In Memoriam—Charles B, Dyer. 209 
features of the statesman and the warrior are preserved in bronze and 
marble. Why should we not cherish the name of Charles B. Dyer, 
who, through many long years of labor and research, in the exposures 
of the rocks of our own city and country, made known to science, 
through the images preserved in stone, the hidden secrets of ancient 
and extinct life? He expanded the boundaries of knowledge, and 
discovered many of the characters by which we are enabled to read 
the structure of the earth, and to form an opinion of its immense 
duration, and the millions of ages which have transpired and been 
consumed in the annihilation, as well as in the development, of vege- 
table and animal organisms. We read of the growth of ages in the 
characters of the fossil shells, among which Mr. Dyer was the first to 
bring to light nearly a hundred distinct species. 
We learn to distinguish between the ages by the forms of the stony 
shells; and to pass back, in time, from one age to another, until the 
strongest mathematical mind is unable to comprehend the figures 
which express the years that must have rolled around, and yet we have 
not reached a beginning. The world was then as large us it is to-day 
and possessed of all the elements of which it is now composed, so far 
as one can judge by any fact or reason yet presented or suggested to 
the mind of man. Science does not teach us of a beginning. It deals 
in finite things, and instructs alone in matters within the comprehen- 
sion of finite minds. Resting, therefore, upon all that science had 
discovered of the past, with a full realization of all the proofs of high 
antiquity, Mr. Dyer was unable to comprehend the beginning of the 
world, and, being honest to himself and others, never pretended to 
understand the subject, or affected to believe any of the prevailing 
traditions about it. He could not penetrate the future by his vision, 
nor by any other faculty of body or mind; but, judging of the future 
by the past, he concluded the world will continue in its course for 
ages, and then there will be as little reason for looking forward to its 
ending as there is now. The past was to him as incomprehensible as 
eternity, and the future involved in the same endless obscurity; but 
his heart was always ready to leap with joy at the wonderful mutabil- 
ity and bloom of the worid. 
He sat at the feet of nature, unpretending, and full of candor. The 
work of collecting and determining the characters of organic forms was 
with him a labor of love, not because he expected to profit by it so 
much himself as he hoped to advance and disseminate knowledge and 
truth, and promote the welfare of his fellow-man. This he did, in a 
marked degree, for many years, not that he published the results of 
