The Sage of Biscayne Bay 63


prairie.5 In later life Simpson revealed that "Some of the love I have
for the great out-of-doors I got from my mother. She knew the name
of every common flower in the fields and woods around my boyhood
home and was glad to answer my eager questions."6 As a child, he
developed a fondness for natural history, making collections of shells,
minerals and fossils, and studying botany.
 Like Darwin, Edison, Burbank and other well-known scientists,
Simpson had little formal education. Later in his life, he said that he had
hated school, complaining that he could never understand sentence pars-
ing and math. "The fields and woods were my school."7 Raised on a farm,
he was first a farmer. "While following the plow it was my custom to carry
a little box on the plow handles and when a shell or specimen was found
I put it in the box and looked up the subject in a book or sent the specimen
to the state geological survey."8 Collecting shells was his first passion,
South Florida was to be his second and last. Simpson went on to work as
a miner, carpenter (he built his South Florida house almost single-
handedly), cowboy (for three years in Nebraska), soldier (in the 57th
Illinois regiment of the Union Army in the War Between the States,
he was with General William T. Sherman in several minor engage-
ments through Georgia from Atlanta to the sea), sailor (after the war
Simpson joined the navy to see the world; for three years, aboard the
Shenandoah, he traveled to Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean,
collecting shells and closely observing the natural world around him).9
 Finally, Simpson settled into the major work of his first life -
mollusks. In the 1880s he had established a reputation as a conchologist.
In Florida Wild Life, Simpson wrote, "There is a nameless fascination
about collecting ... I have been a collector from infancy in fact, I think
I was born one, though I have no recollection of collecting during my pre-
natal existence.""' In the same book, he tells about his first trip to
Florida. In December 1881, he and several friends went by rail and
boat down the west coast to Bradenton, south of Tampa. He had
studied Chapman's Southern Flora and therefore knew many of the
trees and plants on sight." Having collected a "camel load" of shells,
he was lucky enough to run into a marine biologist from the Chicago
Academy of Sciences who helped him identify them.12 Reminiscing
after fifty years, Simpson said:

 These were golden days and I look back upon them as among
 the happiest of my life. I was young and filled with splendid
 enthusiasm; my companions were congenial and were having