Page:Men of Mark in America vol 2.djvu/474

398 United States to the International Congress of Applied Chemistry at Paris in 1896 and 1900; at Vienna, 1898, and at Berlin in 1903. Doctor Wiley has attained his present most useful and important position through his own exertions, aided in his youth by self-sacrificing parents who made every effort to give him the advantages which his active mind and talents made him desire.

He was born on a farm near Kent, Indiana, October 18, 1844. His father, Preston P. Wiley, farmer and minister, was a man of "firmness, honesty and courage." He recalls his mother's influence on his intellectual development and on his moral and spiritual life, and says, " She was a most remarkable woman." John Maxwell his earliest maternal ancestor in America, came from Scotland in 1747.

As a boy he had vigorous health. His great desire was to read, especially history; while his fondness for mathematics and his aptness in that branch of study, were marked.

His early life was spent altogether on his father's farm, where he performed farm labor, often for fourteen and sixteen hours a day. Of this labor, so exacting and fatiguing for a boy, he says, "it has enabled me to work hard ever since without fatigue." The discipline of these earlier years was continued through his college course, and the difficulties in the way of his acquiring an education were not at all of an intellectual nature, but of a material kind. He says of that period in his life, "I did my own cooking in college, and never had an overcoat. I borrowed a shirt-collar the first time I appeared in a public performance. My father and mother denied themselves every comfort to help me through college. I lived for weeks at a time, on Indian corn mush, and sorghum molasses." He had no especial preparatory training for college; but he entered Hanover college and was graduated in 1867, receiving the degree of A.B., and taking that of A.M. in 1870. From Indiana medical college he received the same degree in 1871, meanwhile holding a professorship of Latin and Greek in Butler college, Indianapolis, Indiana, from 1868-71. During the year 1872 he taught natural science in the Indianapolis high school, and he was graduated from Harvard university with the degree of S.B., in 1873. He has received the honorary degrees of Ph.D. and LL.D. from Hanover college. For one year, 1873-74, he was professor of chemistry at Butler university, and from that time until 1878, when he went to Berlin to study chemistry, he held the pro-