OBITUARY. 



GEORGE HUNTINGTON WILLIAMS. 

 Born 1856. Died July 12, 1894. 



ONE of the most prominent members of the new school of 

 Petrography in America has been prematurely removed in the 

 person of Dr. G. H. Williams, Professor of Inorganic Geology in 

 the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Though only in the prime 

 of life, he succumbed in July to an attack of typhoid fever; his health, 

 it is supposed, having been enfeebled by his arduous duties last 

 summer in the department of Mineralogy of the Columbian Exposition. 

 Professor Williams was a native of Uiica, N.Y., and graduated at 

 Amherst College in 1878. He subsequently resided for a short time 

 in Berlin, and then studied under Rosenbusch in the University ol 

 Heidelberg, where he obtained the degree of Ph.D. in 1882. The 

 following year he became connected with Johns Hopkins University, 

 and was Associate Professor there from 1885 to 1892, when he was 

 appointed to the Chair he held at his death. The Professor was an 

 attractive teacher, and numbered among his pupils many of the most 

 successful workers in Petrography of the rising generation in 

 America. Apart from his numerous original memoirs and the 

 " Geology of Maryland," which we reviewed some months ago, his 

 well-known " Text-book of Crystallography " will long keep his 

 memory in the mind of students ; and it is a distinct loss to science 

 that his projected work on the microscopic structure of American 

 crystalline rocks, in progress at the time of his death, should have 

 been thus abruptly terminated. 



The death of M. Dutreil de Rhins has robbed France of one of 

 her best geographers. M. de Rhins had reached Tibet in course of 

 a journey from Turkestan to China and was murdered during a 

 dispute over some horses. It is a satisfaction, though a poor one, to 

 learn from the newspapers that the Chinese Government have 

 promptly ordered the recovery of his papers and effects, and further 

 suggested some reparation to his family. M. de Rhins was only 

 forty-seven, but he has left a monument behind in his account of the 

 geography of Central Asia. 



