MEMOIR OF JAMES D. DANA. 461 



Henry Barnard Kummel, A. M., Ph. D., Trenton, New Jersey. Assistant on the 



State Geological Survey of New Jersey. 

 William Harmon Norton, M. A., Mount Vernon, Iowa. Professor of Geology in 



Cornell College. 

 Frank Bursey Taylor, Fort Wayne, Indiana. 

 Jay Backus Woodworth, B. S., Cambridge, Massachusetts. Instructor in Harvard 



University and Assistant Geologist on U. S. Geological Survey. 



The President then called for the reading of biographic sketches of 

 Fellows who had died during the year. In the absence of Professor Le 

 Conte, the following memoir of Professor Dana was read by H. S. 

 Williams : 



MEMOIR OF JAMES D WIGHT DANA 

 BY JOSEPH LE CONTE 



In the death of Professor Dana, the foremost geologist of America and 

 one of the foremost in the world has been taken from us. I am sure 

 the Geological Society will pardon me if I introduce this notice of him 

 with some personal reminiscences. 



The first meeting of the American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science that I ever attended was the New Haven meeting in 1850. 

 Professor Dana read a short paper " On the Analogy, in Reproduction, 

 between the Hydroids and Plants," showing how the nutritive individ- 

 uals and the reproductive individuals of the one correspond to the leaf- 

 individuals and flower-individuals of the other. His slender, erect form, 

 his sharp, clear-cut features and penetrating eyes, his eager face and noble 

 head crowned with abundant and somewhat disheveled hair, and, above 

 all, the combination of ])hilosophic thought and poetic imagination em- 

 bodied in the paper, made an indelible impression on me — an impression 

 wdnch has only deepened with time. The leaders in American science 

 at that time'w^ere such men as Agassiz, Pierce, Henry, Bache, William 

 and Henry Rogers, Gray, and Hall — surely as brilliant a constellation 

 of first magnitude stars as any since that time. Among such men 

 Dana, although only thirty-seven years old, was even then a prominent 

 figure, for had he not already published his great work on mineralogy 

 and his grand researches on the zoophytes, the Crustacea and the geology 

 of the United States Exploring Expedition? 



I next saw Dana and again heard him at Albany, in 1856, when he 

 read his address as retiring president of the Association. In this address 

 he brought forward again (for he had already done so nearly ten years 

 earlier) his grand views on the development of the earth in its larger 

 features. May we not say that geology as a distinct science, having its 

 own fundamental idea, namely, that of the evolution of the earth through 



LV— Bull. Geol. Soc. Am., Vol. 7, 1895. 



