Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/440

408 York in 1836 and Professor of Chemistry in the Albany Medical College in ] 838, Dr. Emmons removed in the latter year to Albany. He was afterward transferred to the professorship of Obstetrics, and remained on the faculty of the Medical College till 1852. During this period he used to go to Williamstown each year to deliver the course of lectures belonging to his professorship there. His position on the New York survey enabled him to make the valuable present of a suite of the minerals of that State to his alma mater in 1842. One of his Williams College students—now himself a venerable though young-hearted professor well remembers the strong face and beetling brows of Dr. Emmons, and his manner of giving instruction. His disposition was kindly. Being a non-resident, not much was seen of him by the students; he would appear at the lecture room, give his lecture, and disappear. There was not much of the pedagogue about him. Students who had a special liking and capacity for his subject profited much from his instruction; but his enthusiasm in telling the wonders of the rocks carried him along at a rate which left the indifferent student far behind. If only a fraction of his class appeared at the lecture, or if he projected a question at Brown and a response came from Jones or Robertson, he seemed not to notice the difference. Williamstown is in the heart of the Berkshire Hills. One of the summits of East Mountain, a neighboring eminence, is the only place in that region where gneiss crops out, and here Prof. Emmons used to bring his students to display to them as best he could the relations of his much-disputed Taconic System to the other and then better known geological formations. Very likely only a couple of the class would reach the summit with him, yet he would discourse just as earnestly to these as to the whole party that set out with him. This height, says Prof. Arthur L. Perry, in his Origins in Williamstown, "has been justly designated Mount Emmons, by one who was once a pupil and later a colleague and always an admirer of the distinguished Professor of Natural History in the college, Ebenezer Emmons."

It is related of Prof. Emmons, as illustrating his enthusiasm, that once when on a journey with President Hopkins, of Williams, and the president's brother, he asked his friends to turn aside with him to visit a certain cave. They consented to the delay, although the brother was on his way to be married, and waited just within the entrance of the cavern while Emmons penetrated to its inmost depths. After a time they heard the excited cry, "I've got it! I've got it!" and out rushed the geologist, bearing triumphantly a muddy fragment of rock. He had secured a piece of evidence in support of his Taconic System.

In 1836 a law was passed providing for a geological survey of