682 Henry Shaler Williams. 



HENRY SHALER WILLIAMS. 



An Appreciation of his Work in Stratigraphy. 



Henry Shaler Williams, professor of geology in Cor- 

 nell University, was born at Ithaca, New York, on March 

 6, 1847, and died at the age of seventy-one years, in 

 Havana, Cuba, on Jnly 31, 1918. 1 



His first two publications relate to zoology, but all of 

 the subsequent ones have to do with geology, paleontol- 

 ogy, evolution, biography, and teaching. He was the 

 author of upwards of ninety papers and books, compris- 

 ing nearly three thousand pages, and of these about 

 sixty-five titles relate to stratigraphy. Incidental to his 

 studies, he has described sixteen new genera and more 

 than one hundred and forty new species of fossils. He 

 was also the originator of the Sigma Xi Society. 



Professor Williams was one of the two authorities on 

 the American Devonian faunas and formations, though 

 he also did work on the Silurian and Mississippian sys- 

 tems. He seems to have been directed into geology, and 

 more particularly into the study of the Devonian, by his 

 environment at Ithaca, where he spent most of his life, 

 and the geology of which he has made better known than 

 that of any other part of New York State, the richest 

 Devonian field in North America. A reading of his 

 many publications, issued during nearly forty-five years, 

 shows a progression from the detailed description of the 

 faunal successions to an ever deeper philosophic pene- 

 tration into the significance of stratigraphy and fossil 

 faunas. He tells us again and again that it is only the 

 fossil content of the formations that will yield a true 

 chronogenesis of the earth, but he also points out not 

 only that the organisms varied and evolved with time, 

 but also that the faunas are continually altering their 

 specific combinations, and further that they shifted about 

 with the migrating f acies of the sea bottoms. Therefore, 

 the organic succession can not be learned from a single, 

 or even for that matter from several sections ; one must 

 study a wide field to glean the actual history of 

 organisms. These conclusions he began to see as early 

 as 1884, and the further one that stratigraphers must 

 abandon the then accepted canon that each geologic 



*A brief notice of his life is given in the September number, p. 550. 



