Oliver Marcy, LL. D. — Crook. 69 
part of a year ('90). For nearly two score years he was actively 
connected with the university. His own growth and develop- 
ment were contemporaneous with the passing of the day of 
small things to a time of greatness in the institution. When 
he was elected there were eight teachers and thirty-one stu- 
dents; at the time of his death the faculty numbered two hun- 
dred twenty-nine, and the students more than two thousand. 
His work in geology was begun and continued under sur- 
roundings and conditions that were far from auspicious. He 
had been teaching for forty-six years before he was able to 
give his chief attention to his favorite subject. When he be- 
gan his study of geology the many well written and profusely 
illustrated text books that are to-day within the reach of the 
student, did not exist. Books were expensive. But Dr. 
Marcy bought so many that the principal of Wilbraham, Miner 
Raymond, mildly reproved him for extravagance. 
Mantell had not yet written his Medals of Creation; Hugh 
Miller's Testimony of the Rocks did not appear till '56, and 
the Old Red Sandstone not until two years later. Dana did 
not begin to bring out his books until Marcy had been teach- 
ing a dozen years. Lyell's Principles of Geology had passed 
through several editions, but seems not to have come within 
Marcy's reach, so that his early knowledge of the science was 
derived almost wholly from Buckland's Mineralogy and Ge- 
ology, and Buckland was a catastrophist. 
Wilbraham had no museum and Marcy found it necessary 
to go twenty miles to Amherst to find specimens illustrating 
the principles of the science. And later, upon coming to Ev- 
anston, he found the Northwestern university without a mu- 
seum. The building of a museum was a great work, involving- 
much patient and careful work, little appreciated by the unin- 
itiated. During the course of his labors he labelled and clas- 
sified more than seventy thousand geological, botanical, ar- 
chaeological and geological specimens. The museum stands 
as an enduring monument of his activity and knowledge. 
His varied duties as curator, teacher of many subjects, and 
president of the university, left little time for investigation 
or for literary work; consequently the printed products of his 
pen fail to represent his activity or his attainments. About 
sixty articles, which he wrote chiefly for weekly papers, have 
