MEMORIAL OF C. S. PROSSER 73 



gator and to see a science in the making. His method was to bring the 

 student into the most intimate contact with his own studies. He himself 

 was always buried in a pile of specimens and manuscript. He let the 

 students help him. The_y identified material^ hunted out references, 

 copied manuscript, read proof. The students helped with the drawings 

 and colored the maps, and were proud to be of assistance to him in any 

 way they could, and happy, when the report was finally published, to find 

 themselves mentioned in the kindest terms as having aided in its prepara- 

 tion ; for he never failed to give full credit to those who assisted him, no 

 matter how humble the person nor how slight the aid. In the laboratory* 

 his method was that of Agassiz. He set the student down before a mass 

 of material and expected him to work out his own salvation. He did not 

 stand over a student with constant and insistent suggestion and direc- 

 tion — a method now only too common, with the elaboration of the ma- 

 chinery of teaching and the multiplication of assistantships. He never 

 urged a student to take up geology as his life work. He said to me many 

 times that he did not want any one to become a geologist who was not 

 perfectly certain that he would rather be a geologist than anything else 

 in the world. He did not want to bother with a man who could be easily 

 discouraged. Often he has remarked that the men at Union College 

 cared for pure science. They were not so much interested in dollars and 

 cents as a measure of the importance of the several lines of human en- 

 deavor. He appreciated the unworldly atmosphere of the old classical 

 college. His sensitive spirit responded to it as one to the manner born ; 

 for he was essentially a man of the cloister. He disliked the hurly-burly 

 of the world. 



From 1895 to 1899 he was an assistant on the l^ew York Geological 

 Survey, then still in charge of the veteran geologist, James Hall. In 

 1898 he was made Chief of the Appalachian Division of the Maryland 

 Geological Survey, and Avith his collaborators began the long series of 

 Devonian studies of that State Avhich issued finally in the magnificent set 

 of volumes on the Maryland Devonian. 



He took with him to Maryland Richard B. Rowe, his first major student 

 at Union College, and the latter, after receiving his degree at the Johns 

 Hopkins University and giving promise of a brilliant career as a geologist, 

 was the first of Professor Prosser's scientific offspring to be stricken by 

 the hand of death. Those who were associated with him then keenly 

 realized how he loved his students. They were his children. He had 

 lost a son. 



In 1899 he succeeded Dr. Edward Orton, Sr., at Ohio State University, 

 first as Associate Professor of Geology, and in 1901 as Professor of 



VI — Bull. Geou Soc. Am., Vol. 28, 1916 



