DANA CENTENARY 59 



His liberality in the treatment of difference of opinion was another phase 

 of his devotion to truth. The pages of the Journal of Science were always 

 freely open for the presentation of views most widely divergent from his own. 

 "More," he said, "could be learned by studying unconformities than conform- 

 ities." 



His loyalty to truth was in part an intellectual and in part a moral trait. 

 Intellectually it was related to the clearness of his conception. It is the man 

 who never knows exactly what he thinks that falls most easily into the vice 

 of saying something different from what he thinks. But Dana's character was 

 intensely ethical, and with him ethics was always sanctified and glorified by 

 religious faith. In his view disloyalty to truth was infidelity to God. The 

 influences of his childhood home were strongly religious, and in his early 

 manhood he made public profession of Christian faith, uniting with the First 

 Congregational Church in New Haven. His letters, written amid perils of ship- 

 wreck and cannibals in the exploring expedition, reveal the strength of his 

 faith in the providential care of a Heavenly Father. His patience under the 

 restraints imposed upon him by the impairment of his health and the serene 

 light which brightened the long evening of his life were doubtless in part due 

 to a naturally cheerful spirit, but surely in large part due to his religious 

 faith. A few months before his death he wrote to Prof. J. P. Lesley : "I used 

 to have a spring in my walk and get delight out of it. But for a little over a 

 month my heart has compelled me to take what I should before have called a 

 creeping gait. Such encroachments are reminders that the end is coining. 

 But it will be peace, rest, and, I believe, joy unending. Life were worth living 

 if it were only for the end." 



One is reminded of Browning's noble lines : 



"Grow old along with me ! 

 The hest is yet to he, 

 The last of life, for which the first was made." 



As a thinker Dana was eminently characterized by breadth of view. Though 

 facts might be, as Agassiz so nobly said, "the words of God." they were mean 

 ingless unless they could be arranged in sentences. Dana was eminently a 

 generalizer and a systematizes The "Manual of Geology" is Indispensable to 

 every American geologist for its encyclopedic array of facts; hot the general 

 conception of the meaning of geological fact with which the whole hook is 

 luminous is the greater glory. If Dana sometimes mistook analogy for iden- 

 tity, and sometimes grouped facts in a pseudo-system, he only showed "the 

 defects of his qualities." The only man who has made no unsound generaliza- 

 tions is the man who has never generalized at all. 



There is a certain intellectual kinship between the philosopher and the poet 

 The loftiest generalizations of science Involve a flight of imagination approach 

 ing the poetic. The minds most gifted with the power to Bee the scientific 

 meaning of natural phenomena are often most keenly sensitive to the Inspiro 

 Coral Islands" and gemlike sentences which Hash here and there from the 

 pages of the "Manual of Geology" show a poet's sense of nature's manifold 

 and resistless charm. 



Dana's personal appearance was at once attractive and impressive. The 

 flash of his eyes and the exquisite sweetness of his smile will ever haunt the 



