History of the County of Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, with Biographical Sketches of Many of its Pioneers and Prominent Men, Part 88

Author: George Dallas Albert, editor
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to kill them with a regular diploma. And so aided by the notoriety this affair gave him, and sheltered be- hind an Ajax-shield of sevenfold impudence, Ormsby pushed on to fame and fortune.

He actually got a respectable practice, and made some money. He bought property, and built himself a Swiss cottage upon Bunker Hill. Had he lived and practiced for ten years more in Westmoreland he might have retired upon a competence, and deserved his good luck about as well as other medical impos- ters, such as the Browns, Hooflands, Wolfes, and Hoofnaugles.

He was industrious, and rather economical. Having been very poor, he had learned to appreciate money, and was anxious to get rich. When the news of the discovery of gold in California arrived in the old States, the desire of wealth led Ormsby to rush to the El Dorado. While eagerly searching for the precious metal a bank of earth fell upon him, and Ormsby descended to Hades.

"Extremes meet," and there is only " one step from the sublime to the ridiculous." Led by the associa- tion of ideas, and under shelter of these well-known sayings, we have passed per saltum from Dr. Postle- thwaite to Dr. Ormsby.

DR. ALFRED T. KING.

Dr. Alfred Thomas King, born Oct. 22, 1818, in the town of Galway, Saratoga Co., N. Y., and died Saturday, Jan. 2, 1858. His people were Cov- enanters of & poor but respectable class. He got a substantial common schooling, and was put by his father with a doctor of the place as a boy of all-work. He attended about the office, keeping it in shape, and the doctor being the physician for some public works in the city, the boy was regularly employed in carry- ing out the medicine as mixed to the patients at the works. His attention was thus drawn to medicine. He got all the information he could from observation and close attention about the office. He remained in the employ of this doctor until he had a quarrel with the doctor's wife, the mistress of the house. She, in addition to the work imposed on him as office-boy, wanted him to act as soullion about the house and kitchen, which he indignantly refused. This led to acrimonious language, in consequence of which he either left or was discharged.

From the office he went back to his father. At that time a Rev. Andrew Wiley, D.D., an Irish Cov- enanter, taught a school and had a congregation in Philadelphia. King's father got the boy placed as a boarder and scholar in Andrew Wiley's school. All the acquirements he had in the higher branches of a liberal education he received here. Dr. Wiley was a good scholar, but eccentric in his habits. . He some- times got so overcome with liquor that he could not sit at table. Still he was a good scholar and preacher.

After receiving what education he did at Dr. Wiley's, he attended the medical lectures at that city

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and walked the hospitals. He supported himself, and made some money afterwards by himself lecturing on medicine, and by doing duty in the Philadelphia hos- pitals. He then commenced practice as a physician, and opened an office in that city. He got but little business, and having got in arrears with his rent, he was ejected for the non-payment of the same by the woman who owned the building. Much dejected in spirit, as he afterwards related, he then endeavored to secure a position as assistant surgeon on board of a ship, and while engaged in the negotiation for this position he happened to meet at the house of Mr. Wiley, with whom he still stayed, a Westmoreland man, a citizen of Greensburg, of the name of Wil- liam Brown. Mr. Brown was a shop-keeper of the town, and when he went to Philadelphia to buy goods, himself being a Covenanter, was visiting Dr. Wiley, with whom he was on familiar terms. Brown showed the doctor a Westmoreland paper which contained the notice that a good physician was badly wanted at Pleasant Unity, in that county. He told him the location was a good one, and that if he would go there he would in a short time get into business. This was about 1838.

Upon this he made arrangements to come out. He sold what effects he had, and after paying his passage had seventy-five cents left. He located in Pleasant Unity, and when he first came when he visited a patient he either walked or borrowed a horse. As horseflesh, however, was then cheap, he soon got one. In the course of his practice he was brought into con- tact with Dr. Postlethwaite, of Greensburg. He vis- ited him, was taken to his home, and introduced into his family, which eventually led to the marriage between Dr. King and Miss Sidney Postlethwaite, daughter of the doctor. Drs. Postlethwaite and King shortly after entered into partnership in Greensburg.

He had now more leisure and opportunity to turn his attention to the study of literature and the natural sciences, and especially geology.

