Publisher's Synopsis
Mr. John Wesley Powell was in more senses than one a scientific frontiersman. His life reveals the energetic working of a vigorous and independent personality, not trammeled by traditional methods and not so deeply versed in the history, the content, and the technique of the sciences as to be guided by them, but impelled to the rapid discovery of new principles by the inspiration of previously unexplored surroundings. His life shows us further how a man of exceptional power rises suddenly in an otherwise undistinguished lineage, and how he surmounts the limiting associations of early years, less through the opportunity provided by others than through opportunities opened by his own individual enterprise for the satisfaction of inborn interests.
-Biographical Memoir of John Wesley Powell, 1834-1902
