stock, after two centuries of unnoticed growth, at length 
burst into flower." Thus writes Mr. Samuel Carroll Derby in 
a biographical sketch of the late Dr. Orton, published in the 
"Old Northwest" Genealogical Quarterly for January, 1900. 
The truth of this beautiful tribute to the ancestry of Ed- 
ward Orton is accentuated by a reference to two other dis- 
tinguished members of the Orton family that have left their 
impress upon the nineteenth century. One of these w^as Prof. 
James Orton, late of Vassar College, the eminent teacher, 
author and collector, who yielded up his life to science amid 
the lofty peaks of the Peruvian plateau, in 1877; the other was 
William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph 
Company, for twenty-one years up to his decease in 1878, who 
made for himself a world-wide fame as one of the first great 
organizers of modern business agencies. William and Ed- 
ward had the same great-grandfather (Samuel 2nd), and Capt. 
Samuel Orton (1694- 1774) was the great-great-grandfather of 
the three distinguished men (Edward, James, William). 
Dr. Orton was born on the 9th of March, 1829, in Delaware 