In 1840, Dr. King contributed a series of nine arti- cles. to the Republican newspaper on the subject of geology. These articles, however, were preceded by a short one in the form of a communication, and which was a serious criticism on an essay from the pen of Alexander Campbell, D.D., on the Mosaic geology. The appearance of a comet and an unusual display of meteors in the heavens in the fall of that year gave rise to much scientific discussion in the public prints throughout the Union. Dr. King's observations on meteorology were not the least inter- esting and instructive of these. He also gave his views on animal magnetism, and in sundry articles advocated the cherished project of a County Medical Association.

Dr. King made a collection of these articles given by him to the press, and they make quite a large book. To this scrap-album we have had access, and although it is quite voluminous, yet it does not contain all the

contributions which he made, nor all of his public addresses or lectures.1

In his own hand, under date 1840, is the following memorandum, as a kind of preface :

" These essays were written as much for the amuse- ment and improvement of the writer as for the in- struction of the readers, but when both can be united considerable benefit may result, therefore the object must be considered laudable.

" Being fond of literary pursuits, and residing in a town in which there is little appreciation of litera- ture, the writer chose this mode of amusing himself during the few leisure moments which he could snatch from the performance of the arduous practice and study of an onerous profession."

These articles, on scientific and medical topics, were on "Bronchitis," "Scrofula," "Cancer," " A Meteor- ological Phenomenon," "Tornadoes," "On the Im- portance of a Well-Directed Education," "History and Habits of the Hessian Fly," "Natural Sciences," " A Brief Exposition of Mr. Espy's Philosophy of Storms," " Asiatic Cholera," being a communication on the nature and character of the disease, furnished in answer to a special request of many of the first citizens of Greensburg, and which ran through a series of ten articles printed in the Argus. There are also other miscellaneous articles on various sub- jects, of which some were written in an amusing vein, but all were directed to worthy and commendable objects.

Of all the literary productions which gave Dr. King notoriety, the most notable was an address delivered before the Westmoreland County Lyceum on the evening of the 24th of March, 1848, on "The Study of Natural Science." In this address he made severe strictures on the Roman Church for what he called its intolerant spirit, manifested against the leaders of science in the Middle Ages, and particularly the efforts made to have Galileo to recant. In it was also used this language: "The baneful consequences of the be- lief in supernatural agency in the direction and ac- complishment of earthly events have been dissipated to the four winds of heaven." This lecture gave occa- sion for a lengthy and learned reply by the defenders of Mother Church. Immediately following its publi- cation came a reply signed " Amicus Veritatis." In these articles it was evident he had met a more for- midable antagonist. The author was said to be Peter C. Shannon, Esq., a well-known attorney, now on & Territorial bench. It is true that the articles were given to the printer in the handwriting of Mr. Shan- non, and it is probable that he furnished some of the language and quotations used, which were taken from the body of the English poetry ; but the substance of the reply, the arguments, the citations from the po-

1 Our thanks are due Dr. William H. King, son of Dr. A. T. King, of Weet Fairfield, for the use of the scrup-album of his father and for other favors.

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lemical writers and from the ecclesiastical and secu- lar history of the Middle Ages were the work of Rev. Stillinger. This reply appeared in the Argus, and it was an article of such force and ability that Dr. King replied in the Intelligencer over his own name. A re- joinder was made, and this was so forcible and so full of statements which appeared to be well authenticated in history that, finding that he was contending with a theologian on his own ground, a disciple of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was well versed in the subtle- ties of scholastic disputation, and in the logic of his master on a subject that was old and threadbare, Dr. King went to Pittsburgh, and consulted with Dr. Greene, of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and there got facts and authorities upon which he based a reply, and which were incorporated therein. Since that day no similar controversy has been presented to the people of this county. Of course nothing was es- tablished. . The friends of science maintained that 'the doctor had the advantage ; the friends of religion maintained that the priest had the advantage. To a large class, who would not seem to be moved by any sinister motive in expressing their opinion, it ap- peared that Dr. King had the merits of the case, but that as a historian and a theologian he was not the equal of Dr. Stillinger, and that in the argument and in the management of the controversy the latter had the advantage.

