Part 14

Amos Eaton (1776–1842), lawyer, botanist, surveyor, and one of the founders of American geology, was a graduate of Williams College in the class of 1799. He studied with Silliman in 1815, attending his lectures on chemistry, geology, and mineralogy. He also enjoyed access to the libraries of Silliman and of the botanist, Levi Ives, in which works on botany and materia medica were prominent, and was a diligent student of the College cabinet of minerals. He settled as a lawyer and land agent in Catskill, New York, and here in 1810 he gave a popular course of lectures on botany, believed to have been the first attempted in the United States.

In 1818 appeared Eaton’s first noteworthy geological publication, the Index to the Geology of the Northern States, a text-book for the classes in geology at Williamstown. The controlling principle of this book was Wernerism, a false doctrine from which Eaton was never able to free himself. This book was “written over anew” and published in 1820.

While at Albany in 1818, Governor De Witt Clinton asked Eaton to deliver a course of lectures on chemistry and geology before the members of the legislature of New York. It is believed that Eaton is the only American having this distinction, and because of it he became acquainted with many leading men of the state, interesting them in geology and its application to agriculture by means of surveys. In this way was sown the idea which eventually was to fructify in that great official work: The Natural History of New York. (See =43=, 215, 1842; and Youmans’ sketch of Eaton’s life, Pop. Sci. Monthly, Nov. 1890.)

Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864), reverend, state geologist, college president, and another of the founders of American geology, was largely self-taught. Previous to 1825, when he entered the theological department of Yale College, he had met Amos Eaton, who interested him in botany and mineralogy, and between 1815 and 1819 he had made lists of the plants and minerals found about his native town, Deerfield, Massachusetts. Therefore, while studying theology at Yale it was natural for him also to take up mineralogy and geology with Silliman, whose acquaintance he had made at least as early as 1818.

Hitchcock, who was destined to be one of the most prominent figures of his time, was appointed in 1825 to the chair of chemistry and natural history at Amherst College. His first geologic paper, one of five pages, appeared in 1815. Three years later appeared his more important paper on the Geology and Mineralogy of a Section of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont (=1=, 105, 436, 1818). This is also noteworthy for its geological map, the next one to be published after those of Maclure of 1809 and 1817. In 1823 came a still greater work, A Sketch of the Geology, Mineralogy, and Scenery of the Regions contiguous to the River Connecticut (=6=, 1, 200, 1823; =7=, 1, 1824). Here the map above referred to was greatly improved, and the survey was one of the most important of the older publications.

Youmans in his account of Hitchcock (Pop. Sci. Monthly, Sept. 1895) says:

“The State of Massachusetts commissioned him to make a geological survey of her territory in 1830. Three years were spent in the explorations, and the work was of such a high character that other States were induced to follow the example of Massachusetts.... The State of New York sought his advice in the organization of a survey, and followed his suggestions, particularly in the division of the territory into four parts, and appointed him as the geologist of the first district. He entered upon the work, but after a few days of labor he found that he must necessarily be separated from his family, much to his disinclination. He also conceived the idea of urging a more thorough survey of his own State; hence he resigned his commission and returned home. The effort for a resurvey of Massachusetts was successful, and he was recommissioned to do the work. The results appeared in 1841 and 1844.”

Oliver P. Hubbard was assistant to Silliman in 1831–1836, and then up to 1866 taught chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at Dartmouth College. James G. Percival was graduated at Yale in 1815, and in 1835 he and C. U. Shepard of Amherst College were appointed state geologists of Connecticut. Their report was issued in 1842.

James Dwight Dana (1813–1895) was undoubtedly the ablest of all of Silliman’s students. Graduated at Yale in 1833, he spent fifteen months in the United States Navy as instructor in mathematics, cruising off France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. In 1836 he was assistant to Silliman, and in 1837, at the age of twenty-four years, he published his widely used System of Mineralogy. Two years later Dana joined the Wilkes Exploring Expedition as mineralogist, returning to America in 1842; his geological results of this expedition were published in 1849. In 1863, during the Rebellion, he published his Manual of Geology, and through four editions it remained for forty years the standard text-book for American geologists.

