The Captain's collection of books was strongly colored by a religious cast,—John Wesley's sermons, Charles Wesley's hymns; a treatise presenting a biblical proof that negroes have no souls; a little book called “Flowers Gathered,” which purported to be a compilation of the sayings of ultra-pious children, all of whom died young; an old book called “Elements of Criticism,” by Henry Home of Kames; another tome entitled “Studies of Nature,” by St. Pierre. This last was a long argument for the miraculous creation of the world as set forth in Genesis. The proof offered was a résumé of the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms, showing their perfect fitness for man's use, and the immediate induction was that they were designed for man's use. Still another work calculated the exact age of the earth by the naïve method of counting the generations from Adam to Christ, to the total adding eighteen hundred and eighty-five years (for the book was written in 1885), and the original six days it required the Lord to build the earth. By referring to Genesis and finding out precisely what the Creator did on the morning of the first day, the writer contrived to bring his calculation of the age of the earth and everything in the world to a precision of six hours, give or take,—a somewhat closer schedule than that made by the Tennessee river boats coming up from St. Louis.
These and similar volumes formed the scientific section of Captain Renfrew's library, and it was this