The results of this controversy were injurious to the moral reputation of Dr. King. Henceforth an illit- erate rabble garred at his heels till his death. Brain- less men took up the cry, for the want of a better, of "quack," and were patted on the backs by the veriest of quacks. Others, who themselves had no more re- ligion than a house-dog, openly proclaimed that on a strict interpretation of the Scripture.he was an infi- del, and that he was a corrupter of youth and a teacher of false doctrine. Even jealous members of his profession, who were actuated by no honorable motives, violently charged him with being the advo- cate of mercurial treatment. He was attacked for his scientific views by the clergymen of almost every de- nomination, and by those laymen whose zeal, like honest Bardolph's, "burnt in the nose."

A singular phase to be considered in this famous controversy was this: The Intelligencer, the paper in which Dr. King's articles were published, had the reputation of being the mouth-piece of that body of citizens who profess a stricter morality than their neighbors, without regard, of course, to persuasion. The Argus was more worldly. Where the first quoted Scripture in its editorials, the last quoted Hudibras and Don Juan. Hence scoffers said that there was much of the motives which actuated the Puritans in their endeavors to extirpate the profane amusement of bear-baiting evidenced in this, and that the doc- tor was countenanced in his heterodox views not be- canse he attacked Christianity generally, but because he abused the Roman Church particularly.

Prior to the year 1844 it was the prevailing opinion among geologists that in the carboniferous age no air-breathing animal could possibly have existed, on account of the supposed excess of carbonic acid gas in the atmosphere necessary to produce the wondrous vegetable growths of the coal strata. Sir Charles Lyell, one of the most eminent of geologists, says that no vertebrated animals more highly organized than fish were known in rocks of higher antiquity than the Permian (that is, the period following the carboniferous age, and which closes the paleozoic era, or the older division of geological time) until the year 1844, when a fossil reptile was discovered in the coal-measures of Munster-Appel, in Rhenish Bavaria.

In the same year, and before the news of this im- portant scientific discovery reached America, Dr. King made public a discovery of fossil remains which had been unearthed by him several years pre- vious. Up until that time he had discovered in sev- eral localities fossil footmarks of seven distinct but nondescript animals on micaceous sandstone belong- ing to the coal-measures. This was the first unequiv- ocal indication, at least in America, and among the first in the world, of the existence of birds or other animals high in the scale of organization lower than the new red sandstone, and hence geologists regarded the discovery with great interest.

Before this discovery was made by Dr. King, it was, we have said, the unanimous opinion of geologists, from the absence of the remains of highly organized animals among the coal-rocks, that they did not exist at that early epoch. This discovery also conflicted with an hypothesis long maintained by distinguished geologists, that the atmosphere during the carbon- iferous period contained a much larger amount of carboniferous acid gas than at present, which by ab- sorption caused the rapid growth of tree-ferns, lepido- dendrons, and other stupendous coal plants now found so abundantly in a fossil state. This discovery proved that such could not have been the case, since birds and other highly organized lung-breathing ani- mals existed at the same period.

Professor Silliman, in the American Journal of Sti- ence for January, 1845, makes the following remarks in reference to these footmarks :

"Dr. King's discovery is of great interest for the novel forms which he represents in the drawings ac- companying his papers. Only two of them can prob- ably be referred to a biped animal. . . . The other five figures are referable to quadrupeds, of which there are at least four different species, if not genera. His figure '6' is distinctly referable to an animal having the same inequality of step as the cheirothe- rium and other batrachians. The figures 3, 4, 5, and 7 are probably quadrupeds, but differ entirely from anything else of the sort we have seen; there is a cir- cular imprint, surrounded by five toes, in one case circular, in another long and ovate, in a third they are of an intermediate character."

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Dr. King framed a new nomenclature, and ar- ranged all these tracks under classes and orders, genera and species, and his paper was published in and among the proceedings of the Academy of Natu- ral Sciences of Philadelphia for November and De- cember, 1844, and in the American Journal of Science for January, February, and March, 1845, edited by Prof. Silliman, where full descriptions and accurate engravings of these remarkable footmarks may be seen.

This discovery, as might be expected, created the greatest excitement in the scientific world. Sir Charles Lyell, president of the .Royal Geological Society of London, came to North America in the interests of his science, and while here made it a special object of his journey to visit Dr. King, and make a personal inspection of the geological formation of this region, and especially to examine the strata of the coal-meas- ures in which had been found these fossil remains. The public expression of Mr. Lyell was looked for with great expectation, and many quidnunce predicted that he, upon a personal examination of the remains, would come to an unfavorable conclusion. Upon his return he wrote the following letter for publication :1

"TO THE EDITORS OF THE PENNSYLVANIA ARQUE.

