Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, the distinguished Harvard geologist, poet, historian, and sociologist, was born at Newport, Kentucky, February 20, 1841. He was graduated from Harvard in 1862, where he had the benefit of almost private instruction from the great Agassiz. Shaler returned to Kentucky, and for the next two years he served in the Union army. In 1864 he was appointed assistant in palentology at Harvard; and four years later he became assistant in zoology and geology in the Lawrence Scientific School and head of the department of palentology. In 1873 the Governor of Kentucky appointed Professor Shaler director of the Kentucky Geological Survey, and he devoted parts of the next seven years to this work. He was the most efficient State geologist Kentucky has ever known, and his work for the Survey pointed out the path trodden by his successors. His assistant, Professor John R. Proctor, followed him as Director, and he stands next to his chief in the work he accomplished. The Kentucky Geological Survey (1874-1880, 6 vols.), volume three of which, entitled A General Account of the Commonwealth of Kentucky (Cambridge, Mass., 1876), was written entirely by Shaler, are excellent memorials of the work he did for his native state. In 1884 Shaler was placed in charge of the Atlantic division of the United States Geological Survey; and in 1891 he was chosen dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. This position he held until a year or two before his death. Dean Shaler published Thoughts on the Nature of Intellectual Property (Boston, 1878); Glaciers (Boston, 1881); The First Book of Geology (Boston, 1884); Kentucky: A Pioneer Commonwealth (Boston, 1885), the philosophy of Kentucky history summarized; Aspects of the Earth (New York, 1889); Nature and Man in America (New York, 1891); The Story of Our Continent (Boston, 1892); Sea and Land (New York, 1892); The United States (New York, 1893); The Interpretation of Nature (Boston, 1893); Domesticated Animals (New York, 1895); American Highways (New York, 1896); Outlines of the Earth's History (New York, 1898); The Individual (New York, 1900); Elizabeth of England (Boston, 1903, five vols.), a "dramatic romance," celebrating "the spacious times of great Elizabeth"; The Neighbor (Boston, 1904); The Citizen (New York, 1904); Man and the Earth (New York, 1905); and From Old Fields (Boston, 1906), a book of short poems. Besides these books, Dean Shaler wrote hundreds of magazine articles, reports, scientific memoirs, miscellaneous essays. He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 10, 1906, just as he was about to make ready for a final journey to Kentucky. Dean Shaler was loved and honored more at Harvard, perhaps, than any other teacher the University has ever known.

Bibliography. The World's Work (June, 1906); Science (June 8, 1906); The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, with a Supplementary Memoir by his Wife, published posthumously (Boston, 1909), is a charming record of his days at Harvard and in Kentucky.

THE ORPHAN BRIGADE[28]

[From From Old Fields (Boston, 1906)]

"TOM" MARSHALL[29]

[From The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (Boston, 1909)]

I have referred above to Thomas F. Marshall, a man of singular attractiveness and talents with whom I had a curious relation. I first met him when I was about fourteen years of age, when he, for some time a congressman, had through drunkenness fallen into a curious half-abandoned mode of life. He was then an oldish fellow, but retained much of his youthful splendor. He was about six feet three inches high, but so well built that he did not seem large, until you stood beside him. His face, even when marred by drink, had something of majesty in it. Marshall, when I knew him, picked up a scanty living as a lecturer. When sober, which he often was for months at a time, his favorite subject was temperance. On this theme he was as eloquent as Gough; in his season of spree, he turned to history. The gradations were not sharp, for he would, as I have seen him, preach most admirably of the evil of drink while he supported himself in his fervent oratory with whiskey from a silver mug. In matters of history, he had read widely. One of his favorite themes was the mediÆval history of Italy. I recall with a distinctness which shows the impressiveness of his discourses his story of Florence, so well told that ten years after, when I saw the town for the first time, the shape of it and of the neighboring places was curiously familiar. Along with some other youths, I noted down the dates of events as he gave them and looked them up. We never caught him in an error, though at times he was so drunk that he could hardly stand up. I have known many historians who doubtless much exceeded him in learning, but never another who seemed to have such a capacity for living in the events he narrated.

I had no sooner met "Tom" Marshall than we became friends. He at once took a curious fancy to me, talked to me as though we were of an age, and gave me my first chance of such contact with a man of learning and imagination. The relation, while on one side largely profitable to me, became embarrassing, for the unhappy man got the notion that I could stop his drinking if I would stay with him. A number of times when he had his dipsomaniac fury upon him I found that by sitting by his bed and talking with him on some historical subject, or rather listening to his talk, he would apparently forget about his drink and in a few hours drop asleep and awake to be sober for some months.

