I have made confession of three articles of the kindergarten creed. We believe in conscious nurture of the free self-activity of childhood. We believe in the consecration of woman to a nurturing life. We believe that men and nations should participate in woman's supreme privilege. The fourth article of our creed gives the reason for the justification of all the others. We believe that God is the supreme nurturer, and that the world is the cradle wherein He nurtures nascent humanity so that it may grow into His image. "I count it," says Emerson, “a sufficient explanation of that phenomenon we call the world that God would educate a human soul. The nurturing activity which satisfies omniscient love through all eternity may well appeal to what is likest God in the human soul."

The final source of all ideals of life is the character of the Being from whom the universe is supposed to originate, by whom it is sustained, and approximation to whom is the impulsion under which it moves toward its far-off goal. Thus the despotisms of Asia are imitations of the despotism of Brahm, and the mental arrest of Asia is an object lesson on the blight of intellect by the doctrine of a supreme principle which is not akin but antagonistic to human personality. Such freedom as occidental nations have thus far achieved is the direct outcome of belief in a social and self-communicating God, ever calling forth from the abyss of nothingness souls free like Himself, and to whom He gives an infinite universe as a theater of activity and an instrument of education. To know such a God is to be inspired with the correlative idea of freedom and nurture, for only the free soul can be nurtured and only conscious nurture can respond to the need of the free soul. It will always be true that

He only earns his freedom and existence

Who daily conquers them anew.

It will always be true that the "eternal womanly," or that divine nurturing activity, whose fairest natural analogue is mother love, makes possible the struggle for freedom and assures to it a certain victory.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF JOSEPH LE CONTE.a
By S. B. CHRISTY,

University of California, Berkeley, Cal.

In the death of Joseph Le Conte, at Yosemite, Cal., on July 6, 1901, the institute has lost one of its most distinguished honorary members and the University of California its most beloved professor.

The South has produced many distinguished men. In the law, in politics, and in war they have made their mark, and we are all proud of their records. But in science not so many have achieved distinction. The Le Conte family is thus the more remarkable, in that it has produced three men of eminence in that field, while there are descendants of promise yet to be heard from.

Joseph Le Conte was born February 26, 1823, at Woodmanston plantation, Liberty County, Ga. He came of Huguenot ancestry on his father's side and Puritan on his mother's. His mother died when he was only 3 years old, and he was brought up by his father with the most tender care. This father was a very remarkable man; a good physician, a skillful chemist and naturalist, a great hunter, fond of all manly sports, and a passionate lover of nature. Young Le Conte owed much to his father's training, but he was partly prepared for college by Alexander Stephens, who entered into all the sports of his pupils, and strongly

a Abridged from a paper read before the American Institute of Mining Engineers at the Mexican meeting, November, 1901, and printed in Vol. XXXI of the Transactions of the Institute.

impressed them with his own intense hatred of lying and all forms of deceit. His training for college comprised the "Three R's," Latin and Greek through Livy and Xenophon, and mathematics through algebra and geometry.

His life on the plantation at that time was an ideal one; and, as one reads his description of it in his autobiography, one can not but regret the passing away forever of a stage of civilization that made such an existence possible. It was an admirable training for the future lover of nature. Hunting, fishing, boating, swimming, riding were constant sources of enjoyment and profit. In all forms of athletics he was wonderfully proficient. Of a slight, but wiry build, he was capable of performing many feats of strength and agility better than many strong men of nearly double his weight.

