»
Geological Society of America
Centennial Special Volume 1
1985
Rummaging
through
the attic;
Or,
A brief history of the geological
sciences
at Yale
Brian J. Skinner
Department of Geology and Geophysics
Yak University
P.O.
Box 6666
New
Haven,
Connecticut 06511
Barbara
L.
Narendra
Peabody Museum of Natural History
Yak University
P.O.
Box 6666
New
Haven,
Connecticut 06511
ABSTRACT
Commencing with the appointment of Benjamin Silliman as Professor of Chemistry
and Natural History in 1802, the history of instruction and research in the geological
sciences at Yale can be conveniently divided into seven generation-long stages. Each
stage was characterized by a group of faculty members whose interests and personalities
imparted a distinct flavor and character to the institution; as those faculty members left,
retired, or died over a decade-long period of change, responsibility for geological studies
passed to a new generation.
The first stage began with the appointment of
Silliman;
the second started in 1850
as Silliman's career drew to a close and J. D. Dana, his son-in-law, was appointed to the
faculty, and brought the first Ph.D. degrees in the United States. The third stage com-
menced
in
1880,
and the fourth beginning in
1900,
brought the
first
faculty appointments
specifically for graduate instruction. The fifth and sixth stages saw the formative moves
that welded different administrative units together, leading to today's Department of
Geology and Geophysics. Stage seven, commencing
in
1965,
includes the present (1984),
but holds the seeds of stage eight.
The increasing diversity of research activities in geology has led to a doubling of the
number of geological faculty employed at Yale approximately every 50 years. The
number of Ph.D's awarded has increased at a parallel rate. We suggest the size of the
faculty will probably double again by the year 2035 and that production of Ph.D's will
probably rise to a rate of 12 to 15 a year.
355
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
356
B.
J. Skinner and
B.
L. Narendra
ii
I!
t f
M
ft s
1 2 I £ Sis'" k •
CD
II
o o
Iff
ÂŁ
S:
w
<I se o
or x <
s
ro
o
00
CvJ
to
O)
f
CO
•S B.
s
s5s
.a « -
4 IS
1 2 g
J*"
U —>
™2 *
oo X O
3
E
2 a: I
8
"8
3 «
•a .=
3 S -
•ass-g
fsa"fi
Is
|
.ÂŁ
!>
9
— oc
pi
s — si
o
M
OS..
-00
S
ÂŁ*%
^ —
%-a
8
8E.2
o S
B,
2
04
ÂŁ
H 2 "
Ml
• <S to
r: w -g
2 fs"5
x o ÂŁ-
o
S
D
5
5 <=
O «0
• -5
00 (j
ui
* •go
" J «
o u o
I
s
i
—
•
(¬
ill
ill
a 5 ~
ed
00 O
i a
_i
o c
CJEJ
oo
IT A H
E
—
^
3 <N O
^ L'tJ
•S
«
19
3 ^ ÂŁ
^ «
w
(/) e_>
c
^ §
o S
||
§
1
•8
J
§
u
c
| c2
i
w
8*1
w «i 2
S 3 §
=
o o
I
>,.s
o
O
CM
c
CS
0£ ° o
u
J *
I**
x
fa ^
o «J O
All
8
S UT ed
< |«
j J a
•q-
ON =
- - B.
> 3
|i
IS s
s-g 8
c
« O
« « o
2 i §
2 ^
•32
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
Rummaging
through the
attic
357
INTRODUCTION
Yale was one of the first institutions in the United States
where geology was taught; the subject has been offered continu-
ously since 1804, and as a separate discipline since 1812—the
longest unbroken run, so far as we know, of any institution in the
country. A study of the history of geology at Yale shows that any
account must focus on the individuals who have worked at the
institution—how they interacted and how their interests and ac-
tivities changed the science and the institution. The story of the
development of geology at Yale shows how individuals shape an
institution, and could apply to dozens of other distinguished
universities.
Geology was first taught at Yale in the first decade of the
19th century, but records show that even earlier there was re-
search and teaching by Yale people in topics that would today be
considered geology. In the 18th century, for example, it was a
popular occupation for the mathematically inclined to calculate
almanacs estimating the positions of the Moon and the planets
and, especially, predicting the dates of eclipses. Today this would
be called planetology, much of which is housed under the title of
geology. Evidence of a marked interest in another aspect of
planetology—meteors, fireballs, and comets—appears in a pam-
phlet prepared by Yale President Thomas Clap and published
posthumously (Clap, 1781), which records his conclusion that
fireballs are a class of comets that circle the Earth in highly
eccentric orbits. Clap's conclusion was incorrect, but his enthusi-
asm for science and improvements in the teaching of mathematics
were influential on the future of the sciences at Yale.
In 1801 President Timothy Dwight appointed a professor of
mathematics and natural philosophy (physics)—the first of sev-
eral faculty appointments that would place science on a secure
and permanent footing at Yale. For his second appointment in
1802,
he chose a recently graduated student who was then enter-
ing on a legal career; Dwight prevailed on him to abandon the
law and become a teacher. The student, Benjamin Silliman
(1779-1864), had never had a course in chemistry, mineralogy,
or any other subject allied directly to geology, but he accepted
Dwight's offer and, at the age of
23,
was appointed Professor of
"Chymistry" and Natural History. Silliman immediately set to
work learning the subjects he was to teach by attending lectures
in chemistry given by Professor James Woodhouse in the Medi-
cal School of the University of Pennsylvania. While in Philadel-
phia, he also attended lectures by Caspar Wistar on anatomy and
surgery, took a private course in zoology given by Benjamin
Barton, and made social contact with Joseph Priestley. Beyond
some professional advice and assistance offered by Dr. John
Maclean, Professor of Chemistry at Princeton, the Philadelphia
experience was the only formal training in science that Silliman
had when he presented his first course in chemistry to Yale Col-
lege students in 1804-1805. The course consisted of 60 lectures,
with mineralogy introduced at appropriate points. Silliman knew
only too well that he was not really prepared for a career in either
chemistry or natural history, so in 1805 he journeyed to England
and Scotland where he spent a year inspecting mines, visiting
various institutions, and studying in Edinburgh. While in Edin-
burgh, he became interested in the Vulcanist-Neptunist debate,
which was then at its peak. He attended lectures by Dr. John
Murray, an avowed Wernerian-Neptunist, and Dr. Thomas
Hope, an avowed Huttonian-Vulcanist. Though more impressed
by Murray, he struggled with the conflicting philosophies, re-
maining ". . . to a certain extent, a Huttonian, and abating that
part of the rocks which the igneous theory reclaims as the produc-
tion of fire,... as much of a Wernerian as ever" (Fisher, 1866,
v. 1, p. 170). His earliest paper on the geology of New Haven
(Silliman, 1810), written soon after his return from Scotland,
makes interesting reading because it reflects the conflict in his
mind and his attempts to resolve it. As he carried out this earliest
geological investigation of the New Haven region, he was accom-
panied on horseback by interested local citizens, including Noah
Webster, whom Silliman described as being "in the meridian of
life"
and "among the most zealous of my companions. . . ."
(Fisher, 1866, v. 1, p. 216).
By the fall of 1806, Silliman was ready for a full-time teach-
ing role. He was the founder of both the geological and chemical
sciences at Yale, and more important for our story, one of the
founding fathers of geology in North America.
Geological activities at Yale can be readily divided
into seven stages: the first started about 1800 and covered the
long career of Silliman and the early work of his distinguished
student and son-in-law, James Dwight Dana (1813-1895). The
second stage began about 1850, as Silliman's teaching career
drew to a close. Two events of major importance marked the
opening of this second stage. The first was the founding of a
scientific school under the direction of Benjamin Silliman, Jr. and
John Pitkin Norton; the other was the appointment of Dana to
the faculty of Yale College. The third stage opened 30 years later,
about 1880, by which time G. J. Brush had directed the Sheffield
Scientific School to considerable prominence and the Peabody
Museum of Natural History had been founded. Subsequent steps
came in more-or-less generation-long gaps of 20 to 25 years.
