MEMORIAL OF A. H. PURDUE 57 



fication Committee^ which had in charge the arrangement of courses, etc. 

 In 1898 he married Miss Ida Pace, of Harrison, Arkansas, at that time 

 Associate Professor of English at the university — a woman of unusnal 

 mental and social attainments, who comes of a family distinguished in 

 the life of Arkansas. In 1895, again in 1901, and from then on Mr. 

 Purdue was a field assistant on the United States Geological Survey, 

 devoting his summers to field-work. With the Survey he had the reputa- 

 tion of being one of the very few teaching geologists whom that organiza- 

 tion could count on to carry out a program not only in the field, but in 

 the office preparation of his reports. At the time of the Saint Louis 

 Exposition he was made Superintendent of Mines and Metallurgy for the 

 State. In 1907 Mr. Purdue was made State Geologist ex officio of the 

 Arkansas Survey. Though having at his disposal only very meager funds, 

 Purdue was able to prepare or have prepared a number of highly cred- 

 itable reports, including one on the slates of the State, by himself; one 

 by Prof. W. N. Gladson on the water powers of the State, and one by 

 Prof. A. A. Steel on mining methods in the coal fields of the State. 



As a teacher, Purdue brought to his work the results of his normal- 

 school preparation, and the training received under Branner and J. P. 

 Smith at Stanford, and Salisbury, Chamberlain, and others at Chicago, 

 together with his own rather varied experience along that line. He was 

 not a believer in the lecture method of instruction, but rather in the stu- 

 dents working out their results under the stimulus of actual contact with 

 the problems in the field and laboratory, and in this knowledge being 

 reinforced by repeated review and by application to new and practical 

 problems. He had little regard for the indent w^ho would not work and 

 he would bar such students as much as possible from his classes. The 

 great energy he put into his teaching in both the class-room and field 

 wonderfully impressed his students and assistants, so that he constantly 

 inspired them to obtain greater results and attain higher ideals. When 

 he left the University of Arkansas the students presented him a silver 

 loving cup as a token of the respect they held for him as a teacher. His 

 students speak of his class-work being as good as any course in logic, as 

 he led them to analyze their data and taught them how to draw proper 

 conclusions therefrom; so that, aside from those who decided to take up 

 geology as a profession, his old students, scattered all over the United 

 States, look back to the work in his classes as one of the most profitable 

 experiences of their university life. Among his students who were led 

 into adopting geology as a life work may be named Miser and Mesler, of 

 the United States Geological Survey; Carl Smith, Munn, McCreary, 

 Hutchinson, and others, who after more or less time spent with the 



