WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 107 



tion in this matter, but how many would have had the unselfishness 

 to do the right thing at the sacrifice of a little personal credit. 



Another incident might be cited as showing a characteristic of the 

 man. A few months before his death I invited him to join me at 

 Oxford, Mississippi, for the purpose of going over together some of the 

 exposures of the Lafayette in that county, since some doubt had been 

 thrown upon the age of some of the occurrences. He wrote that he 

 would be very glad to join me in this trip, the details of which we could 

 arrange a little later. A few days after this I received another letter 

 from him in which he said that in his first letter he had not perhaps 

 been sufficiently frank with me, since he was suffering from some in- 

 ternal trouble which would certainly take him off in a very short 

 time, but whether in a few weeks or a few months he could not say. 

 I think he died within a month. 



Regarding McGee's work on the Lafayette, while we may not all 

 agree with him in his conclusions, and while he may have included in 

 his monograph some things that were not Lafayette, yet I think all 

 must agree that this treatise on the Lafayette in the Twelfth Annual 

 Report of the Director of the United States Geological Survey will 

 always remain one of the classics of our Coastal Plain geology. 



From Professor J. W. Spencer, of Washington: 



His mathematical paper relating to the Glacial Theory was that 

 which first attracted my attention to Doctor McGee. His early 

 pages on the "Forest Beds" and the geology of northeastern Iowa 

 opened other fields to me, as my earlier studies had been in the region 

 of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. I was then living in 

 the west. Our friendship began at the time of a visit to Washington 

 in 1883. 



McGee's laborious investigations in Iowa contributed largely to the 

 foundation of the present views of the Glacial history of the Missis- 

 sippi Valley, and of America generally. However, his farthest-reach- 

 ing researches were those of the Coastal Plain, extending all the way 

 from New Jersey to Mexico, and covering an area of 300,000 square 

 miles. The same features have since been observed by me for an- 

 other thousand miles in Mexico, thus extending the work of McGee. 



