HISTOEICAL GEOLOGY 



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Early Geology in Philadelphia. The oldest scientific 

 society is the American Philosophical Society of Phila- 

 delphia, started by the many-sided Benjamin Franklin in 

 1769, and which has published since 1771. Up to the time 

 of the founding of the Journal in 1818, there had 

 appeared in the publications of this society thirteen 

 papers of a geologic nature, nearly all small building 

 stones in the rising geologic story of North America. 

 The only fundamental ones were Maclure 's Observations 

 of 1809 and 1817. Later, in this same city, there was 

 organized another scientific society that came to be for 

 a long time the most active one in America. This was 

 the Academy of Natural Sciences, started in 1812 with 

 seven members, but it was not until 1817 and the election 

 of William Maclure as its first president that the work 

 of the Academy was of a far-reaching character. Here 

 was built up not only a society for the advancement of the 

 natural sciences and publications for the dissemination 

 of such knowledge, but, what is equally important, the 

 first large library and general museum. 



William Maclure (1763-1840), correctly named by Sil- 

 liman the "father of American geology," was born and 

 educated in Scotland, and died near Mexico City. A 

 merchant of London until 1796, when he had already 

 amassed "a considerable fortune," he made a first short 

 visit to New York City in 1782. In 1796 he again came 

 to America, this time to become a citizen of this country 

 and a liberal patron of science. 



About 1803, single-handed and unsustained by gov- 

 ernment patronage, Maclure interested himself most 

 zealously and efficiently in American geology. In 1809 

 he published his Observations on the Geology of the 

 United States, Explanatory of a Geological Map ; This 

 work he revised "on a yet more extended scale," issuing 

 it in 1817 with 130 pages of text, accompanied by a large 

 colored geological map. 



Silliman, the Pioneer Promoter of Geology. In 1806 

 when Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864) began actively to 

 teach chemistry and mineralogy, all the sciences in Amer- 

 ica were in a very backward state, and the earth sciences 

 were not recognized as such in the curricula of any of our 

 colleges. Silliman gave his first lecture in chemistry on 



