July 24, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



129 



none are left now. The " all round " man 

 competent to advance with equal foot along 

 the many divergent lines of this comprehensive 

 science, exists no longer. The " State Geolo- 

 gist " now may know one route expertly, others 

 less well and some not at all, but with a capa- 

 city for good generalship he can yet perform 

 the functions of his office without a masque- 

 rade. Professor Winchell was a sturdy, honest 

 geologist with an extraordinary capacity for 

 work and a reliable judgment in organization. 

 He was more than that: his real interests in 

 the science were very broad and he himself 

 entered many fields. His first interest was in 

 the chemistry of the rocks, their mineralogy 

 and origin. He wrote on every phase of geo- 

 logical industry, from mining to water supply 

 and agriculture; on Archean geology with an 

 extensive personal acquaintance; intimately 

 on optical mineralogy and petrography; some- 

 what profusely on the succession and signifi- 

 cance of glacial phenomena; the complicated 

 and sadly mistreated Taconic question he dis- 

 cussed with eminent fairness, and the sheaf of 

 his reviews in the American Geologist indi- 

 cates the still wider reach of his interests. 

 That he desired to share in all departments of 

 his organization is evinced by his titular co-au- 

 thorship with Professor Schuchert in treatises 

 on paleontology for his final reports, a field 

 into which he would hardly have ventured 

 alone. 



The exploitation of all these fields was the 

 legitimate duty of his organization and he led 

 the way into all. And in addition to these 

 services he did not ignore the fact that he was 

 carrying on a "Natural History" as weU as 

 a Geological Survey, as several of its bulletins 

 indicate. There will be no more such geolog- 

 ical surveys in this country, into all of whose 

 parts the chief can enter with skill and rea- 

 sonable finality, and this fact makes the per- 

 formance of Winchell one of which he was 

 indisputably the author, and the great store- 

 house of the data he assembled in the best 

 years of his labor is a monument of distinction 

 to him and to the state which authorized it. 



Professor WincheU's later interest as state 

 geologist had been among the events of the ice 



age and the postglacial waters. These investi- 

 gations, of high worth and broad concern, 

 easily led him into a field with many pitfalls: 

 primitive anthropology. He traversed this 

 field with care and came out into much safer 

 ground: the culture of the aborigines. This 

 latter study absorbed the attention of the 

 years after his survey had closed, and in 1911, 

 under the auspices of the Minnesota Historical 

 Society, he published a quarto of over 700 

 pages on the " Aborigines of Minnesota." 



We can not attempt to analyze more closely 

 here Professor WincheU's publications. They 

 were numerous and varied but they do not by 

 any means show forth his fuU. service to sci- 

 ence. He was the promoter, founder and chief 

 editor of the American Geologist, a monthly 

 journal whose annual financial deficit in the 

 service he personally bore for the eighteen 

 years of its existence. It was a catholic and 

 helpful exponent of the science and there are 

 many who still regret the transmigration of its 

 soul. 



At the last annual dinner of the Geological 

 Society of America, Professor Winchell gave 

 an explicit account of the organization of that 

 society in which he played a prime part as pro- 

 poser and founder, and his interest was ac- 

 knowledged by his election to its presidency 

 a few years after the organization was ef- 

 fected. He was one of the founders of the 

 Minnesota Academy of Science and thrice its 

 president, and a member of a number of scien- 

 tific, historical and archeological societies. 



It would be interesting to find the real clue 

 to Professor WincheU's intellectual inclina- 

 tions and singleness of purpose. Looking both 

 forward and back from his personality, there 

 seems an almost obvious " continuity of the 

 germ-plasm " marked partly by his extraordi- 

 nary presentation to his science of three dis- 

 tinguished devotees: his sons. Dr. Horace V. 

 Winchell, Professor Alexander N. Winchell, 

 and his son-in-law. Dr. Ulysses S. Grant. 

 Some part of his impulses must have come 

 from his tutelage and association with his 

 brother, Alexander Winchell, at Ann Arbor, 

 where he received his first sure direction into 

 paths that led him for periods of service into 



