22 
HELEN ABBOTT MICHAEL 
“ A short vacation in July I passed with my aunt, Mrs. Ellen 
Abbott, at the Delaware Water Gap. There she introduced 
me to one of the resident clergymen, a man who was immensely 
interested in scientific work, and who had brought up his chil¬ 
dren to be familiar with natural history and botany, and al¬ 
though his means were extremely limited, he had spared no 
opportunities that he was able to command to train them in 
scientific methods. My aunt knew my tastes and of Professor 
Cope’s encouraging me to collect specimens. He had pur¬ 
chased her home in Haddonfield and, to her despair, had al¬ 
lowed her beautifully cultivated garden to become a perfect 
wilderness and headquarters for all the small game and rodents 
of the country around. I desired very much to obtain a col¬ 
lection of the geological specimens of the country around and 
of the numerous fossils in which the neighborhood abounded. 
My Aunt Ellen entrusted me to the escort of her clergyman 
friend, and with the assistance of my colored maid, Fannie, 
a ‘stone-breaker,’ as she called herself, we started out bright 
and early of mornings with basket and hammer in hand. These 
excursions were amply rewarded by the interesting finds that 
we made. 
“Fannie and I had been warned by our friend to look out for 
copperhead snakes, as the ridges where the fossils abounded 
were the favorite haunts of these snakes. The color of the 
stones and ground were so nearly like the color of the snake 
that some care was necessary not to pick one up. It was the 
season when snakes were plentiful. Rattlesnakes were at times 
encountered in the region, and often when we would be seated 
resting, an odor from the woods would be wafted to us, and 
then Fannie would say, ‘Come on, Miss Helen, there’s rattle¬ 
snakes about here. Don’t you smell the watermelon odor?’ 
As she had come from the South and had lived long in a lo¬ 
cality where rattlesnakes were plentiful, I did not dispute her 
knowledge, and I invariably ‘moved on.’ 
“The autumn of ’86 I attended the American Association 
meeting held in Buffalo, and I read before the chemical section 
two papers, one on the classification of plants on a chemical 
basis, and the other on an analysis of the Honduras plant Chi- 