Each step began with a group of distinguished faculty members
who were appointed over a period of about eight to ten years, and
imparted to the institution a special flavor determined by their
particular interests. As members of the group retired or died,
responsibility passed to a new generation and a new pattern
started to emerge. Distinct changes occurred about 1880, 1900,
1920,1945, and 1965. It is now apparent that the Department of
Geology and Geophysics has entered yet another stage of genera-
tional refurbishing in the 1980s; future histories will probably
mark 1985 as the midpoint of the change. The dates of change are
not exact—"about 1900" really means the time span from a few
years before 1900 to a few years after 1900. An examination of
Fig. 1 (adapted from an earlier diagram by Jensen, 1952) reveals
that the seven steps are quite distinct.
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
358
B.
J. Skinner and
B.
L
Narendra
STAGE
I: THE
YEARS BEFORE
1850
When Benjamin Silliman started teaching chemistry at Yale,
geology was not even a recognized discipline in most of the major
academic institutions
of
Europe
and
North America.
As
illustra-
tive material became available, Silliman expanded
his
classes
in
geology and mineralogy.
His
first
course, initiated
in
1807, was
a
private
one
based
on
early mineralogical acquisitions.
In 1812,
with
the
famous mineral collection
of
Colonel George Gibbs
available
for his use, he
separated
the
geology
and
mineralogy
lectures from
his
chemistry course
and
started
a new
course
re-
quired of all Yale seniors (Narendra. 1979). By the time Silliman
died
in
1864, geology had risen to such prominence that 33 states
had founded geological surveys (Merrill, 1920),
and
many geo-
logical topics—such as continental glaciation—captured the pub-
lic imagination. The growth of the subject in North America
was
in
no
small measure aided
by
Silliman's elegant bearing (Fig.
2),
powers
of
persuasion,
and
gifted teaching.
But
Silliman
had ac-
quired respectable scientific skills
as
well.
His
student, Amos
Eaton, said, "Silliman
...
gives
the
true scientific dress
to all the
naked mineralogical subjects which
are
furnished
to his
hand"
(Eaton, 1820,
p.
ix). Silliman was a founding officer,
in
1819,
of
the first national organization for geologists,
the
American Geo-
logical Society, and he attracted
to
Yale many students and post-
graduates
who
became leaders
of
the fledgling science.
In 1818
Silliman founded
the American Journal of Science,
providing
a
publication outlet for scientists in
all
fields. That journal has been
published
at
Yale, without
a
break,
to the
present day.
Silliman's effect on Yale as an institution was enormous.
His
leadership, forceful ideas,
and
organizational skills provided
the
momentum
in the
development
of
the physical sciences that
led
directly, albeit some years after
his
death,
to
Yale's becoming
a
university rather than
a
college.
STAGE
2: THE
YEARS BETWEEN ABOUT
1850
AND ABOUT
1880
Two events mark
the
opening of stage
2. The
first
was the
appointment,
in 1850, of
James Dwight Dana
(Fig. 3) as
Silli-
man's successor. Dana graduated from Yale College in 1833
and
grew
to
great prominence during
the
next
20
years
as a
result
of
his scientific papers
and
contributions arising from his participa-
tion
in the
United States Exploring ("Wilkes") Expedition
(1838-1842). Dana was also famous
for
his
System of
Mineral-
ogy,
first published
in 1837, and his Manual of Mineralogy,
which first appeared
in 1848. By
1849,
as
Rossiter (1979)
has
observed,
he
was only
36
but had already accomplished far more
than most geologists did in a lifetime. Aside from being one of the
most distinguished geologists
in
North America, Dana
was
also
Silliman's son-in-law. His appointment
as the
Silliman Professor
of Natural History
in 1850
(changed
to
Silliman Professor
of
Geology
and
Mineralogy
in
1864)
was
necessary
to
keep
him in
New Haven rather than lose him
to
Harvard, and it is not hard
to
imagine the role Silliman might have played behind the scenes
in
Figure
2.
Benjamin Silliman.
A
portrait painted
bv
Samuel
F. B.
Morse
in 1825. (Courtesy, Yale Art Gallery).
order
to
bring about
the
newly endowed chair. Silliman con-
tinued
to
teach geology until Dana had completed his expedition
reports and was ready
to
take over the lecturing role
in 1856.
The second event that marked
the
opening of stage
2
was
a
result of Silliman's practice of accepting postgraduates for special-
ized instruction
(for
which
no
degree
was
given),
a
practice
he
started before
1820. His son,
Benjamin Silliman,
Jr.,
continued
the practice
by
teaching applied chemistry
to
some
of
his father's
special students, starting
in
1842. This
in
turn
led to the
opening
in
1847 of
what
was
initially called
the
Yale School
of
Applied
Chemistry, directed
by the
younger Silliman
and
John Pitkin
Norton.
The
school received
no
financial assistance
and
little
encouragement from Yale. Later named
the
Sheffield Scientific
School after
a
wealthy benefactor, the institution developed into a
successful technical college that awarded
its own
undergraduate
degree
for
professional training
in the
applied sciences.
In 1852
the new degree, the Bachelor of Philosophy (Ph.B.), was awarded
to
a
group that contained members destined
for
greatness
in
geology. Perhaps the most distinguished was George Jarvis Brush
(1831-1912; Fig. 4), Professor of Metallurgy from 1855
to
1871,
then Professor of Mineralogy and Director of the Sheffield Scien-
tific School. Another
was
William
P.
Blake (1826-1910),
a
prominent mining engineer, whose reports about Alaska are sup-
posed
to
have
had a
considerable influence
on U.S.
Secretary
of
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
Rummaging
through
the attic
359
Figure 3. James Dwight Dana. A photograph from an album of a
member of the class of 1865. Yale College.
State Seward when he considered the purchase of Alaska. Blake
later became Professor of Geology and Director of the School of
Mines at the University of Arizona. Yet another of the illustrious
1852 degree recipients was William H. Brewer (1828-1910),
who worked on the California State Survey, was briefly Professor
of Natural Science at the University of California, and then be-
came Professor of Agriculture in the Sheffield Scientific School
from 1864 to 1903.
When the School of Applied Chemistry was founded, it was
administratively enclosed within a new "Department of Philo-
sophy and the Arts," Yale's first formal graduate department.
Master's degrees had been awarded on a somewhat casual basis
since the first commencement in 1702, and degrees were also
given for professional training in the Schools of Medicine, Law,
and Divinity. The new Department, forerunner of today's Grad-
uate School of Arts and Sciences, differed in that it awarded
degrees for research. In 1861 the first three Ph.D. degrees in the
country were awarded—one went to A. W. Wright (later a Pro-
fessor of Chemistry and Molecular Physics at Yale), whose topic
of research was the same as that of President Clap a century
earlier—the velocity and direction of meteors entering the Earth's
atmosphere. In 1863
J.
Willard Gibbs (later Professor of Mathe-
matical Physics at Yale) received his Ph.D. for a thesis on the
form of teeth in spur gears. The thesis has not had any influence
on geology or geologists, but Gibbs's later work in chemical
Figure 4. George Jarvis Brush. A photograph from the archives of the
Pea body Museum.
thermodynamics has had a profound impact on most branches of
geology. The first Ph.D. in geology was awarded to William
North Rice in 1867 for a thesis discussing the Darwinian theory
of the origin of species.
