MODERN GEOLOGY IN AMERICA 
3 
only a short time ago to solemnize our first centennary of modern 
geology is not so much in the man, or in the scientist as it is in his 
remarkable achievement of making the first successful application 
of modern geological principles in the New World. It is an epi¬ 
sode that must ever remain one of fundamental import in the 
history of American geology. 
Old Wernerian influences which dominated geological science 
throughout Europe and colonial America during the Eighteenth 
century and the early decades of the Nineteenth century all but 
missed touching lowa-land. When William McClure, who, a 
hundred years ago, was long president of the American Philoso¬ 
phical Society, in Philadelphia, and who, in his day, was the fore¬ 
most exponent of the German school of geology in this country, 
prepared'a general geological map of Eastern United States, the 
formations afterwards called the Paleozoics were represented as 
reaching only to the Mississippi River. Before these terranes 
could be actually traced beyond, the determination of fossils from 
the Iowa side by Thomas Nuttall forever barred the further 
spread of Werner’s conceptions to trans-Mississippi territory. 
With these newest and most modern principles a then unborn 
state, Iowa, was started upon her geological career. 
When Nuttall made his western tour, in 1809, and garnered 
plentifully from the blufifs of the Mississippi River, fossils which 
he mainly identified with those figured and described in Martin’s 
Petrifacta Derbiensia, he also unwittingly led astray for many 
years afterwards all of his successors in the field. A quarter of 
a century elapsed before it was fully realized that the Carbonic 
section of the Mississippi Valley did not embrace the entire Pale¬ 
ozoic succession, as not a few workers in the region believed. The 
delimitation of the English Carbonic succession in America was a 
long and tedious process and encountered many difficulties. 
Nuttall’s extensive travels were undertaken chiefly in the in¬ 
terests of his monumental works on North American plants and 
his valuable contributions to American ornithology. On his first 
long trip, after first traversing the southern shore of Lake Erie, 
and coasting by canoe Lakes Huron and Michigan, he entered 
Green Bay, and, following that famous old, all-water route to the 
West, which the Indians from time immemorial had used, ascend¬ 
ed Fox River to the short portage to the Wisconsin River, down 
