MEMORIAL OF CHARLES A. DAVIS 37 



Why doesn't she run ?" was his wife's ejaculation. "Fast black and won't 

 run" was Davis' instant application of the familiar advertising phrase. 



As member of the Michigan and Washington Academy of Sciences, the 

 American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American 

 Peat Society, the Washington Greological, Botanical and Biological So- 

 ciety, this and the Washington Geological Societ}^, and corresponding 

 member of the New England Botanical Club, he was always helpful and 

 ready to do his share. He also was a member of the Cosmos Club. 



From the botanist's viewpoint Prof. E. C. Jeffrey writes : 



"Doctor Davis' work on peat is the most valuable that has been done. He 

 did not content himself with the examination of deposits from the surface 

 only, as has been the practice of too many American investigators. In his 

 case necessity was truly the mother of invention; for, unlike European stu- 

 dents, he did not find peat deposits opened to investigation by industrial ex- 

 ploitation. As a result of this situation he was led to the invention of a 

 probing instrument of precision, which makes possible the investigation of the 

 otherwise inaccessible accumulations of vegetable matter in the bottoms of 

 lakes. He arrived at the very interesting and highly significant conclusion 

 that the great mass of accumulated vegetable matter within the boundaries of 

 the United States had been laid down under the surface of open water. This 

 conclusion is not the less valid because Doctor Davis shared the orthodox view 

 that coal deposits were of terrestrial origin. His last efforts were in the direc- 

 tion of showing the existence of algae with structure recognizably preserved in 

 lignitic coals of the Western States. Doctor Davis' personality, although not 

 at first meeting impressive, became with longer acquaintance appreciated as 

 of rare worth. His personal kindliness tempered his stern and Puritanic scien- 

 tific sense of honor. His untimely death is a great loss to American botany 

 and American geology." 



While Davis' turn of mind was eminently scientific and his first words 

 were of algae in black shales or Precambrian limestones, or some new light 

 on the subsidence question, and while he refused $10,000 a year to go 

 into private employ, he never forgot those men who were trying to make 

 peat of the greatest use to mankind, and as a charter member of tlie 

 American Peat Society and editor of its journal from its foundation, in 

 1908, until his death, he worked untiringly for their interests— a work 

 recognized by them in formal engraved resolutions reproduced in his 

 memorial in the Journal of the American Peat Society, volume \X, 

 number 3. 



I can not close this memorial of his departure from the particulai' 

 material form through which we knew him without recording that pecu- 

 liarly vivid belief in, and sense of, a life beyond this life, which the 

 intimacy of the camp-fire and long field trips together led him to express 

 in spite of the fact that he was not a talkative man on these or other 