Among the many students attracted to Yale by its scientific
atmosphere was Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899; Fig. 5), a
member of the Massachusetts Peabody family, whose sons tradi-
tionally went to Harvard. Arriving in 1856, he was graduated
from Yale College in 1860, did two years of graduate study in the
Sheffield Scientific School, then went to Germany where, with
the encouragement of the younger Silliman and J. D. Dana, he
pursued his interests in vertebrate paleontology. Marsh managed
to convince his wealthy uncle, George Peabody, to provide a gift
of $150,000 to found a museum of natural history at Yale. The
gift was awarded in 1866, the same year in which Marsh was
appointed Professor of Paleontology, the first such professorship
in America. The first building to house the Peabody Museum of
Natural History was completed in 1876. Marsh had started his
paleontological expeditions to the western states (Fig. 6) several
years earlier—the first was in 1870—so by the time the museum
was opened it housed not only collections of materials previously
acquired by Yale, but a wealth of new material ready for study.
Marsh's famous studies on extinct reptiles and other animals
arose from this material, as did his work on toothed birds and the
evolution of the horse, which particularly interested Darwin and
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
360
B.
J. Skinner and
B.
L
Narendra
Figure
5.
Olhniel Charles Marsh.
A
photograph taken
in
1872
by
Wil-
liam Notman. From the archives
of
the Peabody Museum.
Thomas Huxley (Schuchert
and
LeVene, 1940). Marsh's work
marked
the
beginning
of a new
line
of
geological activities
at
Yale—vertebrate paleontology.
Another among
the
students
who
were attracted
to
Yale
sciences during the period from 1850 to 1880 was Clarence King
(1842-1901), who graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School
in
1862.
King's early geological activities were mainly
in the
West,
and
from
1867 to 1877 he was
Director
of
the
U.S.
Geo-
logical Survey
of
the Fortieth Parallel, working
in
the area
now
embraced
by the
states
of
Nevada, Utah,
and
Colorado.
His
greatest scientific interest was probably
the
origin and geological
history of the North American Cordillera, but more important
for
geology
as a
profession
was his
appointment,
in 1879, as
first
Director
of
the newly founded
U.S.
Geological Survey.
He was
the first
of
many Yale geologists
to
join
and
serve that distin-
guished institution. King stressed
the
scientific
as
well
as the
practical side of geology, and the U.S. Geological Survey follows
his tenets to the present day. The importance of the U.S. Geologi-
cal Survey to the development of geology in both North America
and
the
rest
of
the world can hardly
be
overestimated.
As the second stage drew toward its close
in
1880, a change
of major importance occurred within
the
complex institution
called Yale. Some years earlier,
J. D.
Dana
and
others
had be-
come champions
of the
move toward making Yale
a
university
rather than
an
undergraduate college with appendages
in
profes-
sional schools. However, there
was
continued resistance
in the
conservative administration to any plan which would place other
units
of the
academic community
on an
equal footing with
the
College and its rigorous discipline
of
young male minds through
the traditional memorization
and
recitation
of
classical subjects.
Perhaps this regimentation
had
been necessary
in
earlier years
when some
of
the students were really children
and the
faculty
had
to act in
loco
parentis;
Benjamin Silliman,
for
example,
was
13 when
he
entered Yale
in 1792. But
times
had
changed,
and
Harvard, under President Charles William Eliot,
was
directing
the change. Eliot presented
his
ideas
for a
curriculum revision
in
his inaugural address
in
1869;
in the
preparation
of
that address
he
was
advised
by G. J.
Brush
and
Daniel Coit Gilman (B.A.,
1852*),
both officers
of
the Sheffield Scientific School (Morison,
1936).
Gilman later became first president both of the University
of California and of The Johns Hopkins University. Eliot set forth
a plan whereby Harvard would become
a
university
in
which
graduate degrees were
to be
offered
in
many departments
and in
which training
and
research
in the
sciences were
to be
given
special emphasis. When Harvard made such
a
move, could Yale
fail
to
react?
Eliot's plan temporarily
led to a
near-total abandonment
of
required courses
for
undergraduates
at
Harvard. Yale's curricu-
lum reform began
in the
1870s, when electives were allowed
in
Yale College
for the
first time.
By 1887 an
extensive elective
system existed
and
Yale had officially become
a
university (Pier-
son,
1952).
STAGE
3: THE
YEARS FROM ABOUT
1880
TO ABOUT
1900
By
1880,
Yale's activities
in the
geological sciences were
located in four administratively separate units—Yale College, the
Sheffield Scientific School,
the
Graduate School,
and the
Pea-
body Museum.
In the
College,
a
general geology course
was
offered
by J. D.
Dana using his
Manual of Geology
(first edition
in 1862) as a text.
It
is interesting
to
look
at
the exam Dana gave
students in 1884 (Fig. 7). The questions have
a
decidedly modern
ring to them and one wonders if students today could handle such
an exam
in
two hours. It
is
especially interesting to see Question
4
concerning the sources of heat that cause geological changes. This
was some years before the discovery of radioactivity, when ques-
tions such
as the
heat generated
by
gravitational compression
were being widely debated. Dana obviously taught
a
course that
was current.
In
the
Sheffield Scientific School, students followed
one of
several prescribed programs
of
study,
the
choice depending
on
their proposed profession. Basic geology
was
taught, oddly
enough,
by
Addison Emery Verrill, Professor
of
Zoology (using
Dana's textbook)
and was
required
for
most
of the
programs.
•Degrees
arc
understood to be Yale degrees
unless
otherwise indicated.
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
Rummaging
through the
attic
361
Figure 6. O. C. Marsh's 1873 student expedition to the West. Marsh can be seen sitting at the top of the
small hill in the foreground, directly above the reclining figure looking for fossils on the side of the hill.
Photograph by C. R. Savage. From the archives of the Peabody Museum.
More advanced instruction in geological topics was given by G. J.
Brush and George W. Hawes. Much of the geological teaching on
campus took place in the rooms of the Peabody Museum, where
O. C. Marsh held sway as unofficial, but very real director. Marsh
himself was what today we would call a research professor, and
did almost no teaching. He was not paid a salary for most of his
career, except for the last few years of his life when he needed
money.
As the third stage opened, the winds of change were still
blowing. In Yale College, geology became one of many electives,
and in 1887, for the first time in 75 years, it was no longer a
required subject for undergraduates. Dana, Marsh, and Brush
were still active, but responsibility was passing to a new genera-
tion.
J. D. Dana's son, Edward Salisbury Dana (1849-1935),
was appointed Curator of Mineralogy in the Peabody Museum in
1874;
in 1879 he became Assistant Professor of Natural Philo-
sophy in Yale College, where he also taught mineralogy and
crystallography, and in 1890 he was appointed Professor of Phys-
ics.
Shortly thereafter Samuel Lewis Penfield (1856-1906) was
appointed to the Sheffield Scientific School. Penfield had studied
mineralogy with Brush and became his successor. With the two
Danas, Brush, and Penfield, mineralogy at Yale was, for a few
years,
very strong and even pre-eminent in the country; it was in
this period that E. S. Dana published the famous 6th edition of
his father's System of Mineralogy (1892). Petrology, a subject
considered in those days to be an offshoot of mineralogy, had
been taught for some years in the Sheffield Scientific School by
George W. Hawes (1848-1882; Ph.B., 1872), who left in 1880 to
become Curator of the Geological Department of the U.S. Na-
tional Museum. Hawes was succeeded by Louis Valentine Pirsson
(1860-1919) who had studied chemistry at Yale (Ph.B., 1882),
worked as an analytical chemist, and then had served as a field
assistant to J. P. Iddings (Ph.B., 1877) and W. H. Weed of the
U.S. Geological Survey in their work in the Yellowstone area.
Pirsson (1918, p. 255) wrote of Hawes that he was "the earliest of
the petrographers in this country." Pirsson himself could also lay
claim to being one of the small group of people who developed
petrology as a science in its own right. He is widely remembered
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
362
B.
J. Skinner and
B.
L. Narendra
YALE COLLEGE.
1884.
DECEMBER EXAMINATION—SENIOR CLASS.
Geology.
Ton, 2 HOUBS.
1.
What are fragmental rocks and the sources of their
materials
?
2.
The chemical constitution and organic sources of limestones.
3.
