Part 15

The catalogue of Professor Hitchcock's publications comprises more than one hundred and fifty titles of papers, reports, and books. Perhaps the earliest thorough study represented among them was that of the fossil footmarks. The first of the published papers on this subject related to the tracks of animals in alluvial clay, and was published in the American Journal of Science in 1855. For several years after this he assisted his father in arranging the museum and compiling tables for the Ichnology. He made a complete catalogue descriptive of the more than twenty thousand individual impressions preserved in the Appleton Cabinet, which was printed, with descriptions of a few new species of footmarks, in the Supplement to the Ichnology of Massachusetts, edited by him after the death of his father in 1865. Although circumstances have prevented him from paying much attention to ichnology in later years, he has prepared several papers on the subject, the most important of which was one on the Recent Progress of Ichnology, which was read before the Boston Society of Natural History about twelve years ago. In it the ichnites were carefully catalogued anew and classified in the light of our knowledge of the numerous dinosaurs of the West; and the results of some studies of the slabs exhumed at Wethersfield, Connecticut, are well known. The list of the Connecticut footmarks was increased from one hundred and nineteen in the Ichnology to one hundred and seventy; and facts were cited to show that the _Grallator_, the three-toed animal most allied to birds, possessed a caudal appendage of a reptilian nature. The Trias of New Jersey had been found to illustrate new features in the _Otozoum_, whose tracks are often ornithic in aspect. A comparison of the features of the Triassic skeletons described by Marsh from Connecticut (_Anchisaurus_) shows that the creatures were rather allied to the _Plesiornis_ than to the _Anomoepus_ of the Ichnology, because of the great size of the fore feet. Notes upon footmarks have been gathered also from illustrations in Pennsylvania, Nova Scotia, Kansas, Nevada, and Florida.

Professor Hitchcock has studied the Quaternary or glacial deposits with great success. His first publication upon the terraces and allied phenomena of Vermont appeared while the old views of a submergence, with icebergs, prevailed, to account for the phenomena. A study of the glaciers of Switzerland in 1866 satisfied him of the truth of Agassiz's theory; and whenever the opportunity came for re-examination of the surface geology of northern New England, the facts were found to require a different theoretical explanation. He caused a thorough examination to be made of the Connecticut River terranes by Warren Upham in the New Hampshire Survey, and proved that all the high mountains of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine had been glaciated by a southeasterly movement. The ice came from the Laurentian highlands, pushed in a southern direction down the Champlain-Hudson Valley, with a southeasterly flow over New England and southwesterly over the Adirondacks; the last two courses having been subordinate to the first. At present the Laurentian hills are lower than the New England and New York mountains overridden by the ice, and probably the same was the case in the Glacial period. The best explanation of these paths is afforded by the suggestion that a gigantic ice cap accumulated north of the St. Lawrence, towering into the clouds so much that its overflow naturally descended over the White and Adirondack Mountains.

That glaciers should accumulate terminal moraines is axiomatic, but no geologist before 1868 had ventured to suggest where moraines might be located in the United States. In that year Professor Hitchcock delivered a lecture before the Lyceum of Natural History in New York and the Long Island Historical Society in Brooklyn, in which he affirmed that the drift deposits from Prospect Park along the backbone of Long Island for its entire length constituted the terminal moraine of the great continental ice sheet. This declaration inaugurated a new era in the study of the age of ice. The geologists in their several States found the terminal moraines, and the various phenomena began to be classified according to new laws. The search for moraines has resulted in a restatement of the incident of the age of ice; more than a dozen successive terminal moraines have been mapped between New York and Montana, which suggest to us the existence of several glacial periods. In compiling a catalogue of observations of the course of glacial striæ by the United States Geological Survey, it was found that Professor Hitchcock had recorded for New England as many as all other geologists had observed for the whole country.

_Eskers_ are another interesting class of phenomena, and were first described as _horsebacks_ in Maine, about seventy of them having been described in the report of 1861 and 1862. It was not till after the description of the Swedish Ösar that the nature of these lines or ridges was understood; and now they were found in every prominent valley in New England, as attendant upon the recession of the ice sheet. Professor Hitchcock gave the correct name of these ridges in his Elementary Geology, 1860; while for many years subsequently they were erroneously called _kames_, even in the geology of New Hampshire.