At 14 he was prepared to enter college, but it was wisely decided to have him wait a year; so at 15 he went to college at Athens, Ga. Of this period, he writes: I may add, here, that for me the so-called dangers of college life never existed. I saw much of vicious conduct among students, of course; but whether such example injures or not depends entirely.on inheritance and early training. For myself, I never felt the least temptation to join in vicious courses, nor have I ever been enticed by others to do so. College students are not so bad as some seem to think. They never deliberately try to lead anyone astray. They simply seek congenial association. Indeed, I believe that college is the safest place in the world for young men. It is impossible always to remain in the bombproof of home. One must go out into the world and fight the battle of life. Now, college men are a picked set, far safer than the average.a

He graduated at Athens, Ga., in 1841, at 18 years 5 months. There was then no opportunity to study nature for its own sake, and as the nearest approach to it we find him, in 1843, a student of medicine in the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. In the summer of 1843-44 he took a trip of several months, with one of his cousins, right into the heart of what was then a wilderness, inhabited only by Indians and Indian agents. His course took him through the Lake Superior country (at that time just being prospected for copper) into Canada, and then down the Mississippi River, long before such towns as Minneapolis were founded.

This trip left a great impression upon his mind. He made en route a number of geological observations, the importance of which he was then too young to realize, which were afterwards confirmed and more fully appreciated by other observers.

In 1845 he graduated from the medical school and settled down as a practicing physician in Georgia.

In the practice of medicine he was moderately successful; but his heart was not in the work. He felt, probably, more keenly than most, the responsibility for the life of his patients, and the lack of preparation which the medical training of that time gave for what he himself terms "the awful responsibilities of a medical practitioner." Then, too, it was characteristic of the man to shrink from practical details; they did not interest him; his nature reached out to solve the larger problems of the mind. He had at this time three medical students, and teaching them interested him far more than the practice of medicine. He confesses to having felt a strong sense of wasted life, though he carefully concealed it from all, even from his wife.

Richard Owen, the comparative anatomist, first interested him in the "homologues of the human skeleton," and this led him to decide shortly after (in 1850) to become a pupil of Agassiz. He went to Cambridge in August:

The university does not open till October, but that does not matter. I did not come to Harvard to enter the university, but only to study with Agassiz, and

aThis, as well as the other quoted matter in this paper, is taken from Professor Le Conte's unpublished autobiography, a work which Professor Christy characterizes as one of the most fascinating stories he has ever read.-ED.

we (Dr. Jones and myself) went right to work. The first work he put us at was very characteristic of the man. He thought a moment, and then pulled out a drawer containing 500 to 1,000 separated valves of unios.

There were 50 to 100 different species, all mixed up. "Pair these valves," said he, and classify into species-names no matter-but separate in species." He left us alone-very severely alone. We worked on these shells for one whole week. He looked at the work from time to time, but made no remark. Finally we told him we had done the best we could. He examined carefully, and was greatly pleased. It happened just then that there entered the room a friend of his just from Europe, M. Ampère, son of the great electrician. He introduced us, and remarked that these pupils of his had just amended correctly the classification of Lea, the great authority on unios.

I only give this as an example of his method of teaching. He constantly carried it out, with some modifications. He set us tasks; we worked unaided, with only a hint here and there. As we became better acquainted, however, finding us already well advanced in thoughtfulness, he often gave us long talks, expounding his biological philosophy and inviting discussion, which we were not slow to accept. He thus scattered unpublished thoughts and suggestions broadcast on all sides with a free hand. *

*

*

There are two types of great men. Men of one class are great by the quantity and importance of their work, but when you come in contact with and measure them intellectually they seem of ordinary stature. Their work is greater than themselves, though surely patience and persistence are admirable qualities which ought to be added to their work in estimating their greatness. Those of the other class, the nearer you approach them the greater they grow. They are themselves greater than all their visible results. These are the great teachers. Their spirit and enthusiasm are contagious, their personality is magnetic. They not only think intensely, but they are the cause of thought in others. Agassiz was preeminently of this class.

A year later (in 1852) Le Conte accepted the professorship of science at Oglethorpe University, Midway, Ga. He was expected to teach all the sciences except astronomy, which went with the chair of mathematics. For $1,000 a year he actually did teach mechanics, physics, chemistry, geology, and botany. A year later he was called to a better position in his own university at Athens, Ga., where for five years he was able to confine himself to natural history, though he had to teach French for a year. In 1857 he was called to the professorship of chemistry and geology at South Carolina College, Columbia, S. C., where he remained till after the war.

