152 
CALL’S GEOLOGICAL WORK 
Starr Jordan, John Casper Branner, and other Cornell scientists 
of that day, who in after years were often closely associated with 
him in his investigations. Leaving college he taught country 
school for several years, at the same time devoting his spare hours 
to collecting and studying in natural history. In the meanwhile 
his parents moved to Des Moines. During the years 1890 and 
1891 he attended Indiana State University, receiving the A. B. 
and A. M. degrees. In 1893 he finished the medical course at the 
Hospital College of Medicine of Louisville, Kentucky, graduating 
with the degree of M. D. Ohio University, at Athens, conferred 
upon him the honorary degree of Ph. t). in 1895. He died in 
New York City on March 14, 1917. 
Call’s principal avocation was teaching. He was connected with 
the schools all his life. Besides instructing in the sciences in the 
high schools of Stonington (Connecticut), Moline, Des Moines, 
Louisville, Brooklyn and New York City, he occupied for a time 
the Chair of Zoology in the Missouri State University. He served 
as curator of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences; and 
for periods of three years each he performed the duties of 
superintendent of Public Schools of David City, Nebraska, and of 
Lawrenceburg, Indiana. He was an able and entertaining 
lecturer, and his services in the field were much sought. His 
work as lecturer for the Board of Education of New York City 
was especially noteworthy and satisfactory. 
Of his more productive work in pure science there was wide 
range. In geology his efforts were mainly of the reconnaissance 
type. Yet he published a number of geological memoirs of note. 
Joining the staff of the United States Geological Survey, he spent 
a long season in the deserts of Utah with Gilbert, who wa^ then 
studying the old desiccated Lake Bonneville — the all but van¬ 
quished remnant of which is the Great Salt Lake of today. From 
the clays and sands of the old beaches of that vast ancient body 
of water he collected the molluscan shells, endeavoring to show by 
their depauperate character that they lived under the inhospitable 
environment of a glacial climate, to which Gilbert ascribed the 
origin of this great expanse of inland waters. Some of the forms 
unearthed proved to be new to science, and were so described. 
After similar fashion he worked with the late W J McGee on 
the loess and the loess fossils of central Iowa. Notwithstanding 
the fact that depauperate shells were found to be abundant at 