The relation between the transporting power of rivers and
their velocity; the geological effects of transportation.
4.
Sources of the heat concerned in producing geological
changes.
5. The distribution of the dry land of North America at the
close of Archaean time; the mountains that then existed.
6. Evidence as to the time of elevation of the Rocky
Mountains.
7. When appeared the first fishes; the first amphibians; the
first mammals ?
8.
What are mountains of eircumdenudation and how were
they made ?
9. Distribution of coal areas in North America; the age of
the coal beds of the Rocky Mountains.
Figure 7. The examination of 1884 given to the class in introductory
geology in Yale College by J. D. Dana. The numbers at the bottom of
the page were written by the student who took
the
exam.
as the P of the CIPW system of normative calculations [Cross,
Iddings, Pirsson, and H. S. Washington (B.A., 1886)]. In many
respects, however, Pirsson reinforced the mineralogical strengths
of Yale's geological activities
so,
as they neared the ends of their
careers, J. D. Dana, a generalist, and O. C. Marsh, a paleontolo-
gist, were the two who gave breadth to the field. Fortunately,
Pirsson became increasingly interested in some of the larger geo-
logical problems and in 1893 he was relieved of
his
teaching in
mineralogy so he could take over the course of basic geology
from Verrill (Cross, 1920). In 1915, Pirsson and Charles Schu-
chert published their course notes, which became the first in a
long series of physical and historical geology texts authored by
Yale geologists. The forefather of them all was Dana's Manual of
Geology, used both at Yale and around the country for more than
a generation. Verrill and Pirsson not only used Dana's text, they
knew the man himself and taught the line of reasoning used in his
book. In a sense, the many physical and historical geology texts
from Yale faculty are one of the institution's major products.
The staff at Yale may have been small during the final years
of the 19th century, but its prestige was high. Both J.
D*'Dana
and Marsh were on the committee of the National Academy of
Sciences that recommended the founding of the
U.S.
Geological
Survey to
Congress.
Marsh was President of the Academy for 12
years (1883-1895), and Dana became the second President of
the Geological Society of America, succeeding James Hall in
1889.
J. D. Dana stopped teaching in 1890 and a new cycle of
change was underway. Unfortunately, the first steps were falter-
ing. Henry Shaler Williams (1847-1918) was appointed in 1892
and succeeded Dana in 1894 as Silliman Professor of Geology in
Yale
College.
After Williams graduated from the Sheffield Scien-
tific School in
1868,
he completed a
Ph.D.
(1871), taught briefly
in Kentucky, and was then called to the chair of geology at
Cornell, where he was responsible for the founding of the society
of Sigma Xi. He became famous for his studies of the Devonian
strata of the eastern United States and for his development of
methods of stratigraphic correlation. He would seem to have been
an ideal appointee, but unfortunately his few years at Yale were
unhappy
ones.
Reportedly Williams was not as interesting a lec-
turer as Dana, and he suffered by comparison (Cleland, 1919).
Problems caused by the assignment of faculty to different admin-
istrative units on campus also seemed to get in Williams's way,
as later correspondence from H.
E.
Gregory to Williams suggests:
". . .it is certainly due to you that the agitation was started and
that our faculty began to
see
clearly the danger of the relationship
between the schools as they did" (Gregory, 1906,
p.
148).
In 1904, Williams returned to Cornell. Only one other ap-
pointment was made before a great faculty expansion started at
the turn of the century—that of Charles Emerson Beecher
(1856-1904), appointed Assistant in Paleontology in the Pea-
body Museum in 1888. Beecher, an invertebrate paleontologist,
had studied at the University of Michigan and worked in Albany
with James Hall; after he came to Yale he completed a thesis on
fossil sponges and was awarded a
Ph.D.
degree in
1889.
This led
to his appointment as a faculty member (Professor in 1897) in the
Sheffield Scientific School, and he succeeded Marsh as unofficial
director of the Peabody Museum. Beecher seems to have been the
first senior faculty appointee to teach paleontology on a regular
basis;
unfortunately he died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1904,
the same year in which Williams resigned. Marsh had died in
1899,
so, as Yale entered its third century of instruction, it was
rich with paleontological collections but devoid of faculty
members to teach from them.
The number of students trained at Yale during the 20 years
from 1880 to 1900 was not especially large, but those Yale
graduates went on to play major roles in the development of
science in the United States. One of the most significant was
Arthur L. Day, who graduated from the Sheffield Scientific
School in 1892 and then received his Ph.D. in physics from the
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
Rummaging
through the attic
363
Figure 8. Faculty members and graduate students in front of the Peabody
Museum of Natural History, 1911 (the names of faculty members are
italicized): 1) Walter R. Barrows; 2) Charles W. Drysdale; 3) Alan M.
Bateman; 4) Richard
S.
Lull: 5) Herbert
E.
Gregory, 6) Freeman Ward;
7) Donnel F. Hewctt; 8) Louis V. Pirsson; 9) Henry G. Ferguson; 10)
Charles Schuchert, II) Ralph D. Crawford; 12) William E Ford; 13)
Joseph Barrel!; 14) Isaiah Bowman; 15) John D. Irving, 16) Morley
Wilson; 17) Charles C. Evans; 18) unidentified; 19) Kirk Brvan;
20) John J. O'Neill; 21) Bruce Rose.
Graduate School in 1894 for a thesis on "The seconds pendulum:
determination for New Haven." Day gained experience in Ger-
many and, on his return to the United States, became an assistant
to G. F. Becker, the U.S. Geological Survey's Chief Physicist. The
Geophysical Laboratory was born in the laboratories of the Sur-
vey, and from here Day was appointed as the first Director of the
Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washing-
ton.
Following Becker's intellectual lead, he started a tradition of
careful and systematic measurements that have had an enormous
impact on the geological sciences. In subsequent years, the Geo-
physical Laboratory became a working home for many Yale
scientists, among them the remarkably productive J. F. Schairer
[B.S.,
1925; Ph.D. (Chemistry),
1928].
Three other graduate students of this era were destined to
play major roles during the next stage of Yale's geological history.
Two received their Ph.D.'s in 1899—Herbert Ernest Gregory and
Charles Hyde Warren; the third, Joseph Barrell, received his
degree in 1900.
STAGE
4: THE YEARS FROM ABOUT 1900
TO
ABOUT 1920
The years from about 1900 to 1920 are among the most
distinguished in the history of geology at Yale (Fig. 8). But they
were also years of great tragedy and, at times, of turmoil.
In 1904, the geologists of the Sheffield Scientific School
acquired a building of their own—Kirtland Hall—newly built of
red New Haven Arkose. It was part of an expanding group of
laboratories specifically built for the School. With the retirement
of Brush in 1898, William Ebenezer Ford (1878-1939) was
appointed Assistant in Mineralogy to S. L. Penfield. Ford had
graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School in 1899, and.
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
364
B.
J. Skinner and
B.
L. Narendra
while an Assistant, earned his Ph.D. in 1903 for a group of
mineralogical studies. Penfield, a great analytical chemist and
determinative mineralogist, died in 1906 at the age of 50. From
1903 onward Ford assumed teaching duties and advanced stead-
ily in academic rank. He made a number of original contribu-
tions,
but is best known for his revision of
E.
S. Dana's Textbook
of Mineralogy, first published in 1877. J. D. Dana authored two
mineralogical texts that have continued, through many editions
and revisions, to the present day. They are the famous System of
Mineralogy,
and the
Manual of Mineralogy,
the latter now in its
19th edition under the authorship of C. S. Hurlbut, Jr., of Har-
vard and C. Klein, Jr., of New Mexico. But it was from the pages
of the famous fourth edition of
E.
S. Dana's Textbook, published
in 1932, that an entire generation of geologists learned mineral-
ogy and crystallography. Popularly known, even today, as
"Dana-Ford," its stature and reliability are such that the book is
still kept in print by its publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and, as
recently as 1980, sold as many as a thousand copies in a single
year. While working on the revision, Ford maintained a reference
file for all mineral species. When he died, the file passed to a
former Yale student, Michael Fleischer [B.S., 1930; Ph.D.
