North America east of the Mississippi, a tremendous feat when one considers the state of geologic knowledge and the sluggishness of travel at that time. Necessarily, his map was extremely generalized, but it was accurate nonetheless. All it showed for Connecticut were the four main geologic (and landscape) features: the Central Valley of younger sedimen-tary rock, the Eastern Uplands and Western Uplands of older crystalline rock, and the Coast without a coastal plain. As these are still the four most important observations to make about Connecticut's geology, one can hardly have asked him to do a better job, considering the enormous scope of his task.

The Percival and Shepard Survey

Since McClure's initial sketch, there have been several other efforts to map the geology of Connecticut. The earliest of these was carried out by Charles Upham Shepard and one of the most remarkable people ever to swing a geologist's rock hammer, James Gates Percival.

Stricken from early childhood with a "deep and brooding melan-choly,"' Percival was an avowed loner who shunned vapid society for the metaphysical worlds of scholarship and poetry. He was renowned as one of the leading American poets of his day whose tortuous verses decrying the pains of existence yanked at the heartstrings of early Victorians. Percival was also a musician who wrote songs and played several instruments. He had a phenomenal facility with languages, and wrote poems in more than a dozen different tongues, including Arabic, Persian, Gaelic, Norwegian, and Sanskrit. In addition, Percival served as a surgeon in the U.S. Army for a short time and was an expert botanist. Dabbling briefly in lexicography, he collaborated with Webster on the first American dictionary. And it is in a subject he never formally studied, geology, that Percival now comes to our attention.

If his incredible accomplishments as a scholar and artist were not enough to distinguish him, his personality and lifestyle easily did. He would go weeks at a time without speaking but a few words or grunts,

134