310 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



delphia on the 1st of August, 1808, he had not completed his fifty- 

 eighth year. 



He was the third in age of four brothers, — only two of whom sur- 

 vive, — who, inspired and guided by their father, Dr. Patrick Kerr 

 Rogers, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Chemistry in William 

 and Mary College, Virginia, — as if by mutual agreement, all gave 

 their lives to the cultivation and teaching of physical science. From 

 his youth, the subject of the present notice evinced so decided a predi- 

 lection for these studies and became so proficient in them, that, in his 

 twenty-second year, he was made Professor of Physics and Natural 

 History in Dickinson College, at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where, at the 

 same time, he edited a periodical called a " Messenger of Useful Knowl- 

 edge." Here he began his first independent studies in structural and 

 dynamical geology, in which he was destined greatly to excel. 



Seeking better opportunities, he soon resigned his chair, and passed 

 a year in England, studying chemistry under the late Professor Turner, 

 and accompanying the late De la Beche in his geological explorations. 

 Returning to Philadelphia, he devoted his whole time to scientific in- 

 vestigations. In conjunction with our other lately deceased associate, 

 Professor Bache, he made and published a valuable series of analyses 

 of the ashes of coal ; and he aided his brother, our own William B. 

 Rogers, in experiments upon " the laws of the Voltaic battery " (pub- 

 lished in Silliman's Journal), and in preparing two memoirs upon " the 

 Tertiary Formations of Eastern Virginia," which were published in the 

 Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. At the request 

 of the Council of the British Association for the Advancement of Sci- 

 ence, he prepared a report on the Geology of North America, which 

 was printed in the third Annual Report of that body, and was in part 

 republished in this country in Bradford's edition of Murray's Encyclo- 

 paedia of Geography. 



His first systematic geological labor was that of conducting the sur- 

 vey of the State of New Jersey, of which he published a report in 

 8vo, with a geological map. While thus engaged a similar survey 

 of the great State of Pennsylvania was provided for by the Legislature, 

 and placed under his direction. This, the most important scientific 

 labor of his life, was commenced early in the year 1836, and, with va- 

 rious interruptions and embarrassments growing out of legislative in- 

 action, was completed by him in the spring of 1855. The fruits of these 

 prolonged labors have been given to the world in his great work en- 