(Chemistry), 1933] who kept it current during his distinguished
career at the U.S. Geological Survey, and used it for four editions
of his very useful volume, Glossary of Mineral Species, the most
recent dated 1983.
After the untimely death of Beecher in 1904, an unusual but
inspired appointment was made in paleontology. Charles Schu-
chert (1858-1942) had left school at age 14 to enter his father's
furniture business in Cincinnati. He was an amateur fossil collec-
tor who became so proficient in paleontology and such a recog-
nized authority on brachiopods that, without formal training, he
was appointed first by James Hall as his assistant, then by N. H.
Winchell to the Minnesota Survey, and eventually as Assistant
Curator under C. D. Walcott at the U.S. National Museum. In
1897 Schuchert published the Synopsis of American Fossil
Brachiopoda and this, along with his other publications, led him
to be invited in 1904 to be Professor of Paleontology and Histori-
cal Geology and Curator of the paleontological collections in the
Peabody Museum. Schuchert was 46 at the time of his appoint-
ment, and local legend has it that the first lecture he gave before a
Yale class was the first time he had ever attended an undergradu-
ate college lecture. What a difference a new approach can make!
While he attempted to improve the instruction of stratigraphy,
Schuchert developed a way to plot the thickness and location of
strata on base maps. Later he plotted the distributions of marine
and nonmarine strata, which led to the development of the so-
phisticated paleogeographic maps for which he became famous.
A firm opponent of Alfred Wegener's ideas of continental drift,
Schuchert became the major geological spokesman against the
concept at the famous symposium sponsored by the American
Association of Petroleum Geologists in New York in 1926
(Schuchert, 1928). Schuchert, like Marsh, devoted his life to Yale
and the Peabody Museum. Neither married, and each used his
personal funds to enrich Yale's collections. Schuchert also acted
as another of the unofficial directors of the Peabody Museum
until his retirement, and on the occasion of his 80th birthday, in
appreciation of his long service, he was bestowed with the title
"Director Emeritus."
Marsh's successor as vertebrate paleontologist on the faculty
was Richard Swann Lull (1867-1957). He brought a new out-
look and new interests and quickly became a major figure on the
campus. When G. G. Simpson prepared his memorial to Lull he
wrote: "The names Marsh, Lull, and Yale are so strongly linked
in the history of paleontology that it is almost a shock to recall
that Marsh and Lull never met and that Lull was nearly 40 when
he began his association with Yale" in 1906 (Simpson, 1958,
p.
128). Lull studied zoology at Rutgers College, graduating in
1893,
then joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Agricultural
College (now the University of Massachusetts) in Amherst.
Nearby Amherst College had a major collection of fossil foot-
prints from the local Triassic redbeds; they drew Lull's attention
and aroused his interest in vertebrate paleontology. He returned
to studies under the direction of H. F. Osborn at the American
Museum of Natural History and in 1903 he was awarded a Ph.D.
by Columbia University. After three more years in Amherst, Lull
came to Yale. He brought with him a love for research and a keen
instinct for collecting, both strong Marsh attributes; and he also
brought a love of teaching and a flair for innovation in museum
exhibit design, neither of which had held much interest for Marsh.
Lull taught a course on evolution to Yale undergraduates that
was tremendously popular and year after year drew hundreds;
"Lull's impressive bearing, his skilled delivery, and his complete
command of the subject made each session unforgettable" (Simp-
son,
1958, p. 128). Outside of Yale, Lull became most famous for
his widely read text, Organic Evolution, first published in 1917,
for his extensive studies of horned dinosaurs, and for his classic
volume, Triassic Life of the Connecticut
Valley
(1915) which was
a pioneering study of paleoecology. Lull's career at Yale spans all
of stage 4 and most of stage 5, because even though he retired in
1936,
he remained active in his work in the Peabody Museum
until he was nearly 80.
A fourth long-lived member of the faculty was Herbert Ern-
est Gregory (1869-1952). A member of Yale's class of 1896,
Gregory completed his Ph.D. in 1899 and was immediately ap-
pointed Instructor in Physical Geography. In 1901 he was pro-
moted to Assistant Professor, and in 1904 he succeeded H. S.
Williams as the third Silliman Professor of Geology. Gregory's
interests were varied—stratigraphy, structural geology, hydrol-
ogy, and geomorphology—and in many respects he seems to
have been more closely allied to the interests of J. D. Dana, the
first Silliman Professor, than to those of H. S. Williams. With
William Morris Davis of Harvard, Gregory founded the New
England Intercollegiate Geological Conference, an annual field
conference held in a different geographical and geological locality
of New England each year. The 75th NEIGC took place in 1983.
Gregory was also responsible for the founding of the Connecticut
Geological and Natural History Survey in 1903. While returning
from a trip to Australia and New Zealand, Gregory visited
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
Rummaging
through the
attic
365
Figure 9. Joseph Barrell. A photograph published originally in the
Bul-
letin of the Geological Society of America (v. 34, 1923, PI. 2).
Hawaii and found that the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu
was in need of both a new director and a major revitalization.
Welcoming reaffirmation of the historic ties forged by Yale-
educated missionaries in the early 1800s, the Yale Corporation
and the Bishop Museum Trustees designed an arrangement
whereby the Director of the Bishop Museum should also hold the
rank of Professor at Yale. Gregory became Director of the Bishop
Museum in 1920, and for a few years divided his time between
New Haven and Honolulu, until he established his residence
permanenUy in Hawaii. He continued to hold the Silliman Pro-
fessorship until his retirement in 1936, but by then he had not
taught at Yale for at least a decade.
Another paleontologist, who began his Yale association by
collecting fossils in the West for Marsh, was George Reber Wie-
land (Ph.D., 1900). Lecturer in Paleobotany from 1906 to 1920,
with nonteaching research appointments thereafter, Wieland is
best known for his work on fossil cycadophytes, but he was also
active and productive in the study of dinosaurs and fossil turtles
(Nelson, 1977).
The careers of E. S. Dana, Ford, Lull, and Schuchert were
all long and distinguished; they spanned the time from the end of
the 19th century to the middle years of the 20th. It was these four
men,
together with Pirsson and Gregory, who carried forward the
traditions and methods of their Yale forebears of the 19th cen-
tury. It is fortunate that they were so long-lived and so active.
because the careers of two other faculty members were sadly cut
short—those of Joseph Barrell and J. D. Irving.
According to H. E. Gregory (1923), Joseph Barrell
(1869-1919; Fig. 9) was the first person appointed to the geolog-
ical faculty at Yale to carry out the program of organized grad-
uate course work that had been authorized by the University in
1902.
Prior to that time, graduate instruction had apparently been
largely an extension of undergraduate instruction. From 1902
onward, the Ph.D. degree would not only entail completion of
research and a satisfactory thesis, but, increasingly, formal courses
as well. Barrell received a B.Sc. from Lehigh University in 1892
and a degree in mining (E.M.) in 1893. He then instructed in
mining and metallurgy at Lehigh for four years and completed a
geological study of the highlands of New Jersey, for which he
received an M.Sc. in 1897. This prepared him to work with
Pirsson, Penfield, and Beecher at Yale from 1898 to 1900, when
he received a Ph.D. for a thesis on the geology of the Elkhorn
District, Montana. He then returned to Lehigh for three more
years.
He was appointed Assistant Professor of Structural Geol-
ogy at Yale in 1903 and Professor in 1908, a post he retained
until his tragic early death from spinal meningitis in 1919.
