August 9, 1888] 



NATURE 



o4/ 



Pennsylvania, though numerous observations had been 

 made on the direction of the striae and the location of the 

 moraines, in the northern part of the States, nothing had 

 been attempted towards gathering the results into a con- 

 sistent whole, or tracing the limits of the glaciation. In 

 that year he succeeded in tracing a great terminal moraine 

 from New Jersey to the Ohio frontier, and showing that 

 beyond this line glaciation was absent, while within it the 

 direction of the motion could be traced as well by the striae 

 as by the derivation of the boulders. Of the truth of these 

 views he succeed in convincing almost all the American 

 geologists who had studied the question. Fired by his 

 success in interpreting the glacial phenomena of his 

 native country, and believing that the same key might 

 be found to unlock the mysteries of European glaciation, 

 he practically threw up his position in Philadelphia, and 

 devoted himself to the study of these phenomena in Great 

 Britain. Devoting his summers from 1885 to the work, 

 he visited — accompanied by his wife, whose active assist- 

 ance he constantly enjoyed — almost every locality in Great 

 Britain and Ireland where striae had been recorded or 

 moraines were likely to occur. To reduce the whole of 

 the previous observations to order was a task he had not 

 yet succeeded in completing, but which he boldly under- 

 took, and to continue which he had once more landed 

 in England. Important results were, however, already 

 obtained, and at the British Association last year he gave 

 English geologists the firstfruits, by presenting them with 

 a map of England in which he had traced a great terminal 

 moraine, as in America, on the north of which the striae 

 and the dispersion of the boulders indicated a continuous 

 ice-sheet, while to the south the various glacial deposits 

 were accounted for by extra-morainic lakes. He boldly 

 advocated the view of the ice mounting up to the heights 

 of 1 100 feet in Moel Tryfaen and elsewhere, where the 

 ice-sheet had crossed the sea, declaring that anyone 

 who was acquainted, as he was, with the far greater 

 results of ice-motion in Pennsylvania would have 

 no difficulty in accepting this, and pointing out that these 

 localities were everywhere on the line of the great terminal 

 moraine. So startling a generalization could scarcely be 

 accepted all at once, and there were many things to 

 account for before the history even of this greatest ice-sheet 

 could be considered complete. Had Prof. Lewis been spared 

 to us, he was prepared to devote himself to the completion 

 of this work. He has left a large mass of notes and draw- 

 ings bearing on it, which must now wait for some Elisha 

 capable of taking up his mantle. Everyglacialist is no doubt 

 more or less satisfied with the account he can give of the 

 glacial history of his own district ; but to the general geolo- 

 gist the whole has hitherto presented a chaos of conflicting 

 histories, fit only to bewilder him. In the clear account 

 given by Prof. Carvill Lewis of one great portion of that 

 history, light seemed at last to dawn, and the hope was 

 raised that glacial chaos would cease. This hope now 

 seems quenched for a time. 



Prof. Lewis was born in Philadelphia, November 16, 

 1853, and took his B.A. degree in 1873 in the University 

 of Pennsylvania. From 1879 to 1884 he was a volunteer 

 member of the Geological Survey of the State. In 1880 

 he was elected Professor of Mineralogy in the Academy 

 of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, and in 1883 Professor 

 of Geology in Haverford College. His work was by no 

 means confined to his glacial studies, the most important 

 of his minor works being the discovery of the matrix of 

 the diamond in an ultra-basic volcanic rock in contact 

 with a carbonaceous tuff. The prediction that, if such 

 was the origin of diamonds, they might be found in 

 meteorites, had just been fulfilled in Russia ; and he had 

 lately visited a locality in Carolina, where the same con- 

 ditions obtain, but had not proceeded further when he 

 was stopped by death. During the last three years he 

 spent his winters in Heidelberg, studying microscopic 

 petrography with Prof. Rosenbusch. 



Those who knew him personally, were charmed with 

 the beautiful frankness of his nature^ his love of truth, 

 his invariable possession of a reason for what he said, 

 and his total lack of pride or assumption of authority. 

 They saw in him a type of what a genuine student of 

 Nature should be, tempered and refined by general 

 culture. Few who knew him at all but must feel they 

 have lost a friend, and an example. 



He married in 1882, and leaves a wife and one 

 daughter. 



SONXET* 

 TO A HIGH SOPRANO 



Accompanying herself on the Piano. 



THE larks who sing at Heaven's high gate despair 

 To match thy notes so piercing-sweet and true 

 That, pure as in night's hour fresh-fallen dew, 

 Vouch thou art good, e'en as thou art most fair. ' 

 Why seek with gems to deck thy radiant hair, 

 Thy flashing, rushing, fingers to indue 

 With rubies' blaze or Opal's orient hue — 

 Thou canst in nobler wise thy worth declare. 

 Oft shall the rapt enthusiast in his cell 

 Intent on Nature's all-pervading clue 

 Pause, to bid Memory with her magic spell 

 Restore that heavenly, loved, lithe form to view 

 And in fond fancy hear thy voice anew 

 Till life to gladness breathes its last farewell. 



New College, Oxford, July 20. 



J. J. S. 



NOTES. 

 The annual meeting of the British Medical Association was 

 opened at Glasgow on Tuesday, the 7th vast. Prof. Gairdner, 

 the President, delivered an address on " The Physician as 

 Naturalist." Speaking of the methods of education necessary 

 for the training of a physician, Prof. Gairdner urged that medical 

 students do not at present receive adequate instruction in physics. 

 " When v/e consider, "he said, "how completely modern science 

 has demonstrated the subordination of living bodies and physio- 

 logical processes, not to a wholly detached set of laws termed 

 vital, but to all the most elementary laws of matter; and, 

 further, the correlation of all the physical forces throughout the 

 universe, so that the living body and its environment act and 

 react on each other throughout infinite space and time, it will be 

 readily admitted, I think, that some kind of systematized in- 

 struction in physics, and not a mere elementary examination in 

 mechanics, should be an essential part of an education with a 

 view to the medical profession. And when we further consider 

 that most of the great advances in medical diagnosis in the 

 present day, through the stethoscope, microscope, laryngoscope, 

 ophthalmoscope, sphygmograph, electricity as applied to muscle 

 and nerve, &c, involve applications of pure physics which are 

 neither remote from practice nor yet very easily mastered by the 

 beginner; and that, in the case of electricity and other phy.-ical 

 reagents, even heat and cold, &c, we are every day extending 

 the domain of these sciences in therapeutics, and still more 

 perhaps in preventive medicine and sanitary science, their claim 

 for an extended recognition in teaching seems to be enormously 

 enhanced. I am persuaded that in a very few years the physical 

 laboratory will become an absolutely essential preliminary step 

 in the education of the physician of the future, and that those 

 who have not undergone this training will be hopelessly distanced 

 in the race." 



* In the next number of Nature will appear the Original of this sonnet 

 addressed , 



To a Young Lady with a Contralto Voice. 



