408 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE Vol. XXVI, 1919 



INITIATION OF MODERN GEOLOGY IN THE NEW WORLD 



Old Wernerian influences which dominated geological science 

 throughout Europe and colonial America during the eighteenth cen- 

 tury and the early decades of the nineteenth only barely touched 

 Iowa. When William McClure, who, a hundred years ago, was 

 long president of the American Philosophical Society, in Philadel- 

 phia, and who was in his day the foremost exponent of the German 

 school in this country, prepared a general geological map of eastern 

 United States, the formations afterwards called the Paleozoics are 

 represented as reaching the Mississippi river.- Before these forma- 

 tions could be actually traced beyond, the determination of fossils 

 from the Iowa side by Thomas Nuttall, forever barred the further 

 spread of Werner's conceptions to trans-Mississippian territory. It 

 is with these new and modern principles that Iowa entered upon her 

 geological career. 



By singularly happy chance Iowa was, in a very unusual way, 

 closely identified with the establishment of modern geology. It was 

 on Iowa soil that there was first application in the new world of 

 the novel principles of identifying and correlating geological forma- 

 tions by means of the organic remains entombed within them. This 

 was a full quarter of a century before the method, which has since 

 become universal in use, was practiced anywhere else on the Ameri- 

 can continent. It was, moreover, the first attempt ever made to cor- 

 relate by fossils geological formations of different continents. 



Those remarkable precepts formulated by William Smith, which 

 lie at the base of our accepted scheme of geological correlation and 

 chronology, are thus practically tested in America, and in Iowa if 

 you please, almost as soon as they are in England the land of their 

 birth. That America should so early and from such an unexpected 

 quarter as Iowa, furnish material aid in support of the newly an- 

 nounced principles is a fact worthy of more than passing notice. 

 The circumstances are long since all but forgotten. In the few 

 casual references made to them in after years either their true im- 

 port is misunderstood or familiarity with the attendant conditions 

 is entirely lacking. Both as the first successful application of mod- 

 ern geological principles in the new world and as the maiden effort, 

 as it proved to be, at world-wide stratigraphical correlation, the 

 event must ever remain one of the outstanding features in the his- 

 tory of geological science. 



Nuttall's paleontological correlations antedate by fifteen years 



-Trans. American Philos. Soc, Vol. VI, p. 411, Phila., 1809. 



