MEMOIR OF JOSEPH F. JAMES. 409 
setts, where he had established his residence only a few months before, 
on March 29,1897. His love of nature in general, and especially of fossils 
and rocks, came to him naturally, by inheritance and association, from 
his father, Uriah Pierson James, a bookseller and publisher, better known 
to geologists as a zealous pioneer collector and student of Cincinnati fos- 
sils, many of which he described. With such a father, devoting to scien- 
tific studies all the leisure that could be taken from a business life, with 
the influence of the collections and membership of the Cincinnati Society 
of Natural History under which he grew up, with large collections of 
shells and fossils in his home, and with the rocks of the neighborhood 
filled with beautifully preserved fossils, it is not strange that Dr James 
became interested in paleontology, and that his principal published 
works relate to that subject. Paleontologists generally are to a consid- 
erable extent a product of environment. In most cases they have lived 
where fossils were plentiful and have begun their work as collectors. Dr 
James’ interest, however, was not confined to a single subject. His 
earliest studies were in botany, and from 1877 to the end of his life he 
published numerous notes and articles relating to plants. 
A complete bibliography of Dr James’ writings would include more 
than two hundred titles, the list being greatly swelled by his zeal for 
popularizing science. Articles for newspapers and semi-scientific jour- 
nals and reviews of books and scientific papers form a large proportion 
of the number. His geologic papers, based on his own observations, 
relate mainly to the Cincinnati region, including discussions of the Pleis- 
tocene geology as well as of the Ordovician rocks. 
The material for most of his paleontologic work was also obtained 
from the Cincinnati rocks, and his papers on this subject may nearly all 
be found in the Journal of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History 
from 1884 to 1897. His Manual of the Paleontology of the Cincinnati 
Group, the first part of which appeared in that journal in 1891, is still 
in course of publication, and when complete will embrace most of Dr 
James’ descriptive and critical paleontologic work, which was confined 
to Paleozoic invertebrates and to such obscure and doubtful plants as 
are found in the earlier Paleozoic rocks. He was very skeptical as to 
the organic nature of many of the obscure and “ problematic organisms ”’ 
that have been described as Fucoides, etcetera, and a number of papers 
were devoted to their discussion. His destructive criticism was useful 
and doubtless justified in many cases, but, as usual in such matters, it 
did not add much to his reputation as a paleontologist. It is a waste of 
labor to give much study to specimens or classes of specimens that from 
their nature must necessarily remain obscure and problematical. 
Dr James’ life was a constant and varied struggle in which his desire 
