TO ALL WHO ADMIRE PUBLIC SPIRIT INCESSANTLY ACTIVE IN ADVANCING, THE COMMON WEAL WHO HONOR BROAD STATESMANSHIP INFORMED BY LOFTY PATRIOTISM ATTEMPERED BY FIRM CONSERVATISM WHO REVERENCE A LIFE OF DEVOTION UNEXCELLED IN ACHIEVEMENT TO THE CAUSE OF HIGHER EDUCATION WHO ESTEEM THE JUST FAME, OF THE DEAD A SACRED LEGACY TO POSTERITY TO BE GUARDED JEALOUSLY FROM ANY CORRUPTION OF PASSION OR PREJUDICE THIS VOLUME OF RECORD OF APPRECIATION OF TESTIMONY IS DEDICATED James Sidney Rollins. THE ANTECEDENTS. HE modern School of Naturalists, having settled to its satisfaction the general doctrine of descent with modification, has of late fallen into two hostile camps over the question as to how the modification is brought about. On the one hand, these attach supreme importance to heredity, and trace back to spontaneous variations in the germ-plasm, and to natural selection therefrom, all the peculiarities that establish themselves firmly through successive generations; on the other hand, those accent the environment with special emphasis, and find in its steady play on the organism the fons et origo of every distinguishing quality, whether of individual, or variety, or species. Per It is not for the historian to compose this strife of savants. haps both parties are right and both wrong: right in what they affirm, wrong in what they deny. Certain it is that the biographer can not safely leave out of account either inheritance or surroundings in estimating the complex of influences that mold the hero into what he is; and no less certain that while time, place, and circumstance may often appear completely regulative of the whole life of action, yet many a turn of conduct, many an element of character, becomes fully intelligible only in the light that emanates from the ancestral tomb. THE subject of this memoir, James Sidney Rollins, was born at Richmond, the county seat of Madison County, Kentucky, on the |