6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 8o 



Committee, and Vice-Chairman of the Board. As a member resident 

 in Washington his advice and counsel played a large part throughout 

 the twenty-five years of his membership. His wide contacts with 

 government departments, universities, and research agencies of all 

 types, his exceptional range of interest in the various fields of science 

 gave him a point of view and a quality of judgment of inestimable 

 value. The Institution owes much of' its accomplishment to his 

 conscientious adherence to a program of high ideals based upon 

 practical, intensive study of facts. 



I know that I express the wish of the trustees, directors, and 

 members of the staft' of the Carnegie Institution in voicing on this 

 occasion our heartfelt gratitude for Doctor Walcott's contribution in 

 the building of many departments, as Mount Wilson Observatory, 

 Geophysical Laboratory, and others, and his assistance and advice 

 on nearly all of our greater projects. 



The major research efforts of Doctor Walcott's life were directed 

 toward the earlier portion of the historical record of the earth. 

 Though he contributed much toward our understanding of general 

 geological phenomena, his interest centered upon the earlier chapters 

 of the history of life. 



One source of Doctor Walcott's power in research lay in his never 

 losing sight of the fact that there is really only one history, which 

 includes the record of physical phenomena and the relation of the 

 story of life to the sequence of events in their environment. Whether 

 he happened to be concerned with determining the sequence of strata 

 necessary as the guide to succession of events in time, or with inter- 

 pretation of great gaps or erosional intervals between such series, 

 or with details of structure in any of the many groups of trilobites 

 or other invertebrate animals which he loved to study, there was 

 always before him the idea that the facts fitted into one scheme of 

 interlocking events in earth history. 



As another aspect of the attitude toward his subject which gave 

 Doctor Walcott exceptional power in furtherance of the study of his 

 subject, one may note that he had at the same time a reputation as 

 a collector with rare penetration of vision, and as a generalizer with 

 almost superhuman judgment as to where in the geological or geo- 

 graphical scheme of things new data would Imve exceptional inter- 

 pretive value. The relation between these two characteristics ex- 

 presses in a manner the breadth of his view and the keenness of his 

 perception. He found types of life new to science in unexpected 

 places, not because of luck or mere persistence. His success was 

 partly due to exceptional keenness and alertness, but largely to his 