Sometimes these quiet interviews were most interesting to me. I recall one of them when I found him in an attack of half delirium. His memory, always active, took him back to the days when he was in Congress and to the scene when he, a very young member of the House, had been chosen by some careful elders to lead an attack on John Quincy Adams. They, the elders, were to come to his support when he had drawn the enemy's fire. It all became so real to him, that he sprang out of bed and in his tattered nightgown gave, first his own speech with all the actions of a young orator, and then the deliberate, crushing rejoinder of his mighty antagonist. At the end of it he fell back upon his bed, cursing the villains who led him into the fight and left him to take the consequences.

My relations with Marshall continued until I went to Cambridge but my influence over his drinking gradually lessened as he sank lower, and his able mind began to be permanently clouded. When I had been some months at college, I espied the poor fellow in the street, carpet-bag in hand, evidently making for my quarters. I sent word by a messenger to my chum, Hyatt, to receive and care for him, but to say that I had left town, which was true, for I went at once to Greenfield, where I had friends. Hyatt was also to provide the wanderer with a suit of clothes and a railway ticket back to Kentucky. I stayed away until I learned that Marshall was on his way home. I have always been ashamed of my conduct in this matter, but the unhappy man was at that time of his degradation an impossible burthen for me to carry; once ensconced in my quarters it would have been impossible to provide him with a dignified exit, and there was no longer hope that I might reform him. Yet the cowardice of the action has grieved me to this day.

Two years afterwards, in 1862, I saw Marshall for the last time. I was with a column of troops going through the town of Versailles, Kentucky. He was seated in front of a bar-room, with his chin upon the top of his cane. He was so far gone that the sight merely troubled his wits without affording him any explanation of what it meant. His bleared though still noble face stays in my memories as one of the saddest of those weary years.

LINCOLN IN KENTUCKY

[From the same]

Among the interesting and in a way shaping incidents of my boyhood, was a brief contact with Abraham Lincoln about 1856. He was coming on foot from the town of Covington; I was on horseback, and met him near the bridge over the Licking River. He asked the way to my grandfather's house, which was about a mile off. Attracted by his appearance, I dismounted and asked him to get on my horse, which he declined to do; so I walked beside him. Probably because he knew how to talk to a lad—few know the art, and those the large natures alone—we became at once friendly. When I had shown him into the house, I hung about to find his name. As I had never heard of Mr. Lincoln of Illinois, it was explained to me that he was the man who was "running against" the Little Giant. We lads all knew Stephen A. Douglas, who was so popular that farm tools were named for him: the Little Giant this and that of cornshellers or ploughs. While Mr. Lincoln was with my grandfather, my mother dined or supped with him. When she came home she said: "I have had a long talk with Mr. Lincoln, who is called an Abolitionist; if he is an Abolitionist, I am an Abolitionist." I well remember the horror with which this remark inspired the household: if my mother had said she was Satan, it could not have been worse. The droll part of the matter is that all the reasonable people about me were in heart haters of slavery. They saw and deplored its evils, and were full of fanciful schemes for making an end of it. But the name Abolitionist was abominated.

I never knew what brought Mr. Lincoln to my grandfather's house. It is likely that he came because a certain doctor of central Kentucky, an uncle of Mr. Lincoln, a widower, had recently married an aunt of mine, a widow. This union of two middle-aged people, each with large families, brought trouble; since family traditions were against divorce, a separation was effected which had an amusing though tragic finish. When all other matters of property had been arranged and P. had betaken himself to his plantation in Mississippi, as an afterthought he set up a supplementary claim to a saddle mule belonging to my aunt which he had forgotten to demand in the settlement. This reopened the question, and it was determined in family council that the grasping doctor should not be satisfied. We boys had the notion that Mr. Lincoln's visit related to this episode of the mule, for shortly after the "critter" was sent with a servant by steamboat, to be delivered to the claimant at the landing of his plantation on the Mississippi River. In due time the negro returned and made report: It was that the unworthy suitor came with a group of his friends to witness his success, mounted, and started to ride away, but the beast, frisky from its long confinement, "stooped up behind," as the darkeys phrase it, and threw his master and killed him. Whether Lincoln had a hand in the negotiations which led to this finish or not, I am sure that the humor of it must have tickled him.