14 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BOSTON MEETING 



MEMORIAL OF GEORGE FERDINAND BECKER ^ 

 BY ARTHUR L. DAY 



With the death of Dr. George Ferdinand Becker on April 20, 1919, the 

 Geological Society of America loses an ex-President and one of its origi- 

 nal Fellows. He died at his home, in Washington, at the age of seventy- 

 two years. 



Any memorial of Dr. Becker's service to geology or to the Society in 

 which he was most active throughout his career must begin with a sincere 

 tribute of respect and honor to one of the last of that splendid group of 

 pioneer geologists which was brought together by the famous Survey of 

 the Fortieth Parallel, the founders of the United States Geological Sur- 

 vey. Clarence King, the central figure of the group, has long since gone 

 from among us; but his three distinguished collaborators, Emmons, 

 Hague, and Becker, have but lately finished their tasks and left to other 

 hands the great problems which they so courageously mapped out. 



Like most of the pioneer thinkers, now unhappily very few in number, 

 Dr. Becker was by necessity the master of several fields of scientific re- 

 search. He possessed an excellent working knowledge of mathematics, 

 physics, chemistry, and geology, and used all these with the greatest free- 

 dom and effectiveness through all of his work. With the possible excep- 

 tion of Gilbert, there was no man of his time in the Washington geolog- 

 ical world who possessed greater versatility in discussion or such breadth 

 of view. In consequence of this, no problem was ever brought to his 

 attention, whether in private council or in the more formal atmosphere 

 of the Geological Society, to which he was not at once ready to contribute 

 some fertile suggestion or some novel viewpoint. 



It has sometimes been said, and I think rightly, that his formal papers, 

 both in oral presentation and in print, lost something of their effective- 

 ness through an assumption that his listeners and readers were equally 

 well equipped in all of these sciences, and it is certainly true that his most 

 important contribution to theoretical geology, if it may be so called 

 ("Finite homogeneous strain, flow, and rupture of rocks," 1893), was 

 twice republished with popular or field illustrations in place of the rigid 

 mathematical demonstration, because the conclusions would not "clinch" 

 in their mathematical form. 



That this versatility was strenuously cultivated by him, rather than an 

 accidental product of early studies, is shown by the fact that the scientific 

 man whom of all his contemporaries he most admired was Lord Kelvin, 



1 Manuscript received by the Secretary of the Society March 9, 1920. 

 Presented by title before the Society December 29, 1919. 



