66 McGEE MEMORIAL MEETING 



he spent several weeks in northern Lower California, making obser- 

 vations among the Cocopa Indians, but the results were not pub- 

 lished. Based chiefly on material gathered by the late J. Owen Dor- 

 sey, McGee prepared a memoir on "The Siouan Indians" to serve 

 as an introduction to Dorsey's "Siouan Sociology," both of which 

 papers appear in the Fifteenth Annual Report of the Bureau. Based 

 on a collection of Peruvian trephined skulls collected by Dr. M. A. 

 Muniz, of Peru, McGee prepared, in conjunction with Dr. Muniz, a 

 descriptive paper which was published in the Sixteenth Annual Re- 

 port of the Bureau, while in the Nineteenth report he presented a 

 paper on "Primitive Numbers," with the result that Cornell College, 

 in his home State, conferred on him the degree of LL.D. in 1901. 

 McGee's anthropological bibliography alone is an extended one, while 

 his writings on scientific subjects generally are extremely varied and 

 extensive. He resigned from the Bureau of American Ethnology, 

 July 31, 1903, to assume charge of the Department of Anthropology 

 of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis, where he was 

 active also in organizing the World's Congress of Arts and Sciences in 

 1904, of which he was senior speaker in its department of Anthropo- 

 logy. At the close of the exposition he was appointed director of the 

 "St. Louis Public Museum," which never developed much more 

 than the name; and in 1907, after spending a period in the Papagueria 

 Desert of Sonora and Arizona, he became associated with the Bureau 

 of Soils in the United States Department of Agriculture as an expert 

 in subsoil erosion and subsoil waters, which position he held until 

 the time of his death. Meanwhile he became interested in the Con- 

 servation movement, and was selected as Vice-Chairman and Secretary 

 of the Inland Waterways Commission, of which he was the leading 

 spirit and in whose interest he was the most active worker. 



In 1888 he married Anita Newcomb, who, with a son and a daughter, 

 survive him. 



McGee was a man of commanding presence, of remarkable mental 

 vitality, ingenuity, and versatility, and of almost fanatical persever- 

 ance. He had a personal fondness for the unusual, as his preference 

 in respect to the initials of his given name and his strong liking for 

 the coinage of new terms suggest. But McGee was human withal, 

 and the most generous character, both with his slender purse and his 



