264 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



American PliilosopTiical Society, the Geological Society of Penn- 

 sylvania, the Geological Society of France, and of other scientific 

 bodies in America and Europe. 



A minnte adopted by the Board of Trustees of the University 

 of Nashville, on the occasion of the death of Prof. Troost, relates 

 that, " born and liberally educated in Holland, he early mani- 

 fested a zealous devotion to natural history and chemistry, more 

 especially to the then infant sciences of geology and mineralogy. 

 With a view to the more successful pursuit of his favorite stud- 

 ies he visited Paris, and was for several years the pupil of the 

 celebrated Haiiy. He removed to the United States about forty 

 years ago, and in due time became an American citizen. His 

 entire life was consecrated to geology and the kindred sciences, 

 with what ability and success his published writings and his well- 

 earned reputation at home and abroad may eloquently testify. 

 As a professor in this university during the last twenty-two 

 years and a State geologist of Tennessee for the most part of 

 that period, he won the confidence and respect of the commu- 

 nity by invaluable service in both capacities, as well as by the 

 unaffected modesty, kindness, and uniform courtesy of his de- 

 portment toward all men. In the various relations and stations 

 of life, public and private, he was without reproach and above 

 suspicion. Beloved, trusted, honored, venerated by all those most 

 intimately connected or associated with him, he could not make 

 an enemy he had none." 



Geography as a whole was compared by Dr. H. R. Mill, in the introduction to 

 his course of educational lectures of the Royal Geographical Society, to a pyra- 

 mid of six courses of masonry, built of blocks obtained from different quarries. 

 The first and fundamental course, built of material derived from pure mathemat- 

 ics, was mathematical geography, absolutely secure and firmly establislaed, under- 

 lying all the rest. Upon it, and resting on it, rose physical geography, the mate- 

 rial for which was brought from physics, geology, meteorology, etc , all the 

 determining conditions being fully known. This served as a foundation for bio- 

 logical geography, in which the imperfect comprehension of life introduced un- 

 stable and incomplete elements; but far fuller of uncertainty was the next tier of 

 anthropo-geography, in which the additional unknown quantity of human nature 

 exercised a preponderating influence, and the positive scientific facts from the 

 quarries of anthropology, ethnology, and economics were few and by no means 

 well co-ordinated. Arising from this came the layer of political geography, the 

 scientific basis of which was mixed up and overlaid with arbitrary, transitory, 

 and impracticable conditions arising from the workings of the human mind and 

 the limitations of nationality. Upon this was reared the final story of the pyra- 

 mid, commercial geography, a mass of rubble, the relation of which to its scien- 

 tific foundation was not yet fully made out. 