Professor Hitchcock gave the name of Champlain to the fossiliferous clays associated with the till of the Atlantic coast. The term has come into general use as connected with the melting of the ice in the latter part of the period. Because of the presence of boreal species, and of analogies with similar deposits in Europe, Professor Hitchcock has asked the question whether there may not have been a Champlain glacial epoch posterior to those named farther in the interior of the country, the Kansan, Iowan, and Illinoisian epochs.

Those who explore the geology of northern New England have to deal with crystalline rocks of various ages, and the opinions of our best geologists have not been in agreement respecting them. Professor Hitchcock was the first to make a geological map of New Hampshire, and he also demonstrated the anticlinal nature of the Green Mountains of Vermont. His teachers had inculcated the view that these eminences belonged to a synclinal disposition, coupling this with theoretical assertions as to their age and metamorphism. Finding their main principle to be erroneous, he naturally disparaged their theories, though more recent studies are eliminating many of the schists from the Archæan. All the later explorers in the field--Canadians and members of the Geological Survey--accept a pre-Cambrian anticlinal in the heart of the Green Mountains.

The distribution of the New Hampshire formations was made out for the most part before any assistance was derived from the labors of Dr. G. W. Hawes and other petrographers. Twenty years ago, at the date of the final publication of the New Hampshire maps, the doctrine of an igneous origin of the crystalline schist had hardly been hinted at. What seems elemental to the modern petrographer who has acquired his technical education since 1890 was unknown then, and the classification given in the report may not agree with that now taught. In the midst of the diverse views entertained, Professor Hitchcock classified the rocks of northern New England according to this principle: rocks that are identical in petrographical composition are assumed to have had the same origin, and to be synchronous. Professor Hitchcock was almost the first of American geologists to employ the petrographer as a help to the understanding of the crystallines--as was evident by the very valuable contributions to knowledge in Part IV of the New Hampshire Report as prepared by Dr. Hawes.

A vexing question concerning what are now called Cambrian terranes divided geologists for a quarter of a century after 1857, and had to be considered in preparing the geology of Vermont in 1861. This was the Taconic controversy. Trilobites had been discovered in Vermont, which were misunderstood by most of the American geologists following Hall, Logan, Dana, and others. In giving the species the technical name first of _Barrandesi_ and then _Olenellus_, Prof. James Hall asserted its derivation from the Hudson River group--relying upon the stratigraphical determinations of Sir W. E. Logan. As soon as Barrandes's attention was called to these trilobites and the attendant publication, he wrote his famous letter to Logan in 1860, declaring that there must be a mistake somewhere. That error was discovered in time to be eliminated from the Vermont report of the following year. Professor Hitchcock had charge of the field work in this Cambrian district, and his views of the arrangement of the formations are in agreement with those of the latest workers in the field. He applied the term of _Georgia_ to one division of the terrane in 1860; and the designation has been generally adopted since that time. Jules Marcou claimed priority in the suggestion of the application of the term, but upon the publication of Professor Hitchcock's statement on the subject the credit of priority was awarded to him by Director Walcott, of the United States Geological Survey.

Between 1860 and 1870 Professor Hitchcock was occupied largely as a mining geologist in the estimation of mineral deposits for mining companies, with his office in New York. In the prosecution of this business he traveled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Alabama. Subsequently, the study of the phosphate beds led him to the island of Redonda in the West Indies. He further visited the phosphate beds of South Carolina and Florida, the gold fields of eastern Oregon, the Chalcedony Park of Arizona, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, and the Yosemite and Yellowstone Parks. Studies made in the Hawaiian Islands and their volcanoes in 1883 and 1886 resulted in the contribution of important observations respecting those regions. At the present writing Professor Hitchcock is spending a year of further observations in those islands.

Mr. Hitchcock was appointed, in 1858, lecturer in zoölogy and curator of the cabinet in Amherst College; an office which he filled for seven years, retiring after the death of his father. In 1866 he was elected professor of geology in Lafayette College, where he gave short courses of instruction to five successive classes. In 1868 he was called to the chair of geology in Dartmouth College, a position which he still occupies, receiving a year's leave of absence for 1898-'99 in consideration of thirty years of service. He taught geology and zoölogy as a provisional professor at Williams College in 1881, and in the following year in the Virginia College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, Blacksbury. He received the degree of M. A. in course at Amherst in 1859, the honorary degree of Ph. D. from Lafayette College in 1870, and that of LL. D. from Amherst College in 1896.

