NovEMBER 17, 1899.] 
Fresh from the spangled vault’s o’erarching splendor, 
Thy lonely pillar, thy revolving dome, 
In heartfelt accents, proud, rejoicing, tender, 
We bid thee welcome to thine earthly home.* 
Advancing years came pleasantly to him. 
In Cambridge he reéstablished the Astro- 
nomical Journal, the special pride of his 
early life, and honors, such as are accorded 
only to the very great, came to gladden him 
with their special significance of recognition 
and appreciation. A dozen peaceful years 
were spent in the quiet of his own home be- 
' fore the end came, and then he passed be- 
yond the stars to his new home in the far- 
away skies. 
The meeting in Chicago brought into con- 
spicuous notice one of the pioneers in 
American geology, whose fine attainments 
had been honored locally by his election to 
the presidency of the Chicago Academy of 
Sciences. Our Association was quick to 
recognize the growing advancement of sci- 
ence in the west by electing John Wells 
Foster to preside over the Salem meeting 
in 1869. 
FOSTER. } 
Foster was born in Petersham, Massa- 
chusetts, in 1815, and was a lineal de- 
scendant of Myles Standish, of Mayflower 
celebrity. He was educated at Wesleyan 
University, and then studied law. In the 
early thirties Ohio was still the El Dorado 
of New England, and Foster settled in 
Zanesville, where he completed his law 
studies and was admitted to the bar. 
In 1847 the national government insti- 
tuted a geological survey of the Lake Su- 
perior region, which at that time was at- 
tracting much attention, owing to the dis- 
covery of the copper deposits there. Charles 
T. Jackson was appointed in charge of the 
expedition, and he chose as his assistants 
* Addresses at the Complimentary Dinner to Dr. 
Benjamin Apthorp Gould, p. 22. 
7 A portrait of John Wells Foster is published as 
Frontispiece. 
SCIENCE. 
707 
Foster and Josiah D. Whitney. On the 
completion of the work, two years later, 
the preparation of the report was assigned 
to the younger men. ‘The two slender vol- 
umes were published by Congress, and still 
remain the accepted authority on the sub- 
ject of which they treat. It was at the 
Cincinnati meeting of our Association in 
1851, that the elder Agassiz ‘declared it 
to be one of the grandest generalizations 
ever made in American geology.’ 
He returned to Massachusetts and was ac- 
tive in politics, serving for some years as one 
of the Governor’s executive council, but in 
1848 he again went west, and Chicago be- 
came his permanent home. For some years 
he had charge of the land department of 
the Illinois Central Railroad and then held 
a similar connection with the Chicago and 
the Illinois Central Railroad, and then held 
a similar connection with the Chicago & 
Alton Railroad, but he relinquished these 
appointments to return to the pursuit of 
science, and accepted a chair of natural 
history in Chicago. 
He was the author of ‘The Mississippi 
Valley, Its Physical Geography,’ which 
gave valuable sketches of the topography, 
botany, climate and geology of that part of 
the United States. His last work, pub- 
lished shortly before his death, was on Pre- 
historic Races of the United States, and 
gave the results of his investigations of the 
mounds found in various places in the 
Western States. He was the editor of the 
Lakeside Monthly, and a frequent contributor 
to literary and scientific periodicals. It 
was said of him that ‘‘ his varied experience, 
his wide and accurate knowledge of facts, 
his intellectual comprehensiveness, and dis- 
criminativeness made him the peer of the 
foremost scholars of his time, while his per- 
sonal and social qualities made him re- 
spected and loved by all who came within 
the radius of his winning personality.”” He 
died in 1878. 
