Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/546

528 would never give up the privilege of honestly expressing his opinion. He declined several invitations to deliver addresses at Oberlin College, because his views were opposed to the beliefs held in that institution. But he finally consented to deliver the alumni address in 1879. He was never controversial, but simply and earnestly sought the truth. He entered Oberlin College about 1850, and was graduated from the literary department in 1854. Very soon after entering college he became a student of mark, and one of the few who, Mr. W. G. M. Stone, of Denver, a fellow-student in his last year, says, were "head and shoulders above their fellows, and himself second to none." The College Record of Deceased Alumni says of him that "when in college he was an enthusiastic cultivator of oratory and of a fine literary style. He had a marvelous command of words, a most fertile imagination, and was a skillful artist with crayon and chalk, so that his lectures were often enchanting as a dream. In his scientific facts he was accurate, but these were always subordinated to his philosophizing. He was an ardent devotee of the evolution theory. In religion he was of the liberal school."

After graduation he went to Natchez, Miss., where he had two brothers in business; taught in an academy; and studied law a year. His social relations there were all pleasant; but the independent Oberlin man, who in his boyhood had systematically aided fugitive slaves in escaping, could not make himself at home in the very center of the slaveholding region. Returning to Ohio, he exerted himself in behalf of the election of Mr. Chase, the Free-Soil candidate for Governor; and afterward engaged in geological work in Illinois, of which he kept no personal record. He took a course of comparative anatomy in New York, some time previous to 1862, but in what school or college is unknown, though he often bore testimony to the value of the instruction he received there.

Prof. Gunning's continuous career as a scientific author and lecturer began in 1862, and his earliest known publication was a paper on the Age of the Human Race, based on the discovery of relics of man in the caves of France, which was published in the Nevada (California) Journal. In the same year he was married and removed to Massachusetts; and about this time he began lecturing in and around Boston. He spent the summers, between the lecture seasons of several years, in physical and biological studies at Falmouth, Gay Head, Nantucket, Portland Harbor, and Eastport, a part of the time under the direction of Agassiz. Geology was the principal subject of his lectures, but as they went on they expanded till they covered a variety of subjects relating to life, evolution, American antiquities, and social theories. His