First American Geological Society.—The founding in 1807 of the Geological Society of London, the parent of geological societies, undoubtedly had its stimulating effect on Silliman, and with his marked organizing ability he began to think of forming an American society of the same kind. This he brought about the year following the appearance of the Journal, that is, in 1819. The American Geological Society, begun in 1819 (=1=, 442, 1819), was terminated in 1830 (=17=, 202, 1830). The first meeting (September 6, 1819) and all the subsequent ones were held in the cabinet of Yale College. The brief records of the doings of this society are printed in volumes =1=, =10=, =15=, and =18= of the Journal. Silliman was the attraction at the meetings, surrounded by his mineral cabinet, and he gave “the true scientific dress to all the naked mineralogical subjects” discussed.

Wernerian Geology in North America.

The Father of American Geology.—Historical Geology begins in America with William Maclure’s Observations on the Geology of the United States, issued in 1809. This was the first important original work on North American geology, and its colored geological map was the first one of the area east of the Mississippi River. The classification was essentially the Wernerian system. All of the strata of the Coastal Plain, now known to range from the Lower Cretaceous to Recent, were referred to the Alluvial. To the west, over the area of the Piedmont, were his Primitive rocks, while the older Paleozoic formations of the Appalachian ranges were referred to the Transition. West of the folded area, all was Floetz or Secondary, or what we now know as Paleozoic sedimentaries. The Triassic of the Piedmont area and that of Connecticut he called the Old Red Sandstone, and the coal formations of the interior region he said rested upon the Secondary. The second edition of the work in 1817 was much improved, along with the map, which was also printed on a more correct geographic base. (For greater detail, see Merrill, Contributions to the History of American Geology, 1906.)

Even though Maclure’s geologic maps are much generalized, and the scheme of classification adopted a very broad one, they are in the main correct, even if they do emphasize unduly the rather simple geologic structure of North America. This fact is patent all through Maclure’s description. Cleaveland also refers to it in his treatise of 1816, and Silliman in the opening volume of the Journal (=1=, 7, 1818) says: “The outlines of American geology appear to be particularly grand, simple, and instructive.” Then, all the kinds of rocks were comprehended under four classes, Primitive, Transition, Alluvial, and Volcanic. It is also interesting to note here that in 1822 Maclure had lost faith in the aqueous origin of the igneous rocks and writes of the Wernerian system as “fast going out of fashion” (=5=, 197, 1822), while Hitchcock said about the same thing in 1825 (=9=, 146).

The Work of Eaton.—Amos Eaton, after traveling 10,000 miles and completing his Erie Canal Report in 1824, “reviewed the whole line several times,” and published in 1828 in the Journal (=14=, 145) a paper on Geological Nomenclature, Classes of Rocks, etc. The broader classification is the Wernerian one of Primitive, Transition, and Secondary classes. Under the first two he has fossiliferous early Paleozoic formations, but does not know it, because he pays no attention anywhere to the detail of the entombed fossils, and all of his Secondary is what we now call Paleozoic. The correlations of the latter are faulty throughout.

Then came his paper of 1830, Geological Prodromus (=17=, 63), in which he says: “I intend to demonstrate ... that all geological strata are arranged in five analogous series; and that each series consists of three formations; viz., the Carboniferous [meaning mud-stones], Quartzose, and Calcareous.” We seem to see here expressed for the first time the idea of “cycles of sedimentation,” but Eaton does not emphasize this idea, and the localities given for each “formation” of “analogous series” demonstrate beyond a doubt that he did not have a sedimentary sequence. The whole is simply a jumble of unrelated formations that happen to agree more or less in their physical characters.

“I intend to demonstrate,” he says further, “that the detritus of New Jersey, embracing the marle, which contains those remarkable fossil relics, is antediluvial, or the genuine Tertiary formation.” This correlation had been clearly shown by Finch in 1824 (=7=, 31) and yet both are in error in that they do not distinguish the included Cretaceous marls and greensands as something apart from the Tertiary.

One gets impatient with the later writings of Eaton, because he does not become liberalized with the progressive ideas in stratigraphic geology developing first in Europe and then in America, especially among the geologists of Philadelphia. Therefore it is not profitable to follow his work further.

