Early Life
Born as the son of Julius Morton and Caroline Georgiana Wheeler (née Anderson) in Milwaukee, he was transferred from public school to a local German academy due to, in his own words, "persistently bad behavior". They had a small museum which Wheeler had studied since he was a child, and when Ward's Natural Science Establishment in early 1884 brought a collection of stuffed and skeletonized animals to the academy, to persuade the city fathers to purchase them, Wheeler volunteered to spend the nights in helping Ward to unpack and install the specimens. The latter was so impressed that he offered Wheeler a job in his Rochester, New York establishment. Here he identified birds and mammals, and later collections of shells, echinoderms and sponges. His shell catalogue was still in use by collectors in the late 1920s.
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Famous quotes related to early life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)