A century of science in America

In the year 1883 a legacy of eighty thousand dollars was left to the President and Fellows of Yale College in the city of New Haven, to be held in trust, as a gift from her chil...

Any mere enumeration of the vast fund of knowledge accumulated by the efforts of man through observation and experiment in the period in which we are interested would be a dry s...

No one, it is presumed, will doubt that a journal devoted to science, and embracing a sphere sufficiently extensive to allure to its support the principal scientific men of our...

“During twenty years from the inception of this Journal, the editor labored alone, although overtures for editorial cooperation had been made to him by gentlemen commanding his...

It is my intention in future to prepare for the columns of this Journal abstracts of the more important physical and chemical memoirs contained in foreign scientific journals, a...

_Earliest Historical Geology._—Even though Giovanni Arduino (1713–1795) of Padua was not the first to classify the rocks into three series according to their age, he did this mo...

═══════════════════════════════════╤══════════╤════════════ Present American classification │Wernerian │ Other │ orders │ writers ───────────────────────────────────┼──────────┼...

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.,...

Hall, however, fell into a number of flagrant errors because of a too great reliance on lithologic correlation and supposedly similar sequence. For instance, the Coal Measures o...

We must digress a little here and note the work of Joachim Barrande (1799–1883) in Bohemia. In 1846 he published a short account of the “Silurian system” of Bohemia, dividing it...

Chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829) may justly be regarded as the founder of the doctrine of modern evolution. Previous to 1794 he was a believer in the fixity of species, but by 1...

It had now become clearly evident, moreover, that the fossils from the older formations were all extinct species, and that only in the most recent deposits were there remains of...

“We may consider the level of the sea to be a grand base-level, below which the dry lands cannot be eroded; but we may also have, for local and temporary purposes, other base-le...

“The page of history recorded in these phenomena is by no means ambiguous. The ridges, or, more properly, the ridge which determines the courses of the St. Joseph and St. Marys...

Third annual meeting of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists, this Journal, =43=, 154, 1842; Abstract of proceedings of the fourth session of the Association o...

“Professor Silliman conducted me to an interesting locality of these in East-Haven. They occur on the main road from New-Haven to East-Haven, less than half a mile from Tomlinso...

This was the attitude of a leader of British opinion toward the subject of deformational geology from which the infant science had to recover before progress could be made. The...

These examples exhibit the characteristics of a large class of mountain masses or ranges. A geosynclinal accompanied by sedimentary depositions, and ending in a catastrophe of p...

The linear mountain systems made from deep troughs of sediments have come then to be recognized as but one of several classes of mountains. This class, from its clear developmen...

Thus in the first period of Government surveys, covering about forty years, the great West, with its wealth of public lands, was well traversed by exploratory surveys, which fur...

The primary aim of the Geological Survey is geologic, whether directed by authority of law toward the “examination of the geological structure, mineral resources, and products o...

The mammals were, perhaps, the most prolific source of paleontological research during the nineteenth century, for, as Zittel has said, Cuvier’s famous investigations on the fos...

To Professor Marsh should be given credit for the first organized expedition designed exclusively for the collection of vertebrate remains, the results of which contain so much...

The ninth decade ushered in the work of a valuable group of students, of whom John Bell Hatcher should be mentioned in particular, as his work is done. Graduate of Yale in 1884,...

The use of the microscope, as soon as the method became more generally understood, opened up so vast a field for investigation that at first the study and description of the roc...

In this brief retrospect, giving only the barest outlines and omitting from necessity much of importance, we have seen petrology grow from occasional crude experiments into a fu...

James Dwight Dana was graduated from Yale College in 1833 at the age of twenty. Four years later (1837) he published “The System of Mineralogy,” a volume of 580 pages. The appea...

It will not be possible to review in detail the lines of work sketched above. An outline of the synthetic work on systems of the mineral oxides and a paragraph on the volcano re...

A considerable amount of work with gases had been done by Priestley, Scheele, Cavendish, Lavoisier, Dalton, Gay-Lussac, and others before our hundred-year period began. Cavendis...

┌─────────┬────────────────────┬─────────────────────┐ │ Groups │ IV │ V │ │ „ │ A B │ A B │ ├─────────┼────────────────────┼─────────────────────┤ │ Typical │ RO_{2} │ R_{2}O_{...

No important practical application has been found for any of these earthy oxides, except that about one per cent of cerium oxide is mixed with thorium oxide in incandescent gas-...

For instance, if the system is heated above the fixed temperature, ice disappears and if the pressure is raised, vapor is condensed. If this same system of water alone contains...

The greatest triumph of these dynamical methods was to come half a century later. The planet Uranus, discovered in 1781 by the elder Herschel, was at that time the farthest know...

_Liquefaction of Gases._—Meanwhile the problem of liquefying gases was attracting much attention on the part of experimental physicists. Faraday had succeeded in making liquid a...

Röntgen’s discovery excited intense interest among laymen as well as in scientific circles. Of the many X-ray photographs taken, those of Wright (=1=, 235, 1896) of Yale were th...

Maxwell’s ether was not a dynamical ether in the sense of Green’s elastic solid medium. In spite of the fact that Maxwell was always active in devising mechanical analogues to i...

Throughout the nineteenth century the ether has played a fundamental part in all important physical theories of light and electromagnetism. But if it is not possible for experim...

This article is intended as a brief survey of the development of zoology in America, and no attempt is made to give a general history of the science. There are numerous accounts...

The times in America, moreover, were fully ripe for the advent of European culture. There were already in existence natural history societies in many of our cities and college c...

In this period also occurred the greatest progress in marine systematic zoology, due to the explorations of the United States Fish Commission off the Atlantic Coast. The Journal...

The work in systematic zoology is now mainly carried on by specialists in relatively small groups of animals. This is necessitated both by the increasingly large number of speci...

The geneticist now realizes that the appearance of the body (phenotype) gives but little clue to the inheritance (genotype). That two white flowers produce only purple offspring...

_Gray as Editor._—Gray’s name as associate editor of the Journal appears in 1853. He had been a welcome contributor, as we have seen, for many years. His influence upon the prog...

There are many broad philosophical questions which have found an appropriate home in the Journal, such as “The Plant-individual in its relation to the species” (Alexander Braun,...