72 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ALBANY MEETING 



the sunny State. He liad bequeathed the congenial task of collecting the 

 faunas and working out the complicated details of the stratigraphy to a 

 younger man, while his own interest centered more and more on the 

 broader problems of correlation. It was always a source of great grati- 

 fication to him that through the long and painstaking labors of liis AVash- 

 burn student all of his main conclusions in regard to the age of the 

 Permian rocks of Kansas were finally ^"erified. 



At Union College he became interested in the older Paleozoics of the 

 wonderful Mohawk A^alley, and found also an opportunity to continue 

 and finally to complete his comprehensive studies, begun at (^ornell, of 

 the Upper Devonian. He initiated the studies that have now so com- 

 pletely revolutionized our ideas of the Ordovician formations of the 

 Mohawk Valley. He called attention to the unsuspected thickness of 

 these rocks, and with his students showed that the Trenton of the valley 

 is basal Trenton only, and that the Trenton fauna persists well up into 

 the supposed Utica shale. The years spent at Union College, in spite of 

 its inadequate facilities, were quite the happiest of his life. The whole 

 region — north, south, east, and west from the old Dutch town — is classic 

 ground to the geologist. There was Troy only a few miles away, with 

 its older C^ambrian ledges, made famous by the work of Ford ; to the 

 north Saratoga, which has served its turn with sundry other names as 

 type section of the Upper Cambrian; to the south, only a couple hours' 

 ride, the Helderbergs, of which Lyell said, A geologist's education is not 

 complete until he has seen this splendid section ; to the west all the 

 geologic I'iches of the Mohawk Valley and its northern tributaries. He 

 established a peripatetic school of geology. Every Saturday, weather 

 permitting (and sometimes not permitting), the' new professor of geology 

 and his little flock of students made for the country, to return in the 

 evening tired, dirty, and happy, with their burden of fossils. With his 

 own private library, a small collection of minerals rescued from a long 

 term of innocuous desuetude in the balcony of the old chapel, and such 

 an out-of-doors, he proceeded to stimulate young men to become geologists. 

 Hi the class-room he was by the common run of students reckoned some- 

 what dry. He was always passing specimens and huge quartos about and 

 citing references. But in the field he was an enthusiast. He set the 

 student on fire. For the first time in their lives a small group of students 

 at the old college realized what the ultimate sources of knowledge are. 

 They saw that even fhemselves could add some small contribution to the 

 great body of facts which make up the science of geology. It seems a 

 little thing to those who liave spent years in scientific work, but to these 

 boys it was epochal to be brought thus into the workshop of an investi- 