Speaking of the outbreak of the war of 1861, he says:

At first I was extremely reluctant, and even opposed, to the movement. I doubted the necessity of secession; I dreaded the impending conflict and the result. A large number of the best and most thoughtful men in the South felt as I did; but gradually a change came about-how, who can say? It was in the atmosphere. We breathed it in the air; it reverberated from heart to heart; it was like a spiritual contagion-good or bad, who could say? But the final result was enthusiastic unanimity of sentiment throughout the South. Those who were the latest and the most reluctant, because they saw the seriousness of the result, were also the most earnest and most reliable. Those who did not join in the movement (with very few exceptions, like Pettigrew) were untrue men in every way, both North and South alike.

Professor Le Conte carried on his teaching till the college was disbanded, as the war became more desperate, and then offered his services to the Confederates, and was employed as chemist and geological expert in the search for deposits of niter and the manufacture of explosives. He suffered all the horrors of war except death in his immediate family. For three years he had the barest and coarsest of food, never tasting tea, coffee, or sugar for that time, and, strange to say, though fond of them, hardly feeling their loss. At the end of the war all his property was gone. His Georgia home had been in the path of Sherman's army, and everything he possessed except the land was gone.

Regarding the actual loss to the South from the emancipation of the slaves, Professor Le Conte maintained at the time, and always afterwards, that it was

not necessarily a loss like that due to the burning of a house. He pointed out that

*

Where the black labor remains reliable, and the management is judicious, the land makes as much as ever it did, and the owner is as rich as ever he was; he has suffered no loss. * * But in some places the labor continues to be utterly unreliable. This is especially true of the so-called "black belt," where the blacks are greatly in excess, and still more especially true in Liberty County, Ga., where my own landed property is situated. I have there more than 2,000 acres of land, half of it rich land. It has never made me one cent since the war. The negroes will not work for wages. They can live on fish, crawfish, and oysters, almost without work. A little patch of cotton will make more tobacco and coarse clothing than they can use. They have no ambition to improve, and live almost like animals. The whites have nearly all quit the country and gone somewhere else. The whole lower and richer part of the county is practically given over to the blacks.

In 1869 Professor Le Conte left Columbia to accept a call to the University of California, whither his brother John had preceded him a year before. He was expected at first to teach, alone and without assistants or laboratory appliances, botany, zoology, and geology. He was compelled to give his instruction entirely by lectures. This he did for many years, and he developed a method of lecture instruction that has probably never been excelled by any teacher of these subjects. Later he was relieved from the heavy task of carrying these three subjects, and confined his teaching entirely to geology. But it was doubtless fortunate for his students that he taught these related subjects for so many years, since otherwise his wonderful grasp of the doctrine of organic evolution would have been impossible. As it was, he welded these three subjects, zoology, botany, and geology, all studied by the comparative method, into an organic unity that made a neverto-be-effaced impression on all his hearers.

It was probably for him, and certainly for California, fortunate that he came when he did to the State University. One can best understand this from his own words:

I have said that my intellectual activity was powerfully stimulated by my coming to California. There were many reasons for this: First, the reaction from the long agony of the war. Abstract thought was almost impossible, for anxiety during the war, and the presence of its ruinous results afterwards. Second, the splendid field for geological research offered here. Third, contrary to my expectations, I found here an exceptionally active, energetic, and intelligent population. What California wanted then (and still to some extent wants) is a more thorough organization of society-an organized public opinion-conventions, traditions-with them, wholesome restraining influences on the weak and the vicious. But the strong and the virtuous do not need these-indeed, are perhaps better without them. Family and name have little influence here; every man must stand on his own merits.

