Major J.W.Powell, the organizer and director for many years of the United States Geological Survey and Bureau of American Ethnology, was brought up by a father and mother whose intense longing was that their son should be a Methodist preacher.

The growing youth wished to please his parents, but was also compelled to satisfy his own conscience.

The more he studied the creeds and doctrines of Methodism, the less he felt he could accept them, and much to the regret of his parents, he refused to enter the ministry.

Yet, in relating the story to me, he asserted that his whole life had been one long agony of earnest study to find the highest truth.

Taking me into his library, where there were several extended shelves filled from end to end with the ponderous tomes of the two great government bureaus that he controlled, he said: "Most people regard this as my life-work, and outwardly it is.