18 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BOSTON MEETING 



natural science rather than sports brought him early into contact with 

 such men as Benjamin A. Gould, Jeffries Wyman, Benjamin Pierce, the 

 elder Agassiz, and other distinguished contemporaries, and gave directive 

 impulse to his earier studies. He was graduated from Harvard in 1868 

 and went abroad at once, taking advanced degrees at Heidelberg in 1869 

 and at Berlin (Eoyal School of Mines) in 1871. Neither did he neglect 

 the practical side while abroad, for he was accustomed to speak with some 

 pride of having ^'begun life" as a "puddler" Avhile still in Germany. . 



Upon the completion of his education he went to California, partly in 

 pursuit of health, which in early life appears not to have been rugged, 

 and partly from interest in mining and metallurgy, which was his major 

 subject of study while abroad, and became instructor in those subjects at 

 the State University at Berkeley. There he came in contact with Mr. 

 Clarence King, who was then engaged upon the survey of the fortieth 

 parallel. 



Mr. King's strong and inspiring personality, aided perhaps by the 

 personal influence of his two younger associates, Messrs. Emmons and 

 Hague, evidently attracted Dr. Becker strongly, for he became deeply 

 interested in the geological problems developed during that survey, and 

 one of them, the Comstock lode, later became the subject of what is, 

 perhaps. Dr. Becker's best-known geological memoir, "Geology of the 

 Comstock lode and Washoe district," 1882. 



In 1879, Avhen Mr. King was invited by Congress to organize the United 

 States Survey and to become its first director. Dr. Becker was among the 

 first called to Mr. King's side, and here we encounter almost immediately 

 the pioneer quality of Dr. Becker's mind. Notwithstanding the utili- 

 tarian demands of the times and the purposes (then utilitarian also) of 

 the Survey, namely, to discover and record the mineral resources along 

 the line of the newly opened transcontinental railroad (Union Pacific) 

 and adjacent territory, we find Dr. Becker seeking out two physicists 

 (Dr. Carl Barus and Dr. William Hallock) to be his assistants and initi- 

 ating the first of the geophysical studies which thereafter became his chief 

 interest. The details of his plan as conceived at that time are nowhere 

 formulated, but he evidently had as an immediate purpose a study of the 

 origin and growth of ore bodies, and I think, even at the outset, he had 

 already in his mind a systematic physical and chemical study of the for- 

 mation of igneous rocks. At all events, the first publications to issue 

 from the laboratory, soon after established in one of the towers of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, had to do with the physical instruments, if they 

 may be thus collectively described, necessary to such a task. I refer to 



