MEMORIAL 21 



MEMORIAL OF WILLIAM BULLOCK CLARK ^ 

 BY JOHN M. CLAKKE 



It has been said of this distinguished member of our Society that he 

 was the most useful citizen of his adopted State. The people of Balti- 

 more and of Maryland have been called on by the public press "to pay 

 high honor to the man who did so much for them/^ 



As he moved about among us in these scientific meetings, engaging 

 us with his spirited personality, his quick and cordial appreciation of 

 others' achievements, his wise perceptions in the business of the Society, 

 and his participation in our common interests in technical science, it 

 may be that we thought he belonged to us alone, and that when he had 

 given the passwords of our guild, spoken its vernacular, shared its spirit 

 of research, and brought before us the sheaves of his harvest, his activi- 

 ties were here revealed and summarized. I think he would have had us 

 believe that the purposes and principles which we embody were his high- 

 est concern; that the diffusion of a knowledge of geological science as 

 a means of properly comprehending the material and spiritual relations 

 of man to the earth and of man to his fellow was the important business 

 of his full and vigorous life. Yet we may not have known that he turned 

 from expositions before us of the anatomy of the Oligocene echinoids 

 to his duties as a member of a civic commission engaged in improving 

 the water front of the city of Baltimore; from exact determinations of 

 coastal plain geology to the administration of child welfare problems 

 in his adopted State. To us he was the geologist and the paleontologist. 

 His other activities, if we knew of them at all, we were most likely to 

 learn from others. 



There must be some in this Society who looked on him as one of the 

 older geologists. To one who was called on to prepare the memorial 

 notice of Doctor Clark's predecessor at the Johns Hopkins, this hardly 

 seems possible, and yet I suppose it may be true. We knew him here as 

 the young Amherst graduate who had gone to the Hopkins to supple- 

 ment the work of Prof. George H. Williams; as the promising geologist 

 who succeeded the brilliant Williams in the professorship. We knew him 

 as the man from outside, who had the rare courage and adeptness to 

 organize and secure public support for a new and needed geological 

 survey of the State of Maryland. Little by little we saw the results of 

 this survey, carefully planned, leading cautiously through reports on 



1 Read before the Society December 27, 1917. 

 Manuscript received by the Secretary of the Society December 29, 1917. 



