DANA CENTENARY 



Session of Sunday, December 29 



In the afternoon the University Museum, containing celebrated col- 

 lections in geology, mineralogy, and paleontology, and the University 

 Art Museum were open to visitors. In the University Library there was 

 displayed, in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of James D. 

 Dana, a great series of the manuscripts and books written by the cele- 

 brated scientist and the medals, diplomas, and decorations that he re- 

 ceived during his long career. 



At 8 o'clock p. m. there was held in Lampson Hall a largely attended 

 meeting in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of 

 James D. Dana, arranged by Yale University in cooperation with the 

 Geological Society of America. The meeting was presided over by 

 Arthur T. Hadley, president of Yale University, who spoke as follows : 



JAMES DWIGHT DANA CENTENARY 



INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 



BY ARTHUR T. HADLEY 



Iii the latter part of the eighteenth century the stream of emigration from 

 northern New England flowed westward up the Mohawk Valley, carrying with 

 it the outposts not only of civilization, but of scholarship and of science. The 

 academies of New York State a hundred years ago were schools of the first 

 rank, out of which came many men of eminence in science and letters. It was 

 from such stock and such surroundings that Dana came. He was by right of 

 birth a pioneer. 



Speaking to an audience that knows the pioneers of tact as distinct from 

 those of fiction, I can describe Dana well by saying that he had the charac- 

 teristics that belong to the type. There was the same determined readiness to 

 submit to hardship and work under adverse conditions, and the same touch of 

 poetry which enabled him to see through those hardships and adverse condi- 

 tions to a goal beyond. His early professional experiences were pioneer ex- 

 periences. He taught midshipmen in the United States Navy. The walls of 

 his school-house were the rocks of Port Mahon ; its playground was the slope 

 of Vesuvius. A little later he served on the Challenger expedition an expedi- 

 tion not unlike that of Darwin in the li<(i</l<\ but Infinitely more perilous and 

 ultimately involving actual shipwreck. He carried the spirit of the pioneer 

 into his scientific work. All through his hooks we feel something of ih. 

 spiration of the poet, something of the joy of new discovery at ever} step, 

 I lis first work, undertaken immediately after he left college, was In miner 

 alogy.' He found geology in large measure occupied in determining the order 



of deposits. lie set himself to the task of finding ont the physical pr es 



by which those deposits were produced. In the great Changes in the middle 



of the last century, by which science ceased to i><' a mere classification of phe 