Professor Hitchcock has been connected with the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1856, and a nearly constant attendant upon its meetings and participant in the proceedings. He is a member of local scientific societies in Portland, Me., Boston, Mass., New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, and also of the Imperial Geological Institute of Vienna. He was one of the most prominent movers in the inception and early history of the Geological Society of America, and had much to do with the organization of the International Congress of Geologists, and with the preparation of special reports for the several meetings between 1876 and 1890. The handsome geological map of small scale compiled for the United States was prepared by him and published in the Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers (1887), to illustrate the nomenclature and color scheme of the International Congress.

Professor Hitchcock is best known to many by his geological maps. The first efforts at mapping the geology of the United States were made independently by Edward Hitchcock and Jules Marcou in 1883--the work of Mr. Marcou extending only to the plains. Prof. H. D. Rogers, five or six years later, prepared a map for Johnston's Physical Atlas. In 1872 Prof. C. H. Hitchcock and Prof. W. P. Blake compiled a map for the ninth census of the United States, and for R. W. Raymond's report upon the mineral resources of the country. The success of his small scale map led Professor Hitchcock to undertake the preparation of a map on a scale of twenty-five miles to the inch for the whole country. For this he consulted every work that had been printed upon the geology of the United States, and obtained the privilege of using many unpublished data collected by geologists of States and Territories in which the work had never been carried to actual completion. The map prepared by the General Land Office was used as the basis for the geological coloration, and the work appeared in 1881, of a size adapted to use in the classroom. Its compiler has never seen any criticism of its accuracy. The edition prepared for the Mining Institute embodies all the information acquired for the large map, with such additional facts as had been learned since that map was published. Prof. Hitchcock's services were called into requisition in the compilation of a similar map for the United States Geological Survey, which was published in its annual report for 1886, under the editorship of W. J. McGee; in fact, the two maps were printed from the same plates, but Dr. Hitchcock's contained certain features not found in the other one--the result of different interpretations--and was more complete. In the Government edition a system of coloration devised by Major J. W. Powell, which was afterward abandoned, was employed.

Professor Hitchcock contributed extensively to the collection of State geological maps in the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, when large scale sheets of New England, and a large copy of the Hitchcock and Blake map of 1872, were exhibited. A medal was awarded for a sheet of thirteen sections illustrating the stratigraphy of Vermont and New Hampshire. The beginning of the measurement of sections was made for the Vermont Geological Report under the direction of Dr. Edward Hitchcock in 1861. Twelve lines of exploration across the entire State were determined upon, and specimens were collected to illustrate all the varieties of rock seen upon each. The specimens were arranged in the State Museum at Montpelier in geographical order. A similar plan of collection and arrangement was projected for the New Hampshire survey, but it was made to extend across the two States, from Maine to New York. Besides the two State reports, later publications were issued, descriptive of explorations and collections for the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the New Hampshire Agricultural Report for 1883. The work did not cease with these publications, for after the transfer of the collection of sections from the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts to Dartmouth College in 1894, additional explorations were made; the number of sections was increased to eighteen; improved drawings of the profiles, colored geologically, were prepared for the cases in the new Butterfield Museum; and the explanation of the details was further facilitated by the construction of a large relief map on the scale of one mile to the inch horizontally, twice as much vertically, and having colors corresponding to those on the profiles between the shelves. About five thousand specimens have been gathered to illustrate the profiles.

The Dartmouth College Museum is filled with specimens accumulated by the energy of Professor Hitchcock. They concern geology, paleontology, petrography, economic botany, and conchology.

FOOTNOTE:

[58] Vol. xlvii, September, 1895.

Editor's Table.

_EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION._

Our attention has been drawn to a lively discussion that has lately taken place in the St. Paul papers over the utterances, on the subject of the doctrine of evolution in its relation to education, of a certain Mr. Smith, who was appointed not long since superintendent of the public schools of that city. What seems clear is that Mr. Smith is a very ignorant man, whose views in regard to education are of an altogether retrograde character. How he came to be appointed to his present position is a question which is being gravely pondered by many of the citizens; but probably the explanation is not very far to seek. The dispensers of patronage in State and municipal affairs are not always competent to make the best nominations to offices calling for high qualifications; and sometimes they do not even act up to their own indifferent lights. The man that has the pull is very apt to be the man that gets the office, and it is not often that the strongest pull goes with the highest professional fitness.