Barren's interests were eclectic, and he published major pa-
pers on such topics as isostasy, geologic time (he believed the
earth to be at least 1.5 billion years old), the influence of climate
on the nature of stratified rocks, the nature and relationship of
marine and continental environments of deposition, volume
changes during metamorphism, and the planetesimal hypothesis
of the origin of planets. He was apparently an extraordinarily
acute and demanding teacher of graduate students, but too de-
manding for most undergraduates. Among his peers and col-
leagues he seems to have been held in great affection but also in
great awe; in Barren's memorial, Gregory wrote (1923, p. 22)
that "he possessed many attractive human traits, but his intellec-
tual power was so obvious and so continuously displayed that 20
years of intimacy has left me an impression of a mind rather than
of a man." Geologists often overlook Barrell because he died
young and because his interests ranged so widely, but as G. L.
Thompson (1964, p. 11) remarked, "many modern ideas are
essentially his but since these ideas involved the basic fundamen-
tals of geology, few people realize that Barrell was the originator."
The second important appointee primarily for graduate in-
struction was John Duer Irving (1874-1918), a petrologist and
economic geologist who was appointed Professor of Geology and
Mineralogy in the Sheffield Scientific School in 1907. Irving had
studied at Columbia, where he received his Ph.D. in 1899. He
was teaching at Lehigh University when a small group of people
gathered in Washington, D.C. to form a not-for-profit member-
ship corporation in order to publish a new journal. Economic
Geology. Irving became its first editor, and when he moved to
New Haven he brought the editorial responsibility with him.
Though the journal has no formal connection with Yale, it has
been housed and edited there ever since—after Irving, by A. M.
Bateman and today by B. J. Skinner. In July 1917, having ob-
tained a leave of absence from Yale, Irving left for France to serve
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
366
B.
J. Skinner and
B.
L. Narendra
with the Eleventh Regiment of Engineers. He died a year later, a
victim of influenza, while on duty at the Flanders front (Kemp,
1919).
Irving gave an inspired course, and some of his lecture notes
remain. His successor, Bateman, continued to use many of the
same notes. Eventually, the course grew into Bateman's famous
volume, Economic Mineral Deposits, first published in 1942 by
John Wiley & Sons. Bateman once pointed out to one of us
(B.J.S.) how the structure of Irving's course could still be seen in
parts of his book.
Mention must be made of the activities of three Yale faculty
members who made important contributions to geology but who
were not professional geologists. The first two were the geog-
raphers, Isaiah Bowman (Ph.D., 1909) and Ellsworth Hunting-
ton (Ph.D., 1909). Both were Harvard trained—Bowman as an
undergraduate, Huntington as a graduate student. Both were
strongly influenced by William Morris Davis, and both went on
to make lasting contributions in geomorphology. Bowman was at
Yale from 1905 to 1915, then became Director of the American
Geographical Society (1915-1935) and eventually President of
The Johns Hopkins University (1935-1948). While at Yale he
wrote his most important scientific
book—Forest
Physiography
(1911);
the volume is really the first comprehensive account of
landforms of the United States. Huntington's career at Yale was
much longer than Bowman's. With the exception of a two-year
gap from 1915 to 1917 while he was in military service, he was a
member of the Yale faculty from 1907 to 1945, though from
1917 onward his position was that of Research Associate in
Geography, and he did little teaching. An intrepid explorer and
prolific writer, Huntington made contributions to knowledge
about the geomorphology of the Near East, China, India, and
Siberia, but he is most famous for his extensive studies of climatic
changes and their influence on civilizations.
The third person who made important contributions to
geology, though not a geologist, was Bertram Borden Boltwood
(1870-1927) who graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School
in 1892. Following studies in chemistry in Germany with Krtiss
and Ostwald, he received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale in
1897. In 1906 he joined the Yale faculty as Assistant Professor of
Physics. After a year's leave (1909-10) when he worked in Man-
chester with Ernest Rutherford, he became Professor of Radio-
chemistry. Boltwood was both a superb chemical analyst and an
accomplished physicist. Between 1900 and 1906, when he and
the geologist J. H. Pratt (Ph.B., 1893; Ph.D., 1896) were working
as consulting mining engineers and chemists, Boltwood became
interested in radioactive minerals. When Rutherford and Soddy
theorized in 1903 that a radioactive element disintegrates spon-
taneously, emitting energy and forming a new element that may
in turn disintegrate, Boltwood found his life's work—identifying
the daughter products. He published extensively and made many
contributions—some with Rutherford, with whom he worked
closely—but most important for geology was his demonstration
(Boltwood, 1905) that lead is the end product of uranium decay.
From this came his suggestion (Boltwood, 1907) that simple
lead/uranium ratios in minerals should give an estimate of the
time of crystallization of the mineral. Radiometric dating was
born; one of the specimens he analyzed was a uraninite crystal
from a pegmatite near Glastonbury, Connecticut, for which he
estimated an age of 410 million years. Boltwood was not aware
that two isotopes of uranium were present and that two different
daughter products were included; fortuitously, the errors involved
compensated each other and the date he calculated is surprisingly
close to the age we would assign today (265 m.y.).
STAGE 5: THE YEARS FROM ABOUT 1920 TO
ABOUT 1945
At the beginning of stage 5, a university-wide administrative
reorganization occurred and the present-day departments of study
were formed. Unification of all the geology faculty of the three
schools—Yale College, the Sheffield Scientific School, and the
Graduate School—created a geology department that was a dis-
tinct budgetary unit with the power to govern its own faculty
appointments, responsible to a central university administration.
Charles Schuchert was named the first Chairman of the new
Department of Geology in 1920.
The Peabody Museum building was demolished in 1917 to
provide space for a new Yale dormitory complex, the Harkness
Quadrangle. Almost immediately thereafter the United States en-
tered World War I, and construction of the promised new mu-
seum building was not begun until 1923. In his annual report as
Geology Chairman in 1921, Schuchert spoke for all the an-
guished curators whose collections were inaccessible: "The pa-
leontologists, with the grand collections in their charge scattered
in nine different and strange places, find that their effectiveness in
teaching and in extension work is almost nil. The geologists of
Yale College are also in temporary quarters, and since 1917 the
various members of the Department have been housed in four
different buildings. The natural history museums of our country
are growing with leaps and bounds, but dear old Peabody Mu-
seum is boxed up and the Lord (and the University Corporation)
alone know when we shall be allowed to emerge. A more de-
pressing state of affairs no department at Yale was ever subjected
to,
and all this is being observed by the spirit eyes of Benjamin
Silliman, James D. Dana, Othniel C. Marsh, and George J.
Brush!" (Schuchert, 1921, p. 180). At long last, under Lull as first
official Director, the Museum and its new displays were finished.
Eight scientific societies—one of them the Geological Society of
America—held their annual meetings in New Haven in De-
cember 1925, and 800 of their members attended the dedication
of the new building.
In this stage, long-lived Lull, Ford, Schuchert, and E. S.
Dana were still present and active; Schuchert and Dana also
assumed important roles in university affairs. But increasingly
prominent was a faculty who trained some of today's most distin-
guished geologists. The new faculty members were A. M. Bate-
man,
C. R. Longwell, C. O. Dunbar, A.
Knopf,
C. H. Warren,
and R. F. Flint. With the exceptions of Flint and
Knopf,
each of
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
Rummaging
through
the attic
367
these appointees had received all or
a
major portion of his profes-
sional education
at
Yale,
lt
would seem that Yale found
it
diffi-
cult
to
look beyond
its own
graduates when
new
appointments
were
to be
made.
The first appointment
of
the
new era
actually occurred
be-
fore
1920.
Alan Mara Bateman (1889-1971)
was a
Canadian
who graduated from Queen's University
and had
already gained
a good deal
of
field experience when he arrived at Yale in 1910
to
study with Irving. During
the
summers
of 1911 and 1912 he
worked for the Geological Survey of Canada
on
the Fraser River,
British Columbia,
and
from this work came
his
thesis
on the
"Geology
and ore
deposits
of the
Bridge River district, British
Columbia,"
for
which
he
received a Ph.D.
in
1913. Bateman
was
then invited to join
the
famous Secondary Enrichment Investiga-
tion inspired by L.