I threw myself into my work with all my energy. I enjoyed my teaching intensely, and this made my teaching correspondingly interesting to my students. I never tire of my subject. Although I have gone over my course in geology now fifty times, I am still as interested in it as ever. Although the whole subject is perfectly familiar to me, I never enter my lecture room without two hours' intense preparation. I must revive my interest; I must get up steam. I am firmly convinced that investigation ought never to be separated from teaching, as many suppose; that not only is one a better teacher from being an investigator, but he is also a better investigator for being a teacher. Nothing so clears up the thought as the earnest attempt to make it clear to others by personal address. Almost every good thought I ever had came first into my mind during the heat of direct preparation for my class lectures. Nearly everything I ever wrote was first given in my class room, and written out and perfected afterwards. Whatever success I have ever achieved in teaching has been the result of my intense interest in my subject and in my students.

His first geological studies date back to that long trip to the Lake Superior region, where he was present at the first opening up of the copper mines; but even then he was more interested on the scientific than on the technical side.

His work with Agassiz on the coral reefs of Florida gave another impetus to his tastes. His search for nitre deposits for the Confederate government, during the dark days of the war, brought him into the practical branch of our profession. But his coming to California, then a virgin field to geologists, inaugurated a new era in his life.

In his vacations he ranged the foothills and the Sierras of California, the Cascades of Oregon, and then into British Columbia. He visited the Comstock mines of Nevada in their prime. He first noted the extent and significance of the great Columbia lava flood that stretches down into northern California. He developed and perfected his theory of mountain formation, and worked out a number of important problems in California geology. Perhaps our greatest interest attaches to his studies in the origin of metalliferous veins. His visits to Virginia City, Nev., to the California gold veins and auriferous gravel deposits, and, most of all, to the sulphur banks, California, and Steamboat Springs, Nev., where traces of einnabar (and, in the latter, also gold, silver, and copper) were still being deposited, stimulated his interest to the highest pitch.

The world is certainly indebted to him for his Elements of Geology, which presents the subject, stripped of every needless technicality, so as to make it interesting to every intelligent reader. I do not know a book in any language which so clearly opens the delights of the science he loved best to the beginner; and anyone who has imbibed its spirit has drawn a lesson from the book of nature which will always give to life new meaning and interest.

He was much interested in the remarkable fossil footprints that had been discovered in some sandstone beds. Dr. Harkness and others had claimed that some of these had been made by prehistoric men. Professor Le Conte examined them with Dr. Harkness and several others, and each wrote a paper, Dr. Harkness arguing in favor of the human origin, and Dr. Le Conte against it. It is needless to add that the latter view is now accepted. The following interesting observations were made at this time by Professor Le Conte concerning the convicts who were employed in blasting out fresh exposures in the formation:

While here my observations on criminals interested me greatly. They enjoyed the work and the investigation immensely and very intelligently. We were all working together, and all intensely interested together. We entirely forgot that they were criminals, and some of them murderers. We were all simply fellowmen, and for the time companions. For all we could see they were much like average men, neither better nor worse. The effect of the work sentiment on them was wonderful. Before sullen and dull, now bright, eager, cheerful and happy. What a reformatory measure such work would be if it could be continued indefinitely.

But it is probably as a teacher of the new gospel of evolution that Professor Le Conte will be best remembered. He was not one of the first to accept it. As a disciple of Agassiz, who never accepted it, he at first was strongly opposed to it; but the more he studied it, the more he attempted to explain it to his students, the more its importance was forced upon him. His strong religious nature made him weigh it in the balance, lest it might contain some flaw or unhappily undermine the religious faith of some tender youth. Of his famous book on evolution he says:

Its success exceeded my utmost expectation. The intelligent public seemed to have been waiting for such a book, especially the third part, viz: The Relation of Evolution to Religious Thought. Since its publication I have received letters from clergymen personally unknown to me, and of every denomination, thanking me for the boldness and yet the temperateness of the book. I have also received letters-30 or 40-from young men personally unknown to me-young men of high intelligence, many of them scientific-from all parts of the Umted States, thanking me for a book which had saved them from rank materialism. I have also received letters from England, France, and Italy, from men of the highest