No. 384.] JAMES HALL AND AMERICAN GEOLOGY. 893 
Association for the Advancement of Science. It was the 
philosopher in Hall which as early as 1839 or 1840 led him 
to instinctively enlarge and multiply the observations of Va- 
nuxem, published in 1829, upon the identity of western for- 
mations with those of New York. It was the philosopher in 
Hall which saved him from Eaton’s mistake in applying Wer- 
nerian categories to the New York rocks, and caused him to 
sweep the cobwebs of imitation and preconception from his 
eyes as he read the story of geological succession in their 
strata. He corrected the “distortion” (as he expressively 
termed it) which had made the even bedded layers of west- 
ern New York equivalents of the so-called “secondary ” rocks 
abroad, and discarded the illusion of an exact resemblance in 
the geology of Europe and America. 
But this philosophic endowment did not endanger his phys- 
ical activity. Less poetic and distinguished in mind or temper- 
ament than the Professors Rogers, his tireless. curiosity and 
enthusiasm brought him in contact with a wider range of geo- 
graphical and geological facts. He traveled extensively and 
made the results of his experience and his collections bear upon 
the elucidation of the geology of New York State. 
It was fortunate that a philosophical mind, one addicted to 
comparison and induction, and not gifted either with marked 
Scholarship or originality, should have been committed to the 
task of studying a section (the Fourth District) of the state 
where the succession was almost undisturbed, where leaf upon 
leaf, with contents unobliterated, the geological record, waited 
for its reader, Hall read the record and established the pagi- 
nation of the opening sections of the Book of Geology for Amer- 
ica. Imbued with lasting impressions of a quiet and continuous 
progress of deposition, marked by no more extreme perturba- 
tions than the secular rising and falling of the earth’s crust, 
he became a strict Uniformitarian, and the problems of vol- 
canic geology, which lay far outside of his path, seldom or 
never enlisted his attention. He writes in the Geology of the 
Fourth District (p. 10) : “ The doctrine of violent catastrophes, 
and of sudden changes in the inhabitants of the ocean, was 
based upon the examination of limited districts, where the 
- 
