OBITUARY NOTICES. 
467 
a century an efficient and prominent officer of the oldest 
and one of the most important of these organizations must 
have had share enough in shaping the movement of affairs 
to warrant a memorial of him more complete than the 
necessarily brief one now presented and intended to form a 
part of the records of this Society. 
Charles Otis Boutelle was born in Lexington, Mas¬ 
sachusetts, August 4, 1813. His grandfather was an officer 
who served honorably throughout the Revolutionary War. 
His father, a skillful physician and a man of brave and 
earnest temperament, was a surgeon in the navy during 
the war of 1812. His mother, a daughter of General 
Nathaniel Goodwin, of Plymouth, who served also during 
that war, was a woman loved and revered by all who knew 
her. She lived to nearly the age of one hundred, and her 
son never ceased to mourn her loss. 
With such ancestry, many features of Mr. Boutelle’s 
character can be traced to their source. Having while yet 
at an early age lost his father, he was educated by his uncle, 
the Reverend Ezra Shaw Goodwin, of Sandwich, Massachu¬ 
setts, and received from him a thorough training in both 
the classics and mathematics. It soon became necessary for 
him to earn his own living; so he taught school, studied 
surveying, and one day, having heard that a friend who 
owned a work on that subject was willing to lend it to him, 
he walked twenty miles to get it. His skill in practical sur¬ 
veying soon became known, and a place was given to him 
on the survey of his native State by its director, Simeon 
Borden. 
Having served creditably as Mr. Borden’s chief assistant, 
he was appointed by Alexander Dallas Bache, Superinten¬ 
dent of the U. S. Coast Survey, to a position upon that work 
in January, 1844. His service was at first in the office, but 
his active temperament and robust physique demanded less 
sedentary occupation, and his special capabilities for the 
field were quickly recognized by his distinguished chief. 
His advancement was rapid. In 1846 he was made an as- 
