198 TJie American Geologist. April, 1900 
county, New York. His father, Rev. Samuel Gibbs Orton, 
was a Congregational clergyman of great zeal and influence, 
who served as pastor of the churches at Sidney Plains and 
Delhi in the same county, successively from 1826 to 1833, when 
on account of failing health he moved to Chatauqua county, 
and finally became pastor of the Presbyterian church at Rip- 
ley, on the shore of lake Erie, near the Pennsylvania-New 
York state line. Here, under the tuition of his father, and 
in the neighboring academies of Westfield and Fredonia, 
young Orton was fitted for college. He entered Hamilton 
(which had also been his father's alma mater), in the sopho- 
more year, at the age of sixteen, "with enough scholastic at- 
tainments to pass muster, but lacking because of immaturity 
the ability to make the most out of a college course," Dr. Or- 
ton says of himself in the half century class letter which he 
prepared in 1898. 
The Hamilton College of that day, like most of its sister 
institutions, was innocent of science, and its principal teaching 
was of the classics, literature, mathematics, and such musty 
metaphysics, and theology as was current at the time. Out 
of it all Dr. Orton emerged on graduation day w'ith a mind 
fairly well trained for accurate thought and facility of express- 
ion, principally as he himself says, from the study of the Greek 
language and literature. 
The collegiate training of the time naturally tended to give 
its votaries an aspiration to enter the Christian ministry, and 
young Orton was no exception to the rule. The stern and in- 
flexible Calvinism of his father, imbibed under the tutelage of 
Dr. Nathaniel Taylor, at Yale, had been so firmly implanted 
into the mind of the son, that in spite of the gentle, kind, and 
loving spirit of the latter, the plant took root even in such in- 
fertile soil, to flourish only for a season, and finally wither and 
die under the beams of the rising sun of science. 
His theological studies at Lane w^ere interrupted by a year's- 
work at Harvard, where in a more liberal theologic atmos- 
phere, so many doubts invaded his mind, that a subsequent 
year at Andover failed to uproot them, and the ministry which 
he entered at Downsville, N. Y., in January, 1856, was aban- 
doned in June of the same year for the more congenial work 
of teaching in the State Normal school at Albany. Here, as 
