238 OhUnary— Professor Otto M. Torell. 



OTTO MARTIN TORELL. 



(PLATE XV.) 



Born June 5, 1828. Died Septembek 11, 1900. 



Through tlie kindness of Mr. Leonard Holmstrom, we are enabled 

 to present our readers with an excellent portrait of the late Professor 

 Torell, who from 1871 to 1897 was head of the Geological Survey 

 of Sweden. The portrait originally accompanied a long article by 

 Mr. Holmstrom in Geologiska Foreningen i Stockholm's Forhandlingar 

 (xxiii, Haft 5) issued at the close of last year. Space does not 

 permit ns to publish even a condensation of this highly interesting 

 account of the departed geologist, but Torell was known personally 

 to so many of his colleagues in this country, which he frequently 

 visited, that they will welcome some extracts therefrom. 



Torell wrote little, partly from a disinclination for the mere 

 physical act, partly from a striving after that completeness which 

 can so rarel}' be attained, partly from a carelessness of personal 

 fame, and partly perhaps because he was rather a propounder of 

 new ideas than a patient elaborator of detail. His influence therefore 

 on the geologists of the world was not quite so great as it might 

 have been ; but on those of his own country it was enormous. 

 Mr. Holmstrom goes so far as to call him "in one sense the creator 

 of Swedish geology. It is true that Sweden could show men eminent 

 in that branch of learning before Torell's time, but it was not till 

 his coming that geology was generally recognized as an independent 

 science. He founded a school of geology in the University of Lund, 

 which possessed neither professor, nor literature, nor collections for 

 its study, and where even to-day there is no full professorship in 

 the subject." 



" He transformed the official Geological Survey of Sweden into 

 a scientific institution of high rank. He himself was the founder 

 of a truly scientific geology of the Quaternary period, through his 

 o-enius and courage in championing the theory of a general glaciation 

 of northern Europe, and for all time his name will be coupled with 

 that bold hypothesis, which fought its way to victory in the teeth 

 of contempt and official excommunication." On his first appearance 

 before the German Geological Society, the geologists of Berlin could 

 not listen to him with patience ; but five years later they made him 

 a chairman at their annual gathering. 



It was in pursuit of evidence for or against his theory of an 

 inland ice- sheet that he began the series of Arctic expeditions of 

 which Sweden has such right to be proud, sacrificing to them no 

 small part of his own means. A. E. Nordenskiold, who was his 

 companion, reminded us not long before his own death, that Torell's 

 first expedition to Spitzbergen (1858) was made in an ordinary 

 clinker-built fishing-smack, which leaked even before she left 



