THE 
AMERICAN NATURALIST 
VoL. XXXII. December, 1898. No. 384. 
RELATION OF JAMES HALL TO AMERICAN 
GEOLOGY. 
L Ps ORATAGAP. 
PROFESSOR JAMES HALL may not be so good a geological 
delineator as W. W. Mather, nor so keen or so original a 
thinker in dynamical geology as E. Emmons, a less learned 
man than Lardner Vanuxem, and in no respect so accomplished 
a zoologist as T. A. Conrad ; yet the fame of James Hall will, 
meritoriously, far outrank the collective reputation of his four 
collaborators. 
Hall was gifted with the power of generalization, a distinct 
talent to give territorial expansion to groups of separated obser- 
vations, and to step outside of the limits of a conventional geo- 
logical creed. And he possessed the faculty of assimilation. 
He derived important suggestions from previous research, lis- 
tened attentively to verbally conveyed views, and could appro- 
priate skillfully the results of labors not his own, when they 
fitted into the scheme of his laborious research. As a purely 
mechanical advantage, Hall evinced a literary superiority. His 
Style is flowing and expressive, of much lucidity in language, 
and — simply because he was not an erudite or exhaustive 
thinker — attractively clear and intelligible in composition. 