"GENTLEMEN,-As many persons have inquired at Greensburg since my return from a visit to the quarries in Unity township what opinion I have come to respecting the curious markings discovered in 1844 by Dr. King, I shall be obliged to you if you will state in your journal that I entirely agree in the views which he has expressed respecting these fossil footmarks. They are observed to stand ont in relief from the lower surface of a slab of sandstone, which lay some feet below the soil. They closely resemble the tracks of an animal to which, from the hand-like form of the foot, the name of Cheirotberium has been given in Europe, where they occur both in Germany and in England. It is now univer- sally admitted that such tracks must have been made by a large reptilian quadruped.

"Their position in the middle of the carboniferous formation has been correctly pointed out by Dr. King, for this layer of sandstone in West- moreland County is decidedly lower than the main or Pittsburgh seam of coal, but there are other smaller seams of coal which occur still lower in the series. These are the first and as yet the only indications which have been brought to light in any part of the world of the existence of reptiles in rocks of such high antiquity. We cannot, therefore, estimate too highly the scientific interest and importance of this discovery.

"I am gentlemen,

" Your obedient servant,

"Greensburg, 18th April, 1846. " CHARLES LYEI.L."

The importance of this discovery, and the recog- nized place of Dr. King as a geologist, has long been settled ; and in the far advanced degree of that science to-day he is regarded as one of those who helped to lead the way to the mountain-tops, whence his fol- lowers may get a glimpse of the promised land.

Reference to this discovery in the standard works on geology, is thus made :

"CHEIROTHERIAN FOOTPRINTS IN COAL-MEASURES, UNITED STATES .- In 1844, the very year when the Apateon or Salamander of the coal was first met with in the country between the Moselle and the Rhine, Dr. King published an account of the footprints of a large reptile discovered by him in North America. These occur In the coal strata of Greensburg, in Westmoreland County, Pa., and I had an opportunity of examining them in 1846. I was at once convinced of their genuineness, and declared

my convictions on that point, un which doubts had been entertained both in Europe and the United States. The footmarks were free ob- corved standing out in relief from the lower corface of clabe of mand- stone, resting on this layers of fine unctaowe clay. I brought away one of these messes, which is represented in the accompanying drawing (Fig. 386). It displays, together with footprints, the costs of cracks of various cises. The origin of such cracks in olay, and costs of the come, has before been explained, and referred to the drying and shrinking of mud, and the subsequent pouring of cand into open crevices. It will be cees that some of the ereke traverse the footprints, and produce distor- tion in them, as might have been expected, for the med must have been soft when the animal walked over it and left the impressions, wherees when it afterwards dried up and shrank it would be too hard to receive wach indentatione.

"No less than twenty-three footsteps were observed by Dr. King in the same quarry before it was abandoned, the greater part of them to arranged (cee Fig. 387) on the surface of one stratum as to imply that they were made sacoeselvely by the same animal. Everywhere there was a double row of tracks, and in each row they occur in pairs, coch pair consisting of a bind- and fore-foot, and each being at nearly equal distances from the next pair. In each parallel row the toes tura, the one set to the right, the other to the left. In the European Okstrecke- rium, before mentioned (p. 290), both the bind- and fore-feet have cach five toes, and the rise of the hind-foot is about five times as large as the fore-foot. In the American fomil the posterior footprint is not even twice as large as the anterior, and the number of toes is unequal, being five in the hinder and four in the anterior foot. In this, as in the Eu- ropeso Chetrecherium, one too stands out like a thumb, and these thumb- like toes turn, the one set to the right, and the other to the left. The American Cheirotherium was evidently a broader animal, and belonged to a distinct genus from that of the tristele age in Europe.

"We may assume that the reptile which left these prints on the ancient sands of the coal-measures was an air-breather, because its weight would not have been suficient under water to have made impressions so deep and distinct. The same conclusion is also borne out hy the casts of the cracks above described, for they show that the clay had been exposed to the air and sun, co as to have dried and shrunk.

