370 THOMAS STERRY HUNT. 



gained he added, from his store of chemical and mineralogical knowl- 

 edge and from his laboratory investigations, the facts and hypothetical 

 deductions which appeared to him to give as conclusive probabilities 

 to the life study of those older barren strata as the evolution of vege- 

 table and animal orgauisms gives to the history of later rocks. He 

 combined in his intellectual equipment the practical experience of a 

 field geologist with a theoretic erudition in geology and allied science 

 such as few of his fellow workers could claim to possess. He was 

 therefore warranted, as the area of his geological view grew, in shift- 

 ing his ground on certain subordinate points. The most notable in- 

 stance of such a change of position was that taken in his Presidential 

 address before the American Association for the Advancement of 

 Science, in 1871, when he subdivided the crystalline rocks which had 

 been previously classed as Laurentian and Huronian into six groups, 

 and altered the stratigraphic relations of what was known in the Can- 

 adian Survey as the Quebec Group. Whether the subject was im- 

 portant enough to warrant the vehemence with which he maintained 

 his ground and sustained his argument may, perhaps, be doubted ; but 

 to Hunt truth was truth, and the relative proportion and importance 

 of the truth had no weight with him. 



It is not on his work as a stratigraphical geologist that Dr. Hunt's 

 fame will mainly rest ; but on his achievements in lithology and chem- 

 istry, and on the broad generalizations which he drew as to the early 

 development of the earth. There are essays in his second series, elab- 

 orating the crenitic theory, which rise to a high pitch of eloquence, 

 and which any one of literary tastes, though utterly ignorant of science, 

 will read with rapt enjoyment. Last year, after completing his " Sys- 

 tematic Mineralogy," and when so feeble that he could only move 

 from his bed to his desk, he commenced a book entitled " The History 

 of an Earth," in which it was his purpose to expand, in a connected 

 treatise, his splendid generalizations on stellar and telluric chemistry, 

 and especially to trace the influence of water under heat and pressure 

 in decomposing the primitive basic crust of the earth, and in creating 

 out of the primary elements the older crystalline rocks, and again 

 in re-creating from their sterile ashes, through decay and death, the 

 newer life-supporting and life-entombing strata which contain, written 

 in generation after generation, the newer history of the earth. But 

 death frustrated this and other literary projects. 



Chemistry was Hunt's first love, and he never deserted her. 

 When he studied geology, his impulse was to seek below the visible 

 results of mechanical causes for the all-pervading chemical forces and 



