NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



In January, 1901, he undertook the examination of a mining 

 property in Missouri which had been sold, to English capitalists 

 subject to his approval. An attack of whooping cough and. 

 pneumonia in the previous month had left him with a slight 

 tubercular affection of one lung. The weather was inclement 

 and the examination proved, unusually long and laborious, so 

 that at its close it was found, that tuberculosis had taken so firm 

 a hold upon his system that he was obliged to abandon all busi- 

 ness and give himself up entirety to the attempt to recover his 

 health. 



After a fruitless visit to the tropics, which had hitherto proved 

 a balm for all of his ailments, he attended the annual meeting 

 of the Academy in April, 1901, and then went West, where he 

 spent the balance of the year in southern California and Arizona 

 in a brave though hopeless fight against the inroads of the dread 

 disease. 



In this, with a thorough understanding of the probable out- 

 come of his illness, he displayed the same cheerful courage and 

 spirit of self-renunciation that had characterized his whole life. 

 He would not yield to the desire of his devoted mother to hasten 

 to his bedside, fearing the effect of the long journey in her then 

 precarious condition of health, and he courteously declined the 

 many offers of his friends to visit him and cheer his loneliness. 

 On Christinas eve of 1901, at Phoenix, Arizona, he finally passed 

 away, quietly and without suffering, in the prime of intellectual 

 life, with his greatest scientific work not yet fully completed and 

 leaving a void in the hearts of friends that can never be filled. 



It is difficult to fairly judge King's scientific publications in 

 the light of the present day, for they were written just before 

 the opening of an era of great change in the methods of geo- 

 logical investigation — a change which has thus far proved de- 

 structive rather than constructive in its results. Many of the 

 fundamental theories of geology which prevailed at that time 

 have been disproved or abandoned, while as yet there is no gen- 

 eral acceptance of those which have been put forward to replace 

 them. 



In June, 187 7, he delivered the address at the 31st anniver- 

 sary of the Sheffield Scientific School on "Catastrophism and the 



48 



