244 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LV, No. 1418 



North America. Thirteen great quarto vol- 

 umes and at least a five-foot shelf of works on 

 paleontolog3' are his enduring monuments. 



The wonderful Fourth District of western 

 New York was Hall's "patent" and in it he 

 labored for five years unraveling its geology, 

 "the most excellent piece of field work he ever 

 did," in the course of which was established a 

 large part of the New York System of geolog- 

 ical formations. Then came the ever widening 

 Paleontology of New York, the dominant note 

 of Hall's long life. An insatiable collector, 

 withovit ever knowingly having a duplicate 

 fossil, he sold the worked-up collections onh' to 

 buy and collect others with the money so ob- 

 tained. Appropriations or none by New York 

 or other states, he went on constantly garner- 

 ing more material. 



As one reads the book, the thought comes 

 readily that New York State has been the 

 mother of geologists — one almost comes to the 

 belief that all American geologists between 

 1843 and 1890 came from the Empire State or 

 got their training there. We also see the 

 passing show of the master minds that devel- 

 oped the geologj' of the entire Mississippi 

 Valley, since they were all for one reason or 

 another worshippers at the Albanian shrine. 

 "His influence guided official geologic move- 

 ments in every state where they were inau- 

 gurated, and in many his hand took a helms- 

 man's part." Hall's influence was also great 

 in Canada between 1843 and 1869, since his 

 relations with the director of the Geological 

 Survey of Canada, Sir William Logan, "were 

 openly harmonious." 



Hall's zenith of scientific attainments came 

 between 1857 and 1861. Some years before, he 

 presented at the Montreal meeting of the 

 American Association for the Advancement of 

 Science his "most notable performance in 

 philosophical geology," The Geological His- 

 tory of the North, American Continent. In 

 this essay, published in 1861, he set forth two 

 essential propositions in regard to mountain 

 making, and they are the fundamentals on 

 which our modern conception of these struc- 

 tures depends. These are : 



1. That ranges of folded mountains exist only 

 where sediments have uniformly accumulated to 



maximum thickness and that such maximum 

 accumulation is possible only by corresponding 

 depression of the sea bottom along the edges of 

 continents delivering such sediments. . . 



2. That folded mountains result from the 

 crumpling of the upper layers only of these ac- 

 cumulated deposits, a consequence of the adjust- 

 ment of the later sediments to a deepening but 

 contracting depression. 



When Hall was sixty years of age, he was 

 "at the threshold of his greatest productive- 

 ness," and he worked in this way : 



Of all the corps of men engaged upon this 

 work, Mr. Hall himself was, in these days, the 

 most diligent. Nothing that entered into his 

 publications escaped his criticism and review and 

 he was keen and quick in the preparation of his 

 manuscript. Up and at his desk soon after break 

 of day, with a cup of tea and a panada at his 

 elbow, he found his quiet hours before his 

 assistants came around. And after they had gone 

 there were the evening hours which seldom found 

 him awaj' from his work room. It was his habit 

 when at work to sit before his desk on a revolving 

 piano-stool; his backbone needed no support and 

 an easy chair he abhorred. But alongside his 

 desk he kept, for his callers, a deep scoop-shaped 

 great chair into which the visitor shriveled as he 

 sank down into insignificance near the floor, while 

 his vis-a-vis, erect on his stool, towered majes- 

 tically over him. It was a strategic advantage 

 and in many an engagement commanded the 

 enemy 's works. 



When the reviewer went to Albany in 1889 

 as Hall's private assistant, the latter was a pic- 

 turescjue old man: 



His round, full-bodied figure, his heavy snowy 

 beard running well up over his ruddy cheeks, an 

 always erect carriage and a sqnare level look out 

 from under thick brows and over his Moorish 

 nose; dressed in an old coat and in trousers 

 which buttoned down the sides after the fashion 

 of 1830, he was bound to attract attention and 

 curiosity. Every morning . . . his man Tom drove 

 him from his home in a broken-down, one-seated 

 cart which had once owned a top but lost it long 

 since, drawn by a broken-down old nag which 

 had also seen better days and had like as not 

 been taken in exchange for apples or old speci- 

 men boxes, his capacious snow- crowned figure 

 capped with a chimney-pot hat towering above his 

 diminutive driver — the jogging figure through the 

 Albany streets was sure to compel notice. 



