Albert Homer Purdue. 249 
from the State had put him out of touch with the political personnel of 
the Republican party and he failed to get the nomination. Perhaps he 
would have succeeded if he had listened to the demands of those who 
wished the promise of places which they were not prepared to fill. The 
winter following he was principal of the high school at Rensselaer, 
Indiana. Then came a year of graduate work as a Fellow at the Uni- 
versity of Chicago. 
His professional career began in 1896, when he was elected Professor 
of Geology at the University of Arkansas, his position after 1902 being 
that of Professor of Geology and Mining. Here his executive ability 
and judgment were early recognized, and as time went on more and 
more of the administrative committee work of the university fell on his 
shoulders. He was chairman of the Committee on Student Affairs and 
of the Classification Committee, which had in charge the arrangement 
of courses, etc. In 1898 he married Miss Ida Pace, of Harrison, Arkan- 
sas, at that time Associate Professor of English at the university—a 
woman of unusual mental and social attainments, who comes of a family 
distinguished in the life of Arkansas. In 1895, again in 1901, and from 
then on Mr. Purdue was a field assistant on the United States Geological 
Survey, devoting his summers to field-work. With the Survey he had 
the reputation of being one of the very few teaching geologists whom 
that organization could count on to carry out a program not only in 
the field but in the office preparation of his reports. At the time of the 
St. Louis Exposition he was made Superintendent of Mines and Metal- 
lurgy for the State. In 1907 Mr. Purdue was made State Geologist 
ex officio of the Arkansas Survey. Though having at his disposal only 
very meager funds, Purdue was able to prepare or have prepared a 
number of highly creditable reports, including one on the slates of the 
State, by himself; one by Prof. W. N. Gladson on the water powers of 
the State, and one by Prof. A. A. Steel on mining methods in the coal 
fields of the State. 
As a teacher, Purdue brought to his work the results of his normal- 
school preparation, and the training received under Branner and J. P. 
Smith at Stanford, and Salisbury, Chamberlain and others at Chicago, 
together with his own rather varied experience along that line. He was 
not a believer in the lecture method of instruction, but rather in the 
students working out their results under the stimulus of actual contact 
with the problems in the field and laboratory, and in this knowledge 
being reinforced by repeated review and by application to new and 
practical problems. He had little regard for the student who would not 
work and he would bar such students as much as possible from his 
classes. The great energy he put into his teaching in both the class- 
room and field wonderfully impressed his students and assistants, so 
