WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 7 



various lines of activity with which he was identified. We shall 

 listen with pleasure to their discussion of his life and work. 



The first speaker will be Doctor Milton Whitney, Chief of the 

 Bureau of Soils, who was associated with Doctor McGee in his later 

 studies of the uses of water in agriculture. 



Doctor Whitney said: 



For the last five and a half years of his extremely active life, Doc- 

 tor McGee was intimately associated with me in the Bureau of Soils 

 and was one of my principal and most valued advisors. In this in- 

 timate and quiet association in executive work, where practical things 

 have to be done and theories and speculations have to be translated 

 into definite, constructive, and reasonable action, he presented a side 

 of his character which perhaps some of his associates in the field of 

 constructive legislation did not see. It is of this I speak tonight. 



Like all great reformers, he knew that to secure attention and re- 

 form in methods the people must be shocked to overcome natural 

 inertia and arouse them to action. 



His quotation of huge figures indicating that an area equivalent 

 to 100,000 farms has been devastated in this country by soil erosion 

 was a clarion call to attract attention to the need of proper conserva- 

 tion of the soil in cultivating the fields and managing the forests and 

 other protective covers. He did not mean that all erosion is harmful 

 and necessarily destructive he was too eminent a geologist and 

 physiographer to fail to see even more clearly than most of us, that 

 erosion and leaching are natural processes in the life of the globe, 

 just as evaporation and elimination of what we call waste material 

 is a life process of the living body. Without these there would be an 

 absence of surface relief and of physiographic form; there would be 

 an absence of most of the mineral segregation that marks our mineral 

 wealth; there would be an absence of those rejuvenated and most fer- 

 tile soils of our younger flood plains, and of the renewal of our surface 

 soils generally. His conception was that erosion is a necessary nat- 

 ural process; his purpose was not to prevent erosion, but to control 

 it in the interest of mankind. 



He no more considered erosion as a necessary evil than he would 

 have condemned the rainfall because of occasional disastrous floods, 



