924 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER. 
Of the lives of but few men is it so true that cold recital of 
facts utterly fails to portray what the man was or what his 
presence meant to the community of which he was a part. Per¬ 
haps no teacher has in recent years so indelibly impressed him¬ 
self upon the lives of college men as did Dean Shaler. It 
would be necessary to secure a composite of the memory pic¬ 
tures of literally thousands of students in order adequately to 
present the characteristics of this truly remarkable man to one 
who had never known him. Since in college training the spirit 
of teaching counts for quite as much as its subject matter, a 
biographical sketch of Professor Shaler, however brief ^ should 
deal as much with the characteristic habits of the man and with 
the incidents growing out of his contact with students, as with 
his scientific attainments and the honors which came to him 
through them, important as these were. 
Professor Shaler was just past sixty-five years of age at the 
time of his death on the tenth of April 1906. Though a Ken¬ 
tuckian by birth, he was educated at the Lawrence Scientific 
school of Harvard university; and upon completion of his 
course in 1862, he hurried to Kentucky in order to enlist in the 
Union army. He was commissioned captain of an artillery com¬ 
pany afterwards well known as “ Shaler’s Battery.” A particu¬ 
larly active service throughout the war for the Union brought 
him often into positions of danger and thus contributed not a 
little to the fund of reminiscences for which he became famous. 
While in college, he had come under the instruction of Pro¬ 
fessor Louis Agassiz, and his natural love for science had thus 
been greatly stimulated. Returning from the war broken in 
health, he became instructor in paleontology at Harvard uni¬ 
versity, and with unusual rapidity was advanced to the full 
rank of professor. Professor Agassiz, as is well known, did 
not accept the then new doctrine of evolution, and it is char¬ 
acteristic of Professor Shaler both that he was one of the first 
to accept the new doctrine, and further, that he had the temer- 
