22 PROCEEDINGS OF THE PITTSBURGH MEETING 



Pleistocene phenomena in the Mississippi basin: a worliing hypothesis (ab- 

 stract). Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, vol. 17, 1905, 

 p. 730. 



Clarence Luther Herrick. American Geologist, 1905, vol. xxxvi. 



Preglacial drainage in the Mississippi Valley : a working hypothesis (abstract). 

 Science, vol. xxv, 1907, p. 772. 



MEMOIR OF ROBERT PARR WHITFIELD 

 BY JOHN M. CLARKE 



This age of general education and of necessary special training for the 

 student of science sees an ever lessening number of men who have done 

 well and deserved well without the full panoply of modern equipment. 

 We have had a goodly array of such men in the history of American 

 science, in whom an inspiring mutation or a favorable inheritance of an 

 instinctive love of nature has successfully overcome the shortages of 

 early training. The departing generation gave us more such men than 

 the present, and perhaps we could find no one career that more signally 

 illustrates this achievement than that of Professor Whitfield. 



Through a very long life he displayed not only great assiduity in the 

 pursuit of the occupation to which, by his very good fortune, he was 

 called, but a natural aptitude quite out of the ordinary, even among the 

 trained men of science today. One likes to think, in the presence of 

 what Professor Whitfield did accomplish, of what he might have done 

 had he been blessed with the guidance of thorough education. And one 

 may well reflect how much more would be achieved in our science today if 

 our trained men were more happily endowed with the enthusiasm which 

 knows no bounds of hours or salary. 



Eobert Parr Whitfield was born at New Hartford, New York, May 27, 

 1828, and he died at Troy, April 6, 1910, having lived into his eighty- 

 second year. He is buried in the Rural Cemetery at Albany, not far 

 away from Ebenezer Emmons and James Hall. 



In the very fact of his great age he takes rank with the two most inti- 

 mate associates of his earliest work in his science — James Hall, his chief 

 on the New York Geological Survey, and Charles A. White, his com- 

 panion in arms during their years at Albany. Mr. Whitfield's name is 

 that of one who, at a time when the field of invertebrate paleontology in 

 America was wide open, virgin, inviting, and exceedingly contentious, 

 made noteworthy contributions to morphology under the cover of a 

 greater name, from which he was not released till he had passed middle 

 life. Mr. Whitfield's father, an Englishman, was a spindle maker in a 

 cotton mill. When Whitfield was seven years old his family went back 

 to England with the intention of remaining, but after six years returned 