C.
Graton, then at the U.S. Geological Survey,
which included members
of
academia, industry,
and the
Geo-
physical Laboratory.
The
work continued
for a
number
of
years
and
led to
many important papers—especially concerning
the
deposits
at
Kennecott, Alaska (White, 1974).
In 1915
Bateman
was appointed Instructor in Geology; when Irving left for military
training
in
1916, Bateman was appointed Assistant Professor.
He
continued to work at Yale until his death, rising through the ranks
and finally becoming
the
Silliman Professor
of
Geology
in 1941.
Following Bateman's appointment
and the
deaths
of
Pirs-
son,
Irving,
and
Barrell, there were three appointments
in 1920:
Longwell, Dunbar,
and
Knopf.
Chester
Ray
Longwell
(1887-1975) entered Yale
as a
graduate student
in 1915 but
service
in the U.S.
Army interrupted
his
studies,
and he did not
complete
his
thesis
on the
geology
of the
Muddy Mountains
of
Nevada until 1920.
He
was appointed
to the
Yale faculty
in the
same year
and
advanced steadily, becoming Professor
in 1929.
Longwell's main interest continued
to be
western geology, espe-
cially
the
western overthrust belt which
his
thesis
did
much
to
define. He was an excellent teacher and such major figures
in the
geological world
as W. W.
Rubey
and
James Gilluly were
among the graduate students he influenced.
He
was also an excel-
lent teacher
of
undergraduates
and
taught elementary physical
geology
at
Yale. Following Pirsson's death
he
inherited
the
physical geology portion
of
the Pirsson
and
Schuchert
Textbook
(1929),
which eventually became
the
famous Longwetl,
Knopf,
and Flint version
of Physical Geology
(1948).
The second appointee
of 1920 was
Carl Owen Dunbar
(1891-1979; Fig. 10), successor to Beecher and Schuchert. Dun-
bar studied geology
at
Kansas where
he
came under
the
strong
influence
of W. H.
Twenhofel (B.A.,
1908;
Ph.D., 1912),
who
was
a
great admirer
of
Schuchert
and
encouraged Dunbar
to do
graduate work under
him.
Dunbar received
his Ph.D. in 1917,
after which
he did a
year
of
postgraduate study with Schuchert
and then spent
two
years
as an
instructor
at the
University
of
Minnesota.
In
1920
he
returned as Assistant Professor
of
Histori-
cal Geology
and
Assistant Curator
of
Invertebrate Paleontology,
becoming Professor
of
Paleontology
and
Stratigraphy
in 1930.
Dunbar's broad professional interests centered
on the
fusuline
foraminifera
and
their
use in
stratigraphic correlation.
As a
Figure
10.
Carl
O.
Dunbar
and
John Rodgers.
A
photograph taken
in
1956.
(Courtesy
of
K.
M.
Waage).
teacher
he
was demanding and meticulous and
had a
great influ-
ence
on the
students
he
came
in
contact with—especially
the
graduate students.
He
also was an important textbook writer.
He
collaborated first with Schuchert
in
revision
of
the historical side
of
the Textbook of Geology
(Schuchert
and
Dunbar, 1933),
which he later rewrote as the highly influential
Historical Geology
(1949).
He
then revised this book again with
K. M.
Waage
(1969).
Perhaps even more influential
at the
graduate level
was
the book Dunbar co-authored with John Rodgers
in
1957,
Prin-
ciples of
Stratigraphy,
a
classic text that grew
out of a
jointly
taught course.
As
Director
of
the Peabody Museum
he
initiated
the construction
of the
museum's first dioramas. Probably
the
best known exhibit produced during
his
directorship
is the 110
foot-long Pulitzer Prize-winning mural,
"The Age of
Reptiles,"
painted
by
Rudolph Zallinger.
The third appointee
of 1920 was
Adolph Knopf
(1882-1966).
Knopf,
a
petrologist, was successor
to
Pirsson.
All
of
his
training
was at the
University
of
California
at
Berkeley
where
he was
strongly influenced
by the
teaching
of
Andrew
Lawson. Knopf received
a
B.S.
in
Mining Geology
in 1904 and
throughout
his
life made important contributions
to
economic
geology. First
and
foremost, however,
he was a
petrologist
and
field geologist. In 1905 he started working with
the
U.S. Geologi-
cal Survey
and
spent
six
field seasons
in
Alaska, during which
time (1909)
he
completed
his Ph.D.
thesis. Between
1910 and
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
368
B.
J.
Skinner and
B.
L. Narendra
1920 Knopf worked with Waldemar Lindgren, F. L. Ransome,
L.
C. Graton, W. H. Emmons, J. B. Umpleby, and others as they
studied the ore districts of the western United States; he published
a number of papers and contributed to many others. One has to
wonder how the arrival of such an accomplished economic geol-
ogist on the scene at Yale must have seemed to the already
appointed A. M. Bateman. By 1920, salaries at the U.S.G.S. were
so low compared to those at universities that Graton left for
Harvard, Lindgren for M.I.T., Emmons for Minnesota, and
Knopf for Yale (Coleman, 1968).
Knopf,
like Barrell, was a
scientist with eclectic interests and a demanding mind. He chal-
lenged students mightily and is remembered by them as an inspir-
ing teacher. From Boltwood he developed an interest in
radiometric methods of measuring geologic time and while he did
not, unfortunately, seize the opportunity to start making such
measurements at Yale, he played a major role in bringing geo-
logic insight to the measurements made so enthusiastically by
those in the laboratory.
Shortly before Knopf joined the faculty, his wife Agnes died
during the influenza epidemic of 1918, leaving him with three
children. In 1920, he married Eleanora Bliss (1883-1974), a
distinguished Bryn Mawr geologist then working at the U.S. Geo-
logical Survey. Unfortunately, neither the geology faculty nor the
Yale University administration was ever bold enough or sensitive
enough to appoint Mrs. Knopf to the faculty or to allow her to
teach, though she worked in her husband's office. A long genera-
tion of students remembers with affection and gratitude her intel-
lectual stimulation and advice (Rodgers, 1977). She became the
leading structural petrologist in the country and was an active,
productive scientist until her death in 1974.
Two other appointees of this stage were C. H. Warren and
R. F. Hint. Charles Hyde Warren (1876-1950) graduated from
the Sheffield Scientific School in 1896, and received a Ph.D. in
mineralogy under the direction of Penfield in 1899. He also spent
a summer in the field in Yellowstone with Iddings, as Pirsson had
done. After a short term as Instructor in Mineralogy at Yale he
moved to M.I.T. and advanced to Professor of Mineralogy in
1912.
At the retirement in 1922 of Russell M. Chittenden,
Brush's successor as Director of the Sheffield Scientific School,
Warren was recalled to replace him. His title was changed from
Director to Dean and he was simultaneously appointed Sterling
Professor of Geology. Warren was an able and fair administra-
tor—he not only served as Dean but also as Chairman of the
Department of Geology from 1923 to 1938. Most of Warren's
activities were taken up in administration so he did little teaching
and little research. His administrative leadership was vitally im-
portant, however, and to his credit can be recorded the final
solution of the difficulties caused by the continued maintenance
of two different undergraduate schools within the university, and
the inevitable duplication of course offerings, among other things.
Under his guidance, the Sheffield Scientific School ceased to exist
except as a legal title to cover administration of the School's
endowment funds.
The last member of the famous group of faculty of stage 5
to be appointed was Richard Foster Flint (1902-1976). Like
Knopf,
Flint brought new blood and ideas to Yale, for he had
received all of his education at the University of Chicago (B.S.,
1922;
Ph.D., 1925). He joined the Yale faculty the year he re-
ceived his Ph.D. and became both a masterful teacher and the
most distinguished glacial geologist of his age—indeed, he was
widely and affectionately known as the "Pope of the Pleistocene."
