of the new School of Agriculture. Its discipline he had planned to place in the hands of a representative senate of students. The lower classes were to be divided into sections, each numbering ten to fifteen, and each section to be under the direct supervision of some member of the senior class.
Dr. Owen's scientific publications were very numerous. His favorite subjects were the significance of the contour of continents and the causes of earthquake action. His mind was especially attracted to the study of hidden causes in the development of the earth—that is, to those causes which we have not yet learned to associate with their effects. This difficult line of research involved a vast amount of reading in every tongue, and the breadth of his early education made such reading possible. His first important work, A Key to the Geology of the Globe, was an endeavor to show that the present features of the earth are all the results of fixed and demonstrable laws, like those governing the development of animals and plants. He believed that the earth was a great magnet, made so directly or indirectly by the heat of the sun. As a result of this, he thought that the axis and coast lines of both continents tend to conform to the axis of the ecliptic. The angular distance of twenty-three and a half degrees, which marks the northward extension of the sun in summer, he took to be a natural unit of measure in the structure of the earth.
Whether these relations are real or fanciful I have no means of knowing. Perhaps in the ultimate progress of science it does not matter, for many hypotheses must be framed and tested before we come to the full measure of the laws which regulate the changes in the earth's crust.
Dr. Owen was a gentle and reverent man, unassuming and unselfish in all his relations—a man of perfect courtesy of manners because of perfect courtesy of thought; a man whom everybody loved because his love went out to every one. He was the highest type of teacher, of naturalist, of scholar, of soldier even, because above all his was the highest type of man.[1]
- ↑ The writer once gave a lecture at New Harmony in the old building which had been the Community Theater. Dr. Owen presided. He was then nearly eighty years of age and very deaf. He did not hear one word of the lecture, but he had the art of appearing to hear. To every point the speaker or the audience deemed good he responded with a smile of appreciation, the expression of perfect courtesy, the courtesy of the "gentleman of the old school," of which type Dr. Owen was one of the most perfect examples.
