7 6o AMERICAN OBITUARY 



W J McGee (his full name), anthropologist and geologist, died September 4, 1912. 

 He was born at Dubuque, la., April 17, 1853, and was self-educated. After studying math- 

 ematics, astronomy, law and other subjects, he turned his attention about 1875 to archaeology 

 and geology. Without public aid he made a geological and topographic survey of north- 

 western Iowa, and later became attached to the U. S. Geological Survey. He was in charge 

 of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1893-1903, resigning in order to undertake the work 

 of assembling a collection of races for the St.'Louis Exposition, 1904. His later years were 

 devoted to the inland water-ways commission, and he was an expert in the U.S. department 

 of agriculture. He wrote on anthropology, geology and hydrology. 



George Wallace Melville, naval officer, died March 17, 1912. He was born in New 

 York City, January IO, 1841, was educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, entered 

 the navy as assistant engineer in 1861 and served through the Civil War. In 1879 he sailed 

 with the De Long Arctic expedition, and commanded the boat's crew that escaped from 

 the Lena delta. He later headed the parties which recovered the records of the expedition 

 and De Long's remains. After 1887, he was engineer in chief, U.S. Navy, and became rear- 

 admiral, 1899 (retired, 1903). He invented many mechanical appliances, and wrote In 

 the Lena Delta, a narrative of the De Long expedition after the loss of the "Jeannette." 



Richard Wilde Micou, theologian, died at Oxford on June 4, 1912. He was born on June 

 12, 1848, at New Orleans, and after studying at the universities of Georgia and Alabama, he 

 went to Erlangen, to Edinburgh, and to the General Theological Seminary in New York City. 

 He was ordained in 1870. In 1892 he became professor of systematic divinity in the Phila- 

 delphia Divinity School, and in 1898 professor at the Virginia Theological Seminary. 



Philip Verrill Mighels, author, died October 13, 1911. He was born in Carson City, 

 Nevada, April 19, 1869, was admitted to the Nevada bar in 1890, was a journalist in San 

 Francisco and New York, and in 1895 began writing fiction. He published about a dozen 

 books, of which the best known is Brwver Jim's Baby. 



Darius Ogden Mills, American financier, died at Millbrae, California, on January 4, 1910, 

 aged 84. Born at Salem, N. Y., on September 25, 1825, he was a clerk in New York, went 

 to California during "the gold rush" of 1849, became a storekeeper at Sacramento, and 

 founded the Gold Bank of Sacramento. After doing much for the development of the 

 Comstock lode region, he was president of the Bank of California from 1864 (when he founded 

 it) until 1873, and in 1875, when the bank was wrecked under other management, he returned 

 and placed it on a sound basis. In California he had endowed a chair of philosophy in the 

 state university and had been a trustee of the Lick estate and Observatory. He sent an 

 astronomical expedition to Chile to observe stars not visible in the northern hemisphere. 

 In New York (after 1880) he was a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum and of the Museum 

 of Natural History and president of the New York Botanical Society; and he built the Mills 

 Hotels, lodging-houses for working men. His daughter married Whitelaw Reid. 



Paul Morton, administrator, died in New York City, January 19, 1911. He was born 

 in Detroit, Mich., May 22, 1857. At the age of fifteen he began his business career as a 

 clerk in the land office of the Burlington and Missouri R.R. He showed great executive 

 ability as a railroad man, and rose to be second vice-president of the Santa Fe system in 

 1898. He was secretary of the navy in Mr. Roosevelt's cabinet in 1904-05. In 1906 he 

 was made president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, and by his able administration 

 helped to restore the impaired fortunes of that company. He became vice-president of the 

 Pan-American R.R. in 1910. 



Francis Philip Nash, professor of Latin at Hobart College in 1871-76 and 1882-1907, 

 died on February 5, 191 1. He was born in Florence, Italy, December 5, 1836, graduated at 

 Harvard in 1856 and at Harvard Law School in 1859, and practised law in New York City 

 before becoming a teacher. He edited Two Satires of Juvenal, translated the American 

 Prayer Book into Italian, and contributed to the Nation (New York). 



John Willock Noble, Secretary of Interior in President Benjamin Harrison's cabinet, 

 1889-93, died March 22, 1912. He was born in Lancaster, Ohio, October 26, 1831, graduated 

 at Yale in 1851 and at the Cincinnati Law School in 1852, and was admitted to the bar in 

 1853. He practised in St. Louis (1855) and then in Keokuk, Iowa, until the outbreak of the 

 Civil War, during which he became colonel and brevet brigadier-general. He was U.S. 

 district attorney in St. Louis in 1867-70 and prosecuted whisky and tobacco frauds. 



Edward Payson North, civil engineer, died on July 20, 1911. He was born in Hartford, 

 Conn., July 16, 1835, studied engineering at Union College, became assistant engineer of the 

 Saratoga & Hudson River railway in 1864, and in 1 866 chief engineer of the Stamford & 

 New Canaan Railroad, on which he used, probably before any one else in the United States, 

 nitro-glycerine in rock-excavation. In 1868 he became connected with the Union Pacific 

 and in 1873-75 with U.S. Army engineering work on the upper Mississippi. He was super- 

 intendent of roads and streets in New York City in 1876 and, after being chief engineer of the 

 Sinaloa & Durango railway in Mexico (1881), was engineering expert on many municipal 

 projects, including the electric subways in New York, where he was head of the work on 

 paving and repairing streets in 1895 and consulting engineer of the department of public 

 works in 1897. He was a prominent member of the American Society of Civil Engineers 

 and contributed many papers to its Transactions and to technical and other journals. 



