Page:Men of Mark in America vol 1.djvu/360



ALL, WILLIAM HEALEY, son of a missionary clergyman, pupil of Professor Louis Agassiz and of Jeffries Wyman; explorer, hydrographic and topographic surveyor, geologist and biologist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, August 21, 1845. His father, the Reverend Charles Henry Appleton Dall, was a minister-at-large in St. Louis, Missouri, 1841-57, where he established the first free school west of the Mississippi, and was a missionary clergyman to British India for thirty years (1857-86) with headquarters at Calcutta. He was a helpful, enthusiastic, modest and unselfish man of poetic temperament and sweet tempered philosophy. His mother, Caroline Wells (Healey) Dall was a daughter of Mark and Caroline (Foster) Healey. She was a radical reformer from 1840, a woman of extraordinary intellectual grasp, will power and energy, was one of the three persons who formed the American Social Science association, in 1865, framed its original constitution, and was for many years vice-president of its board of directors. She was the first woman in America to receive the honorary degree of LL.D., which was conferred on her by Alfred university in 1877. Through his mother he was descended from Miles Standish of the Mayflower and from William Hele, Cambridge, 1626; Simon Bradstreet, Salem, 1630; and the New Hampshire Bell, Harlakenden, Symonds, Foster, Wells and Weare families. Through his father he traces his first American ancestor, William Dall of Forfar, Scotland, who settled in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1740. His grandmother, Henrietta (Austin) Dall, was a niece of Stephen F. Austin the pioneer, son of Moses Austin, and "father of Texas." Through his paternal grandmother he was also allied to the Phelps and Beekman families of New York, the Brooks, Deacon and Parker families of Boston and the Livingstons of Albany.

As a boy he was fond of natural history, horticulture and fishing. He was a pupil at Allen's classical school. West Newton, Massachusetts, at the Boston grammar and English high schools, at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard university, under Louis