Joseph Barrell. 257 



ceding were spent in Europe with Professors Herbert 

 E. Gregory and Charles H. Warren, travelling ''by foot, 

 by bicycle, and by third-class trains, the object being to 

 see the countries and study geology rather than to do 

 sightseeing in the cities. . . . Another turn in the wheel 

 of fate called me in 1903 to Yale." In 1908 he was 

 promoted to a professorship and, as he says, was "fixed 

 as a staid professor. The position otfers opportunity 

 for three kinds of work, one-third of the time teaching- 

 geology to undergraduates in Yale College, one-third 

 teaching in the Graduate School future professional 

 geologists, and one-third of the year for research. 

 The latter gives the most visible measure of work 

 accomplished. ' ' 



Barrell was a member of the Sigma Xi honorary sci- 

 entific society, and president of the Yale Chapter in 

 1911-1912. He was also elected to the Phi Beta Kappa, 

 chapter of the same University. He was a fellow of 

 the Geological Society of America, the Paleontological 

 Society, and the American Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science, and a member of the American Acad- 

 emy of Arts and Sciences. Only a few days before his 

 death, there came to him the news of the highest honor 

 that can be given to an American scientist, election to 

 the National Academy of Sciences. 



A man of science, and especially one deeply interested 

 in generalizations, should be endowed with imagination 

 under restraint. Barrell had a great deal of this quality, 

 and loved to speculate under the limitations of ''mul- 

 tiple hypotheses." It was a pleasure to listen to him 

 telling his children about gnomes and elves, and occa- 

 sionally, as in his "Central Connecticut in the Geo- 

 logic Past," or "A Vision of Yale in 6010," he allowed 

 himself flights of figurative writing." The most humor- 

 ous of these only too rare instances appears in a dis- 

 cussion of a classification of marine deposits in the 

 Bulletin of the Geological Society of America. Here he 

 is presenting the view that materials foreign to the sea 

 may be rafted there by trees and ice. And then he 

 digresses into this: Man has become "an important 

 geological agent. The oxidized and inorganic debris 

 which he throws overboard from ships must already 

 mark out the steamer lanes, especially, across the abyssal 

 ocean bottoms. The unalterable materials which he con- 