"The geological position of the esodstone of Greensburg is perfectly clear, being situated in the midst of the Appalachian coal-field, having the main bed of coal, called the Pittsburgh seam, three yards thick, one hundred feet above it, and worked in the neighborhood, with several other seams of coal at lower levels. The impresslous of Lepidodendron, Sigillaria, Stigmaria, and other characteristic carboniferous plants are found both above and below the level of the reptilian footsteps.

" Analogous footprints of s large reptile of still older date bave since been found (1849), by Mr. Isaac Lea, in the lowest beds of the coal forma- tion at Pottsville, near Philadelphia, so that we may now be said to have the footmarks of two reptilians of the coal period, and the skeletone of four.""

" Amphibian footprints have been observed in the coal-measures both of Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia. Near Greensburg, Pa., in a layer at- uated about one hundred feet below the horizon of the Pittsburgh coal, Dr. A. T. King counted twenty-three consecutive steps of one individual. Those of the hind-feet are five-toed, and of the fore-feet four-toed,-the former five and a half inches long, and the latter four anda half Inches. The distance between the successive tracks is six to eight inches, and between the two lines about the same, which shows that the animal was large, about as long as broad, and probably a batrachian of the Laby- rinthodont tribe. The species is called Thewaropus heterodactylus."

His address, delivered Nov. 22, 1842, before the Westmoreland County Medical Association, on the rise and modern history of medicine, is without doubt one of his most interesting productions.

In regard to his style of expression, he had the rare, happy faculty of conveying information on scientific subjects in popular language. He was a professional who was not content with the restricted dictum of the materia medica, but to express his acquirementa and his thought laid contribution to the polite liter-

2 Sir Charles Lyell : Manual of Geology, New York, Harper's, 1871, p. 407.

$ James D. Dana : Manual of Geology, Philadelphia, 1863, p. 351.

1 The original letter is in possession of the editor.

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ature of ancient and modern times. In his inquiries and researches he penetrated into the very depths of the natural sciences, identified the medicinal proper- ties of plants with the plants themselves, and was not satisfied with any of the phenomena of nature with- out comprehending the whole of the scientific bear- ing and all the reasons connected with them. He took pains to show, and did show in popular language embodying learned research, that the knowledge of organic chemistry was essential in the acquirements of a thorough and scientific physician. The ostenta- tious and obtrusive ignorance in the profession at his day in these sciences was doubtless the cause of the supreme contempt in which he held the average backwoods or country physician.

Dr. King had also turned his attention largely to the existing flora and fauna of Western Pennsyl- vania, and with them he was probably more intimate than any man of his day. He dissected all the ani- mals, had a collection of almost all the birds, and his herbariums furnished specimens of all the plants of the region between the crest of the Alleghenies and the Western boundaries of the State. His experi- ments as a chemist and his collections as a mineral- ogist attest his zeal and industry in these depart- ments of human knowledge. He was also a thorough microscopist, and his testimony in several great crim- inal trials upon the blood-corpuscles found on the clothing of the prisoners aided largely in administer- ing the laws correctly in such cases.

In the death of Dr. King-and now we use the words of one of his warm friends-not only his friends but his profession and the community in which he lived sustained a heavy loss, because, although not appreciated perhaps by all classes, there was, never- theless, a large number of families who looked to him in the distress and alarm consequent upon disease in their midst with unbounded confidence, and they, no doubt, sincerely lamented the dispensation which deprived them of his professional aid. Certainly one of the most skillful among his brethren, he had besides such rare faculties for the diagnosis of dis- ease that some of them almost believed him inher- ently and especially gifted in that behalf, rather than that his abilities had been acquired by close observa- tion in a large practice. Cool and careful at the bedside, collecting all the evidence, investigating all the symptoms, he came to no conclusion until the whole was taken into the account, and then he was rarely ever mistaken. In his mode of treatment too he was equally judicious, and if his remedies some- times failed in their operation they never proved in- jurious, or left the patient worse than before. To him the"" vis medicatrix naturæ" was all in all, and the office of the pill and plaster was but to clear the way for its full and free operation. Hence his won- derful success in many of the most dangerous cases to which he was called.

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History of the County of Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, with Biographical Sketches of Many of its Pioneers and Prominent Men, Part 88

Author: George Dallas Albert, editor Publication date: Publisher: Number of Pages:

Author: George Dallas Albert, editor
Publication date:
Publisher:
Number of Pages: