Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/710

694 to a business man in New Brunswick, who was not regarded as generous or liberal, and proposing a loan of one hundred dollars on bis individual note. The proposal was accepted, and the financier, taking young Lockwood's hand in his own, wished him God speed.

Immediately after this transaction the seminarian went into a barber's shop, and, while waiting his turn, picked up a city paper which offered a series of premiums for the four best stories on a given subject. Reaching home, he told his wife what he had read. She said, "You must write for the first prize!" The story was written, and won the first prize. It was called The Treasure Hunters, and was written during the California gold fever, but bears not even a remote relation to the Argonauts.

Mr. Lockwood was graduated from the seminary and was licensed to preach in 1850. He received a call to the church at Cortlandtown, N. Y., where he remained only two years, employing for diversion his spare time in the pursuit of natural history, collecting insects and studying animals. In 1852 he was called to Gilboa, N. Y., where, located by the side of the Schoharie, he became deeply impressed with the fossil richness of the region.

A clerical agent for a benevolent society came to Gilboa, and after having succeeded, with Mr. Lockwood's aid, in securing the largest subscription ever given in the church for outside benevolence, was taken by him for a stroll in the fields and by the fossil beds. Mr. Lockwood spoke of the geological aspect of the region and of the great age of the Catskills, when the agent responded that it "was all the work of the flood." "Could the flood," asked Mr. Lockwood, "build up these stony mountains filled with shells for thousands of feet deep? . . . We will let the rocks speak for themselves." Picking up a soft stone from the stream, he dropped it on the rock at the agent's feet, when it broke, revealing a mass of Devonian trilobites. "Now," he said, "these fossils were deposited in quiet waters, and by no turbulent flood. So gently was each one laid by Nature in its bed to die, that not one of the delicate striæ that beautify it was injured or disturbed. But then, why should not the Creator have loved the beautiful before man was made?" "What! what!" exclaimed the agent; "death in the world before man was made? I see! You're an infidel!" The agent's society seems, however, to have overlooked this matter of infidelity, for it made Mr. Lockwood an honorary member in recognition of his services to it.

The young minister was soon reading other "sermons in stones."

Strolling one day along a high bank when the water of the stream was low, he observed some carbonaceous markings. With the aid of hammer and chisel these were proved to be relics of an