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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



like parallelism and for their steady declining gradation of 

 curvature when they are compared in any east and west section 

 across the corrugated zone/ To the westward of the Appalachian 

 chain, where this structure is conspicuous, he pointed out that 

 * the crust waves flatten out, recede from each other, and vanish 

 into general horizontality/ Coupled with these leading features 

 he remarked that the total thickness of the coal measures steadily 

 diminishes from some three thousand feet thick in Pennsylvania 

 to fifteen hundred feet in the Illinois basin, and to not more than 

 one thousand feet in the basins of Ohio and Missouri ; and simi- 

 larly the number of workable seams of coal diminishes from 

 twenty-five on the Schuylkill to probably seven in Indiana and 

 Illinois, and but three or four in Iowa and Missouri. And when 

 we add to this the clearly established facts of the increasing 

 amounts of sea deposits simultaneously with the decrease of land- 

 derived materials eastward and the diminishing effects of meta- 

 morphoses in the same direction, from the fully bituminous coals 

 of the Western States to the hard anthracites of the most disturbed 

 region, it must be conceded that Prof. Rogers contributed a noble 

 quota to the unraveling of some of the grandest phenomena 

 which geologists have been called upon to investigate." 



In the autumn of 1857 Prof. Rogers was appointed Regius 

 Professor of Natural History in the University of Glasgow, which 

 position he held until his death. A Glasgow paper thus describes 

 his inaugural lecture : 



" The hall was densely crowded and the lecture of the learned 

 gentleman was listened to throughout with the most decorous 

 attention, broken only at intervals when some passage of surpass- 

 ing beauty evoked the spontaneous applause of the alumni. To 

 great scientific attainments Prof. Rogers unites great popular 

 ability. His intellectual faculties are admirably balanced. It 

 would be difficult indeed to say whether the analytic or synthetic 

 faculty is the stronger, so delicate is the poise of power. ... It 

 would be doing injustice to Prof. Rogers to attempt so much as 

 an outline of the lecture delivered yesterday ; suffice it to say that, 

 as far as any lecture could be so, it was an exhaustive synopsis of 

 the wide field of scientific research embraced under his professori- 

 ate. The grouping of the varied branches of the general subject 

 was executed with the utmost precision and comjjleteness. The 

 marvels of Nature that were met at every turning in the path of 

 investigation were brought most happily before the imagination 

 of the neophytes of science, while the great practical results of 

 the study of natural history were never once lost sight of, even in 

 presence of its most gorgeous visions." 



Prof. Rogers returned with his family to the United States on 

 a visit in the summer of 1865. He went back to Scotland alone in 



