Edward Orton . — White . 1 99 
professor of natural sciences, he found at last the sphere for 
which nature had so well fitted him. But, although the position 
was so desirable, and his success as a teacher most brilliant, 
yet on account of his liberal tendencies in theology, and his 
growing abhorrence of the Calvinistic dogmas so commonly 
taught, he remained at this college only three years. An 
organized persecution of Dr. Orton was begun, based upon re- 
marks (paradoxical as it may seem) which he should have 
made to one of his Sunday school classes. To be accused of 
heterodoxy at that time ('56-'59) before the days of evolution, 
and when narrow and illiberal ideas dominated the church, 
which in turn controlled most of the educational institutions, 
meant a public trial, and eventual expulsion, so rather than 
undergo the torture and scandal of such an inquisition into his 
honest convictions of truth. Dr. Orton stepped down and out 
into the obscurity of a small academy at Chester, and thus was 
lost to the State Normal school one of its greatest minds and 
purest souls. 
Six long but not idle years were spent in the retirement 
of this academy, and then Dr. Orton was in 1865 called to 
Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio, through his friend, 
the Rev. Austin Craig, who had become acting president of 
that institution, after having been pastor of an independent 
church near Chester, and had learned by intimate association 
the genuine worth of the patient, gentle, and gifted principal 
of Chester academy. 
This was the real beginning of Dr. Orton's useful life, since 
as he himself described it, when about to enter upon his work 
in that institution, "The prison doors are at last opened for 
me." There, in the free atmosphere of the great west, he 
could at least express the truth, as his intellect and conscience 
dictated, without danger of persecution by the bigotry which 
had compelled his retirement from public life in New York, 
and had practically driven him from the state of his birth to 
secure employment commensurate with his talents. 
Dr. Orton's geological work at Antioch received official 
recognition in 1869 through his appointment as one of the two 
principal assistants to Dr. Newberry on the Geological Survey 
of Ohio. This difficult position he filled with great tact and 
credit, and his reports upon the district under his charge re- 
