144 The American Geologist. March, i89<» 
Nestor of American geology." A few instances may be cited 
of the many that could be given. In 1841 Dr. Hall made a trip 
to the Mississippi valley, and stopped for a while at Cuyahoga 
Falls, Ohio, as the guest of Mr. Newberry, whose son was 
amusing himself by collecting the coal-plants found in the 
shales of his father's mine. Before the visit ended young 
Newberry had decided to devote his life to the study of 
geology. In 1850 a pupil of Louis Agassiz went with Hall 
amid the Helderberg mountains, and took his first field lesson 
in geology; his name was Joseph LeConte, afterward profes- 
sor of the University of California. Prof. R. P. Whitfield, 
now the paleontologist of the American Museum of Natural 
History, and famous for his many contributions to science, was 
for eighteen years Hall's assistant. F. B. Meek, the great 
authority on the Jura and Cretaceous on this continent, was 
also associated with Hall. So have been C. A. White, J. D. 
Whitney, C. D. Walcott, C. E. Beecher, John M. Clarke, and 
others eminent as geologists. 
Reference, however brief, should also be made to the fact 
that when Hall took charge of the Fourth District of the New 
York survey, Mather had the First, Emmons the Second, and 
Yanuxem the Third. Conrad, who was the paleontologist of 
the survey, is said to have remarked as he retired from the 
field: "If I were to work a hundred years I could not describe 
the fossils of New York." This reminds us of Hall's own re- 
mark to Clarke when the last proofs of the last quarto volume 
had been read embodying the results of seven consecutive 
years of hard work on the paleozoic Brachiopoda: "We have 
labored very hard on this book, and have brought out some 
knowledge that will be useful to the scientific world; but for 
my part, I feel that I would now like to begin the study of the 
Brachiopoda." And this, again, reminds us of the confession 
of Sir Isaac Newton as to the incomplete nature of his wonder- 
ful work : "I seem to myself to have been only like a boy play- 
ing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then 
finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, 
whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." 
Such is the modesty of true greatness, caused by the conscious- 
ness that the greater the work actually done, the more vast ap- 
pears what remains to be done. 
