364 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1904. 



mature and conservative; D. D. Owen, by all means the leader in 

 reconnaissance work, and W . \Y. Mather. James Hall was rapidly 

 forging to the front among paleontologists, while J. D. Dana, in the 

 full Hush of early manhood and fresh from the experiences of the 

 Wilkes expedition, began the important series of papers dealing with 

 the grander problems of earth history which soon placed him foremost 

 in the ranks of American geologists and. indeed, among the geologists 

 of the world. 



Among the names which were to appear prominently in the decade 

 will be found those of E. T. Cox, Ebenezer Emmons, J. P. Lesley, 

 F. B. Meek, B. F. Shumard, Michael Tuomey, and J. D. Whitney. 



Geology, at the opening of the decade, had found a place in the 

 curricula of the leading colleges of the land, as at Bowdoin, in Maine; 

 Amherst and Williams, in Massachusetts; Yale, in Connecticut; the 

 Rensselaer Institute, in New York; the University of Virginia, at 

 Charlottesville; the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill, and 

 the College of South Carolina, at Columbia. 



The Smithsonian Institution came into existence also during this 

 period. The National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the 

 Society of American Naturalists and Geologists were formed at the 

 very beginning of the decade, the last named to be in 1847 merged 

 into the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The 

 retrospect was pleasing, the prospect encouraging. 



In 1840 an immense stride in the study of the drift deposits was made 

 through the publication of Louis Agassiz's Etudes sur les Glaciers, a 

 work comprising the results of his own study and observations com- 

 bined with those of -Ian de Charpentier, E. T. Venetz, 

 Agassiz's Glacial anc j y (; Hugi. The work was published in both 



Theory, 1840. => l 



French and German and brought to a focus, as it 

 were, the scattered rays with which the obscure path of the glacial 

 geologist had been heretofore spasmodically illuminated. But libraries 

 in America were few and far between, the workers were poor, and 

 many remained long in ignorance of the existence of the treatise or 

 gained but a partial and imperfect idea of its contents through hearsay 

 or brief reviews in periodicals. 



The prevalent ideas on the subject of the drift have been from time 

 to time given in these pages. It was Agassiz's idea, based upon obser- 

 vations in the Alps and the Juras, and what was known regarding exist- 

 ing conditions in northern Siberia, that at a period geologically very 

 recent the entire hemisphere north of the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth 

 parallels had been covered by a sheet of ice possessing all the char- 

 acteristics of existing glaciers in the Swiss Alps. Through this agency 

 he would account for the loose beds of sand and gravel, the bowlder 

 clays, erratics, and all the numerous phenomena within the region 

 described which had heretofore been variously ascribed to the Noachian 



