MEMOIR OF R. P. WHITFIELD 23 



to Utica, and then the young man was set to learn his father's trade of 

 spindle making. Evidently he cared little for it, as at the age of twenty 

 he was put at work in Chubbuck's manufactory of "philosophical" ap- 

 paratus — then and for long after a well-known establishment in Utica— 

 and today many of the Chubbuck air pumps, galvanic cells, and gener- 

 ators are to be found in the storerooms of the older academies and col- 

 leges of New York. In this establishment he became a partner and had 

 much to do with the manufacture of the Morse telegraphic instruments. 

 But Mr. Whitfield had practically no schooling. Doctor Hovey has 

 quoted Mr. Whitfield's own statement that his entire school training 

 amounted to less than three months, and his achievement therefore is 

 really a matter for wonder and applause. But his love for natural objects, 

 joined with the acquisitiveness that goes with an instinct for natural 

 history, led him early to make collections of the shells, and more par- 

 ticularly of the fossils which abound in that region of paleozoic sedi- 

 ments. Like Marsh, Powell, Orton, Calvin, Walcott, and some other 

 New York men, Whitfield's life was, mutatis mutandis, an illustration 

 of the outcome of a favorable environment on an innate proclivity. In 

 the intervals of his shop work he sought out the mollusks of the streams 

 and woods and the fossils in the Silurian rocks, arranged them with 

 nicety, exactness, and keen appreciation of their structural differences, 

 explicating these by drawings, of which he had learned the art in the 

 Chubbuck factory. 



His interest in natural science and his skill at drawing had become 

 known to James Hall, then approaching the height of his long and last- 

 ing influence on American geology. Hall had a rare and keen insight 

 into the possibilities of young men endowed with zeal for science. He 

 was ever on the lookout for them. It was a singular trait of this man of 

 many singular traits that the scientific assistants he brought about him 

 were soon made fully aware of the fact that they must efface themselves 

 80 far as any recognized participation in his official work was concerned, 

 but notwithstanding give their best to his science or accept their cong^. 

 All did the former, for there was a contagion in Hall's enthusiasm, and 

 most all got the latter sooner or later; but AVhitfield was an exception, 

 remaining with Hall for twenty years and helping to give distinction to 

 the Paleontology of New York by his exquisite drawings and his keen 

 analysis of fossil structures. In 1856 Hall was deeply involved in work; 

 aside from his Paleontology of New York, of the third volume of which 

 he was then bearing the entire expense, as the State appropriations had 

 failed, he was conducting the Geological Survey of Iowa, and when Whit- 

 field arrived in Albany in that year he found his imperious master sur- 



