822 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE FIRST HALF CENTURY OF THE AMERICAN 

 ASSOCIATION. 



By Prof. DANIEL S. MAKTIN. 



THE recent jubilee meeting of the American Association for the 

 Advancement of Science, held at Boston, where the society was 

 organized fifty years ago, is a memorable event in the history of 

 science in this country, and is well deserving of careful notice. It 

 has been somewhat fully treated of, indeed, in several of our maga- 

 zines and leading papers, and the general aspects of it must be 

 familiar to most of the readers of these pages. But some considera- 

 tion is due to so interesting a topic from a review entirely devoted to 

 scientific objects, and it is proposed in this article to give not only 

 some historical aspects of the association and its half century of work, 

 as has been done in most of the articles and addresses that have ap- 

 peared, but also some suggestions as to the influence that it has 

 exerted on the country, and how that influence may and should be 

 increased in the years to come. 



The association itself was the natural and indeed the necessary 

 outgrowth of the earlier organization known as the Association of 

 American Geologists and Naturalists, which held its first meeting at 

 Philadelphia in 1840. That movement began two years before, in 

 1838, in the suggestion of such a body as eminently desirable, by 

 Prof. Edward Hitchcock, of Amherst College, in a letter to Prof. 

 Henry D. Rogers, of Philadelphia. The two brothers Rogers took 

 up the suggestion earnestly, and, with the active efl^orts of Pro- 

 fessor Hitchcock, brought together the first gathering, which was 

 a notable one both in itself and in its subsequent results. These 

 were foreshadowed at the very outset; the original idea was for 

 a conference of geologists only, but the inevitable expansion was 

 seen in the name selected, in which the words " and Naturalists " 

 were soon added to the proposed title — " Association of American 

 Geologists." 



There were eighteen students of the science present at that first 

 meeting, in the Franklin Institute at Philadelphia, Professor Hitch- 

 cock being chosen to preside. Among them were nearly all the men 

 actively interested in geological studies and in the early State sur- 

 veys then beginning or begun. Of that circle of founders only one 

 remains. Dr. Martin H. Boye, then of Philadelphia, but lately abroad. 

 Prof. James Hall, the veteran head of the New York State Survey, 

 and for some years past the Nestor of American paleontologists, lived 

 to within a few weeks of the Boston jubilee meeting, and his presence 

 was looked forward to with peculiar interest; but he was taken away 