Early American Text-books of Geology.—The first American text-book of geology bears the date of Boston 1816 and is entitled An Elementary Treatise on Mineralogy and Geology, its author being Parker Cleaveland of Bowdoin College. The second edition appeared in 1822. It also had a geologic map of the United States, practically a copy of Maclure’s. To mineralogy were devoted 585 pages, and to geology 55, of which 37 describe rocks and 5 the geology of the United States. The chronology is Wernerian. Of “geological systems” there are two, “primitive and secondary rocks.”

In 1818 appeared Amos Eaton’s Index to the Geology of the Northern States, having 54 pages, and in 1820 came the second edition, “wholly written over anew,” with 286 pages. The theory of the later edition is still that of Werner, with “improvements of Cuvier and Bakewell,” and yet one sees now-a-days but little in it of the far better English text-book. Eaton did very little to advance philosophic geology in America. What is of most value here are his personal observations in regard to the local geology of western Massachusetts, Connecticut, southwestern Vermont, and eastern New York (=1=, 69, 1819; also Merrill, p. 234).

We come now to the most comprehensive and advanced of the early text-books used in America. This is the third English edition of Robert Bakewell’s Introduction to Geology (400 pages, 1829), and the first American edition “with an Appendix Containing an Outline of his Course of Lectures on Geology at Yale College, by Benjamin Silliman” (128 pages). Bakewell’s good book is in keeping with the time, and while not so advanced as Conybeare and Phillips’s Outlines of 1822, yet is far more so than Silliman’s appendix. The latter is general and not specific as to details; it is still decidedly Wernerian, though in a modified form. Silliman says he is “neither Wernerian nor Huttonian,” and yet his summary on pages 120 to 126 shows clearly that he was not only a Wernerian but a pietist as well.

Unearthing of the Cenozoic and Mesozoic in North America.

The Discerning of the Tertiary.—The New England States, with their essentially igneous and metamorphic formations, could not furnish the proper geologic environment for the development of stratigraphers and paleontologists. So in America we see the rise of such geologists first in Philadelphia, where they had easy access to the horizontal and highly fossiliferous strata of the coastal plain. The first one to attract attention was Thomas Say, after him came John Finch, followed by Lardner Vanuxem, Isaac Lea, Samuel G. Morton, and T. A. Conrad. These men not only worked out the succession of the Cenozoic and the upper part of the Mesozoic, but blazed the way among the Paleozoic strata as well.

Thomas Say (1787–1834), in 1819, was the first American to point out the chronogenetic value of fossils in his article, Observations on some Species of Zoophytes, Shells, etc., principally Fossil (=1=, 381). He correctly states that the progress of geology “must be in part founded on a knowledge of the different genera and species of reliquiæ, which the various accessible strata of the earth present.” Say fully realizes the difficulties in the study of fossils, because of their fragmental character and changed nature, and that their correct interpretation requires a knowledge of similar living organisms.

The application of what Say pointed out came first in John Finch’s Geological Essay on the Tertiary Formations in America (=7=, 31, 1824). Even though the paper is still laboring under the mineral system and does not discern the presence of Cretaceous strata among his Tertiary formations, yet Finch also sees that “fossils constitute the medals of the ancient world, by which to ascertain the various periods.”

Finch now objects to the wide misuse in America of the term alluvial and holds that it is applied to what is elsewhere known as Tertiary. He says:

“Geology will achieve a triumph in America, when the term alluvial shall be banished from her Geological Essays, or confined to its legitimate domain, and then her tertiary formations will be seen to coincide with those of Europe, and the formations of London, Paris, and the Isle of Wight, will find kindred associations in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgias, the Floridas, and Louisiana.”

The formations as he has them from the bottom upwards are: (1) Ferruginous sand, (2) Plastic clay, (3) Calcaire Silicieuse of the Paris Basin, (4) London Clay, (5) Calcaire Ostrée, (6) Upper marine formation, (7) Diluvial.

The grandest of these early stratigraphic papers, however, is that by Lardner Vanuxem (1792–1848), of only three pages, entitled “Remarks on the Characters and Classification of Certain American Rock Formations” (=16=, 254, 1829). Vanuxem, a cautious man and a profound thinker, had been educated at the Paris School of Mines. James Hall told the writer in a conversation that while the first New York State Survey was in operation, all of its members looked to Vanuxem for advice.