Professor James Dicight Dana. 449 



staff included, in addition to Dana, Pickering, Couthoy, and Peale as 

 zoologists, Rich and Breckenridge as botanists, and Hale as philologist. 

 The memory of the events, scenes and labours of this cruise was a con- 

 stant joy to him during the remaining fifty-three years of life. On at 

 least two occasions, however, he was in imminent peril : at one time 



.his vessel narrowly escaped destruction on the rocks of Southern Fuegia, 

 when the sea was dashing up the cliffs to a height of two or three hun- 

 dred feet, and all the anchors had given way ; at another time his party 

 had to take to the boats empty-handed, and some hours afterwards they 

 saw the last vestige of the vessel which had been their home for three 

 years disappear beneath the waves. 



The study of the material collected by the expedition and the prepa- 

 ration of his reports occupied all the available time during the next 

 thirteen years. The first two or three years were spent at Washington, 

 but after his marriage to the daughter of Prof. Silliman he removed 

 back to New Haven, where he passed the rest of his life. In 1850 he 

 was appointed Silliman Professor of Geology and Natural History at 

 Yale College. In 1846 Mr. Dana had become associate-editor of the 

 American Journal of Science, and after the death of Prof. Silliman, in 

 1864, he became the principal editor of that important scientific organ. 

 Dana gave special attention to corals and coral islands, and also to 

 volcanoes. The Wilkes expedition of 1838-42 followed in part the 

 course taken by the Beagle in 1831-36, and even where it diverged from 

 that route visited coral and volcanic islands such as have been carefully 

 described by Charles Darwin. When the Wilkes expedition reached 

 Sydney in 1839, Dana read in the papers a brief statement of Darwin's 

 theory of the origin of the atoll and barrier forms of reefs ; this mere 

 paragraph was a great help to him in his later work, and he afterwards 

 regarded Darwin with feelings of the deepest gratitude. A visit to 

 the Fiji Islands in 1840 brought before him facts such as had been 

 already noticed by Darwin elsewhere ; but there they were on a still 

 grander scale and of a more diversified character, thus enabling him to 

 speak even more positively of the theory than Darwin himself had 

 thought it philosophic to do. On other points the conclusions arrived 



. at by Darwin and Dana, independently of each other, were for the 

 most part the same, and differed only in comparatively unimportant 

 details. Dana's special labours relative to corals ceased with the pub- 

 lication of his report on the zoophytes collected by the expedition, 

 but an elaborate account (406 pages) of Corals and Coral Islands was 

 prepared by him and issued in 1879 : this was an extension of his 



•expedition-report on Coral Reefs and Coral Islands, which had been 

 separately published in 1853. In 1890 appeared another considerable 

 work (399 pages) entitled " Characteristics of Volcanoes, with contri- 

 butions of facts and principles from the Hawaiian Islands," which 

 placed on record much useful information collected by him during his 

 travels. 



