ORIGINAL ARTICLES. 
An Eminent Living American Geologist and 
Palaeontologist.—Professor John M. Clarke, 
LL.D., D.Sc., For. Corr. Geol. Soc. Lond., Director of the New 
- York State Museum, Albany (New York), U.S.A. 
WITH A PORTRAIT (PLATE V). 
pene State of New York has long been famous as the centre from 
which radiated out geological life and energy to the early 
explorers, whose followers are now to be found spread over the vast 
States of America. The names of Emmons, Silliman, Dana, and 
Hall, and a host of other great geologists, may be cited, whose records 
will never die, and whose work is now being carried on by their 
living representatives. Such a surviving successor of James Hall now 
worthily fills his chair at the Albany Museum. 
Professor John M. Clarke was born in 1857 in the Puritan village 
of Canandaigua, in the “ Finger Lakes Region” of Western New 
York State, amid the rich Devonian fossiliferous rocks. Mr. Clarke’s 
boyish desires naturally turned to the study of his native rocks and 
fossils. His home life was simple and well influenced, his father being 
for nearly two generations the principal of the Academy, and both 
father and mother were of the Puritan stock which came out from 
Old England to Massachusetts in the first half of the seventeenth 
century. After school and college days, Mr. Clarke became a teacher 
of geology, first at Amherst College, from which he had graduated ; 
afterwards at Smith College, and this active interest in imparting 
knowledge he has retained to this day as professor of geology in the 
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with which he has been associated 
for more than twenty-five years, in succession to Amos Eaton, 
Ebenezer Emmons, and James Hall. As a mature student of 
geological science, Mr. Clarke spent three years at Gottingen, and 
on his return from Europe he joined on 2nd January, 1886, the staff 
of Professor James Hall, the distinguished paleontologist and 
geologist at Albany, where he has remained ever since, in the 
geological service of the State of New York. 
At the time of Mr. Clarke’s advent at Albany, James Hall was — 
75 years old, and while his vigor and enthusiams were unimpaired 
and his devotion to his great work, the Paleontology of New 
York, unstintea, the extensive researches necessary to carry this 
work forward naturally fell on younger men. Hall was then in the 
midst of his greatest productiveness, but his assistant, the late 
Charles E. Beecher, was leaving and soon the labour of the 
preparation cf these great volumes in all their extensive details of 
research, drawing, lithography, and printing fell to Clarke, his new 
assistant. The volume on the Devonian Trilobites and other 
Crustacea (vol. vil), and the two volumes on the Genera of the 
Paleozoic Brachiopoda (vols. viii, parts i and 11), were prepared by 
Mr. Clarke, the latter with the help of illuminating suggestions from 
Charles Schuchert. But all this work of the assistant, though 
usually not seen by Professor Hall until in type, was carefully read, 
annotated, and generously accepted by him 
