Page:Men of Mark in America vol 2.djvu/435

 CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT ALCOTT, CHARLES DOOLITTLE. There is no more absorbing pursuit than that of scientific research, none that more fully fills the measure of a man's life, leading him onward from problem to problem, and affording satisfactions which money-making cannot give. This is well illustrated in the career of Charles D. Walcott. Born in the village of New York Mills, Oneida county, New York, March 31, 1850, the son of Charles D. and Mary (Lane) Walcott, he was a boy of delicate health and studious habits. The character of his future career was indicated in his thirteenth year, when he found at once enjoyment and instruction in the collection of fossils at Trenton Falls, New York, and the study of science in many branches, on winter evenings. Mr. Walcott's father was a cotton manufacturer, and a man of business integrity and sagacity, who died in 1852, leaving the mother to care for the children. Charles was educated with a view to business pursuits, in the public and high schools of Utica, New York. On leaving school, he spent two years in a business house; but the boy's inclination for geologic study had grown too strong to be easily overcome, and his persistent research in the rock-world bore fruit.

During five years of life on a farm he had made a valuable collection of fossils, which was afterward purchased by Professor Louis Agassiz for the Cambridge museum; and in 1876 his reputation as an ardent young geologist brought him the offer of a position as assistant to Professor James Hall, state geologist of New York. During his three years of active labor in this position, he extended researches (begun upon New York's geological problems) to the neighboring fields of Ohio, Indiana and Canada. Mr. Walcott was appointed on the United States geological survey in 1879, his early work on the survey carrying him into the then unexplored plateau country extending through Utah and the Grand Canon of the Colorado, where he made valuable investigations. Later he became deeply interested in an investigation of the Cambrian system of the Appalachians,