“Timothy,” remarked an old Friend, “was thy grandfather the only man who ever lived in the country?”
“Other men exist in the country, but no one else lived like my grandfather,” he replied.
Brought up, when with his parents, in so scientific an atmosphere, and when at his birthplace so delightfully surrounded not only by congenial kinsfolk, but Nature in her most attractive guise, it is little wonder that Conrad became a naturalist. Mr. Fraley tells me that, when a youth in early teens, Conrad was the “president” of an “Academy of Science” of which he, Mr. Fraley, was “secretary,” and that it was conducted with all the decorum and good faith of the institution after which it was modeled.
Conrad was educated at select schools under the superintendence of Friends, but really educated himself, so far as the “higher branches” were concerned, acquiring without a teacher a thorough knowledge of Latin, Greek, and French. His skill in drawing was remarkable and early developed. He not only made all his own illustrations, but did considerable for others, as the shells, seaweed, and other small objects on some of Audubon's plates of birds. Before seriously taking up the special studies that subsequently made him famous, he wrote many sketches of a popular character, and occasionally drifted into verse. His father being a publisher and printer, Conrad entered the establishment as a clerk, reluctantly probably, and there learned the printer's art, and when his father died, in 1831, he continued the business for a short time, but the love of natural history was too strong to be overcome, and he gave up the shop and its belongings. Because of a preference for walking afield to attending religious services, a committee of Friends called upon Conrad, and, not accepting his explanation, they directed his name to be stricken off their roll of membership. Conrad did not like their action, and probably it is due to this that he seldom afterward attended any religious gathering, occasionally dropping into some country Quaker meeting, but always, as he said, for old times' sake and not spiritual profit.
In 1831 he was elected a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and, some years after, of the American Philosophical Society. Of many foreign learned societies he was a correspondent, but, keeping no record of such elections, the names and dates of election have been lost.
Conrad's first volume bears date of 1831, and has the following title: American Marine Conchology, or Descriptions and Colored Figures of the Shells of the Atlantic Coast. Of this little volume, printed for the author, Conrad says in his preface, “it is designed to supply a deficiency which has long been felt by the cultivators of American natural history.” The work contains seventeen
