JOURNAL OF THE 



WASHINGTON CARUTHERS KERR. 



Washington Caruthers Kerr, Ph. D., the second President of 

 the Mitchell Society, died in Asheville, N. C, August 9th, 1885, 

 fifty-six years old. He was born in Guilford county, N, C, and was 

 graduated at the University of N. C, with highest honors in schol- 

 arship in 1850. After teaching school in North Carolina, and while a 

 professor in Marshall University, Texas, he was appointed a computer 

 in the Nautical Almanac Office at Cambridge, Mass. Availing hin - 

 self with great ardor of the opportunities offered by Harvard College, 

 he became the companion as well as the pupil of Davis, and Agassiz, 

 and Peirce, and Lovering, and Guyot, and Horsford, and Eustis, 

 and formed lasting friendships with others renowned in science on 

 both sides of the Atlantic. From Cambridge he went, in 1857, to 

 Davidson College, N. C, as its Professor of Chemistry, Geology and 

 Mineralogy. This position of personal safety he left at the begin- 

 ning of the late civil war and enlisted as a private in the Confede- 

 rate army; but was soon detailed to devise methods for, and to 

 superintend the manufacture of salt on the coasts of Norfh Carolina 

 and of South Carolina. In 1866 he became the successor of Dr. 

 Emmons as the Geologist of North Carolina. In 1867-'8 he deliv- 

 ered the lectures on Chemistry, Geology and Mineralogy before the 

 Senior Class at the University of North Carolina. In 1882 he ac- 

 cepted a position in the Coast Survey of the United States, that he 

 might connect his own work in North Carolina with that of the 

 Nation. His labors among the mountains of North Carolina were 

 suspended, because of bodily infirmity, in 1883. 



Dr. Kerr was one of the oldest and most active members of the 

 American Association for the Advance of Science, and was connected 

 with several other similar societies. To the archives and to the 

 publications of these bodies he contributed frequently and often 

 largely. Although of a slight physical frame, he was of great en- 

 ergy in body and in mind. He visited every portion of his native 

 State and examined personally its plains, hills, mountains, rivers, 

 creeks, forests, minerals, metals and climate. No man has ever 

 labored so constantly, intelligently, lovingly and successfully to 

 discover and proclaim the capability of North Carolina to supply 

 the wants of mankind. Possessed of a fiuent tongue and a ready 

 pen, he spread the fame of his State wherever science is cultivated. 



