54 Charles Schuchert — Historical Geology, 1818-1918. 



visit to New York City in 1782. In 1796 he again came 

 to America, this time to become a citizen of this country 

 and a liberal patron of science. 



About 1803, single-handed and unsustained by gov- 

 ernment patronage, Maclnre , interested himself most 

 zealously and efficiently in American geology. In 1809 

 he published his Observations on the Geology of the 

 United States, Explanatory of a Geological Map. This 

 work he revised "ona yet more extended scale, " issuing 

 it in 1817 with 130 pages of text, accompanied by a large 

 colored geological map. 



Silliman, the pioneer Promoter of Geology. — In 1806 

 when Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864) began actively to 

 teach chemistry and mineralogy, all the sciences in Amer- 

 ica were in a very backward state, and the earth sciences 

 were not recognized as such in the curricula of any of our 

 colleges. Silliman gave his first lecture in chemistry on 

 April 4, 1804. In the summer of that year, Yale College 

 asked him to go to England to purchase material for the 

 College, and great possibilities for broadening his 

 knowledge now loomed before him. As Silliman himself 

 (43, 225, 1842) has told the interesting story of his 

 sojourn in England and Scotland, it is worth while to 

 restate a part of it here. 



" Passing 1 over to England in the spring of 1805, and fixing 

 my residence for six months in London, I found there no school, 

 public or private, for geological instruction, and no association 

 for the cultivation of the science, which was not even named in 

 the English universities." In geology "Edinburgh was then 

 far in advance of London . . . Prof. Jameson having recently 

 returned from the school of Werner, fully instructed in the doc- 

 trines of his illustrious teacher, was ardently engaged to maintain 

 them, and his eloquent and acute friend, the late Dr. John Mur- 

 ray, was a powerful auxiliary in the same cause ; both of these 

 philosophers strenuously maintaining the ascendancy of the 

 aqueous over the igneous agencies, in the geological phenomena 

 of our planet. 



On the other hand, the disciples and friends of Dr. Hutton 

 were not less active. He died in 1797, and his mantle fell upon 

 Sir James Hall, who, with Prof. Playfair and Prof. Thomas 

 Hope, maintained with signal ability, the igneous theory of 

 Hutton. It did not become one who was still a youth and a 

 novice, to enter the arena of the geological tournament where 

 such powerful champions waged war; but it was very interest- 

 ing to view the combat, well sustained as it was on both sides, 

 and protracted, without a decisive issue, into a drawn battle . . . 



