406 PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



professor, Lieutenant Mather married his cousin, Miss Emily 

 Maria Baker. By this marriage he had three sons and three 

 daughters. Mrs. Mather died in 1850. 



After leaving the army Mr. Mather was for a short time 

 Professor of Chemistry, Mineralogy, and Geology in the Uni- 

 versity of Louisiana, but before the close of 1836 Governor 

 Marcy, of New York, appointed him, together with Ebenezer 

 Emmons, T. A. Conrad, and Lardner Vanuxem to make a 

 geological survey of that State. Each of these principal 

 geologists was assigned to one of four districts into which the 

 State was divided for the purpose. Mather had the first 

 district, which comprised Washington, Saratoga, Schenectady, 

 Schoharie, and Delaware Counties, and all that part of the 

 State to the southeast of them. What this survey accom- 

 plished has been told by Dr. James Hall, in the Popular 

 Science Monthly, for April, 1883. Among other things, he 

 says that " Their labours had in a great degree quieted the 

 feverish anxiety regarding the discovery of coal within the 

 limits of New York, for which frequent explorations had been 

 made in the black slates of the Hudson River Valley and else- 

 where, involving the expenditure of much money and loss of 

 time. . . . Professor Mather has estimated, from what he re- 

 garded as reliable data, that the fruitless coal-mining enter- 

 prises which had been undertaken in the Hudson Valley alone, 

 during the fifty years preceding 1840, had cost more than a 

 quarter of a million of dollars. The sums thus expended in 

 other parts of the State, though doubtless much less, must, 

 nevertheless, have been very large." The work of the survey 

 lasted about seven years. During this time Prof. Mather made 

 five periodical reports and a final report. This last forms a 

 quarto volume of six hundred and fifty-three pages, with forty- 

 six coloured plates, being one of the set of volumes embodying 

 the results of the survey and published by the State. This 

 report has been highly commended. 



In 1837 a State Geological Survey of Ohio was projected 

 and Prof. Mather was made chief geologist. This ill-fated 

 project was killed after an existence of little more than two 

 years by a spasm of economy which attacked the Ohio Legis- 

 lature of 1839. Two annual reports had been presented, and 

 were printed as State documents, and a report on the collec- 

 tions was made afterward, but there was no final report, and 



