REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR 1923 Wy 
D. DANA LUTHER, MILLER AND GEOLOGIST 
1840 — 1923 
D. Dana Luther, beloved of all who knew him, died at his home 
in Naples, N. Y., December 17, 1923. He joined the geological staff 
of this institution in 1891 and served continuously until his retire- 
ment in 1916. He was 51 years old when this service began and 76 
when it ceased. 
There was much in Mr Luther’s life that was picturesque and 
unusual. Many of its features bring it into comparison with the 
lives of Hugh Miller, the Scotch stonemason, and of Robert Dick, 
the baker of Thurso; one a great geologist and expositor, the other, 
geologist and botanist of more than local merit, whose story has 
served as a lesson to boys of the right sort. A thoughtful and 
reflective stonemason might well become a geologist, and a lover of 
all Nature might prefer his communion with her to the compulsions 
of the bread board. With Mr Luther, a miller, it was a mantle of 
sorrow that fell upon him in middle life which seemed to turn his 
overwhelmed thoughts from his business to the untrammeled spaces 
among the hills of his native valley. From the catastrophe of a 
broken home circle, a motherless group of little children and a grow- 
ing disability from miller’s asthma, he sought and found an inspiring 
release where Nature had provided it. It was in this episode of 
sorrow that he learned to hear the voices in the rocks, the woods and 
the fields. 
Calvin Luther and Rebecca Dana were strong names and strong 
characters. They were of the Puritan stock from Berkshire county 
which spread westward toward the Genesee country, the frontier, 
after Sullivan’s raiders upon the Seneca settlements had brought 
back wondrous stories of the fertility of the land. These parents 
were not of the first venturers into this remote and _ hill-crowned 
valley of Naples; they were nevertheless early arrivals, and Mr 
Luther passed his entire home life in the generous house which his 
father built on the high terraced bank of the valley creek. Close 
to it was his father’s mill where for a generation the countryside 
ground its grist and found its flour and meal, and here Dana Luther 
ground out the modest living of his early manhood. 
Mr Luther was the writer’s friend. Like interests in the mysteries 
of the rocks brought them together at just the critical time when 
Nature was ministering to his wound; the staid, wise and cautious 