However this may be, there Mr. Smith is, and what kind of a man he is may be judged from his utterances. It is thus that he refers to Mr. Spencer: "There is an old man in England who for years has spent all his time and devoted all his energies to the attempt to create a system which shall entirely ignore the name of the Deity. He will shortly die, and it shall not be remembered that he ever performed an act or said a word that blessed or comforted or relieved his suffering fellows." To further darken the picture, he contrasts Spencer with the late Cardinal Newman, who wrote the hymn "Lead, kindly light," and who, we are told, if he had done nothing more, would have been "followed by the blessings and the prayers of those whom he had comforted and saved." Again, dealing with the modern scientific view that, in the development of the human individual all antecedent stages of human development are, in a manner, passed through, he says: "Let us discard the primitive-man theory. You do not believe it. Rather shall we not hold with Emerson that every child born into the world is a new Messiah given into the arms of fallen humanity to lead them back to paradise?"

It is no part of our purpose to defend Mr. Spencer against the attacks of so negligible an assailant as Mr. Smith, of Minnesota. The words that Mr. Spencer has spoken for truth, for justice, for humanity, for peace, are his sufficient commendation and vindication--were vindication needed--in the eyes of all who have any competent knowledge of contemporary thought. If these words do not help to make the world better we should feel little inclined to put our trust in the most skillfully constructed sacred lyric. Men do not always know their benefactors; and it is altogether possible, nay probable, that thousands who perhaps never heard Mr. Spencer's name have benefited through the greater consideration with which they have been treated by others, owing to his teaching. It is quite possible for men, yes, and women too, to sing "Lead, kindly light" with great unction, and yet to be the ardent abettors of warlike sentiments and warlike acts--to revel in a ruthless and immoral jingoism. Dryden was not referring to the adherents of any evolutionist philosophy when he wrote:

"In lusts we wallow, and with pride we swell, And injuries with injuries repel; Prompt to revenge, not daring to forgive, Our lives unteach the doctrine we believe."

"Not daring to forgive" is good, and nearly as true in the nineteenth century as it was in the seventeenth. The one English statesman who dared to forgive a defeat inflicted on English arms and to acknowledge an error, incurred by that single act a deeper hatred and contempt than he earned by anything else, or all else, in his long and storm-tossed career. We refer to the action taken by Gladstone after the battle of Majuba Hill. And we are much mistaken if the majority of those who execrated him most deeply for not crushing the Boers under England's overwhelming force were not immense admirers of the cardinal's hymn. What is certain is that they were not immense admirers of Spencer, and that Spencer did not immensely admire them.

Superintendent Smith has quoted Emerson, but he does not occupy the standpoint that enables him to see Emerson in true perspective, or to feel what his philosophy lacks when confronted with the newer knowledge of the century. Mr. J. J. Chapman, in his recent memorable book of essays, gives us a better view. "A critic in the modern sense," Mr. Chapman says, "he (Emerson) was not. He lived too early and at too great a distance from the forum of European thought to absorb the ideas of evolution, and give place to them in his philosophy.... We miss in Emerson the underlying conception of growth, of development, so characteristic of the thought of our own day, and which, for instance, is found everywhere latent in Browning's poetry.... He is probably the last great writer to look at life from a stationary standpoint."

That the doctrine of evolution constitutes to-day a most important guiding principle in education no competent educationist could be found to deny. It teaches us to deal with the young as in a very true sense the heirs of all the ages, to make due allowance in childhood for instincts and habits which partake of the earlier stages of human development, and to look forward with confidence to later and higher manifestations. We have less faith than our ancestors had in the rod, and more in the gradual unfolding of the powers and capacities of the mind, and therewith the enlargement and improvement of the moral nature. We do not believe as our forefathers did in breaking children's wills; nor do we view their peccadilloes in the lurid light of a gloomy theological creed. We recognize that veracity, in the sense of strict accuracy of speech, purged of all imaginative elements, is a virtue which not all adults are able to practice, and which is not a natural product of the child mind. We can not accept Emerson's doctrine of infant Messiahs, and yet we can recognize very fully the mission of the child in the home, the demand it makes for tenderness, for patience, for thoughtfulness on the part of parents, the hopes and fears and heart-searchings that it calls into play, the aspirations that it promotes toward the realization, if for its sake only, of a higher life. Froebel grasped a large measure of truth in regard to children, but too much of sentiment, in our opinion, entered into his treatment of them. In the full light of the doctrine of evolution we take them as they are, and help them to work out under favorable conditions that development of which they are capable. We are not imposed upon by childish imitations of mature virtues, and are rather disposed to repress recognized tendencies to precocity; but we believe that the germs of good are sown in every normal human being, and that, unless killed by most unwise treatment, they will fructify in due time.