Flint joined with Longwell and Knopf as an author of Physical
Geology, then published subsequent editions with different co-
authors until the time of his death.
To those who were privileged to get to know him, Flint was
a warm and responsive friend, but unfortunately he found it
difficult to lower a barrier of reserve and to most people he came
across as autocratic and forbidding. This did little to endear him
to the geological community of North America, so in spite of his
scientific status he received few honors in his homeland, but a
great many honors from abroad. He was also the losing protago-
nist in a long-continued debate over the origin of the channeled
scablands. Flint ridiculed J Harlen Bretz's suggestion that the
unique topography resulted from a catastrophic flood and he was
overly dogmatic in his rejection of the idea.
A faculty member appointed to the Department of Zoology
during stage 5, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, must also be mentioned.
Hutchinson was educated at Cambridge University and worked
in South Africa prior to his appointment to the faculty in 1928.
From the moment he arrived at Yale he started to influence
geology and geologists through his many contributions in biogeo-
chemistry and limnology. Indeed, Hutchinson can be considered
the first geochemist appointed at Yale. In 1946, as stage 6
opened, a second geochemist was appointed to the faculty, this
time in the Department of Astronomy. Rupert Wildt, who had
studied with V. M. Goldschmidt, is more correctly called a cos-
mochemist, and like Hutchinson he was so eminent in his field
that when the new journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta
was founded in 1951 (American editor, F. E. Ingerson, Ph.D.,
1934),
the names of Wildt and Hutchinson appeared among the
distinguished members of the Editorial Advisory Board.
Institutions are sometimes blessed by a flux of students who
for a time catalyze each other's interests and stimulate each other
to heights of great achievement. A necessary ingredient for suc-
cess is that the students have the right temperaments, but even
more essential is that they have an outstanding faculty with
whom to interact (Rubey, 1974; Gilluly, 1977). All these condi-
tions were met at Yale during the period 1920 to 1945 (Figs. 11
and 12). It was a period when the Graduate School at Yale
flowered under the leadership of Dean Wilbur L. Cross and Yale
President James Rowland Angell, a period during which, accord-
ing to the respected historian of Yale, George Pierson (1955),
there was a revival of scholarship among Yale undergraduates.
The list of Yale students of this time who went on to gain
distinction in geology reads like an honor roll for the profession.
Among the geology Ph.D.'s were Henry G. Ferguson (1924),
Donnel F. Hewett (1924), Thomas B. Nolan (1924), James Gil-
luly (1926), George Gaylord Simpson (1926), J. B. Stone (1926),
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
Rummaging through the attic
369
Figure 11. Faculty members and graduate students in front of Kirtland
Hall, ca. 1922 (the names of faculty members
arc
italicized): l)unidcnti-
fied; 2) William W. Rubey; 3) Joseph E. Hare (?); 4) James Gilluly;
5) Thomas
B.
Nolan;
6) unidentified; 7) unidentified; 8) Ludlow Weeks;
9) Carle H. Dane; 10) Ellsworth Huntington; 11) Alan M Bateman;
12) Chester R. Longwell; 13) Adolph
Knopf,
14) Waldo S. Glock;
15) Carl O. Dunbar, 16) unidentified; 17) J. Doris Dart; 18) Charles
Schuchen, 19) Richard
S.
Lull
Wilmot H. Bradley (1927), Carl Tolman (1927), G. Arthur
Cooper (1929), Philip B. King (1929), Aaron C. Waters (1930),
A. K. Miller (1930), Carle H. Dane (1932), Norman D. Newell
(1933),
M. N. Bramlette (1936), Paul D. Krynine (1936), Yang
Tsun-Yi (1939), Preston E. Cloud (1940), A. L. Washburn
(1942),
and John Rodgers (1944). Joining this remarkable group
were W. W. Rubey, who did not complete his Ph.D. require-
ments, but who was later awarded an honorary degree (D.Sc,
1960),
Harry H. Hess (B.S., 1927) who was also awarded an
honorary degree (D.Sc, 1969), and Ralph E. Grim (B.A., 1924).
Including those who taught and those who studied, the extraordi-
nary Yale group from this period has been awarded 13 Penrose
medals to date; they are (in order of receipt) Schuchert, Simpson,
Gilluly,
Knopf,
Rubey, Hewett, King, Hess, Bradley, Cloud,
Rodgers, Waters, and Cooper. Two others, A. L. Day and M. E.
Wilson, have also been awarded the medal, which was first pre-
sented in 1927. No fewer than nine of the same group have served
as President of the Geological Society of America; they are, in
order of appointment, Schuchert,
Knopf,
Gilluly, Longwell,
Rubey, Nolan (when he was also Director of the U.S. Geological
Survey), Hess, Bradley, and Rodgers. In addition, J. D. Dana,
Arnold Hague, A. L. Day, George S. Hume, Peter T. Flawn. and
Paul A. Bailly, recipients of Yale degrees in other periods, have
also served as president.
STAGE 6: THE YEARS FROM ABOUT 1945
TO ABOUT 1965
The faculty appointed around 1920 continued essentially
unchanged through the 1930s and to the end of World War II in
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
370
B.
J. Skinner and
B.
L. Narendra
Figure 12. Faculty members and graduate students in front of Kinland
Hall, 1938 (the names of faculty members are italicized): 1) Alan M.
Bateman; 2) RichardF. Flint, 3) Carl
O.
Dunbar, 4) Charles Schuchert,
5) J. David Love; 6) G. Edward Lewis; 7) Adolph
Knopf,
8) Chester R.
Longwell; 9) Eleanora
B.
Knopf,
10) J. Danvers Bateman; 11) Wendell
G. Sanford; 12) William ÂŁ. Ford; 13) Joseph P. Jennings; 14) Esa
Hyyppa; 15) Chauncey D. Holmes; 16) Hugh H. Beach; 17) Preston E.
Cloud; 18) John C. McCarthy; 19) William A. Rice; 20) Allen J.
Turner; 21) John S. Shelton; 22) Earl M. Irving; 23) S. Warren Hobbs;
24) Shu Chen; 25) A. Lincoln Washburn; 26) Yang Tsun-Yi; 27) John
Rodgers; 28) Gladys M. Galston; 29) Mrs. Lewis; 30) Jean M. Berdan;
31) Mrs. Washburn; 32) Mrs. Hyyppa; 33) Mrs. Shelton.
1945.
E. S. Dana died in
1935,
breaking the last direct link that
went back through his father to his grandfather, Benjamin Silli-
man.
Schuchert died in
1942,
at the ripe old age of
84;
Ford died
in
1939,
before retirement; and Huntington died in
1947.
Lull
retired from teaching duties in
1936,
but continued to be active in
research. Gregory retired from the Silliman professorship of geol-
ogy in
1936
and was succeeded in the chair by
Knopf,
who was,
in turn, succeeded by Bateman and then in
1962
by a student of
this era, John Rodgers (Fig.
10).
There have only been six Silli-
man Professors from
1850
to the present day. Four additional
endowed professorships in geology have been established in this
century. C. H. Warren retired in
1945
so by the end of the war
there was a small senior faculty—Longwell, Dunbar, Flint,
Bateman, and
Knopf.
New appointments were needed, not only
to maintain faculty strength, but also to handle the anticipated
increases in teaching loads as military personnel returned to catch
up on delayed educations (Fig.
13).
Following Ford's death, George Switzer joined the faculty
as mineralogist, but he was quickly called to the Smithsonian
Institution and his place was taken in
1945
by Horace Winchell,
son of A. N. Winchell, grandson of N. H. Winchell. He had
studied as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin and
completed a Ph.D. at Harvard. Just prior to Knopfs retirement in
1951,
Matt S. Walton was appointed as a petrologist, and started
a program of study on the petrology of the igneous and metamor-
phic rocks of the Adirondacks. In vertebrate paleontology. Lull
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
Rummaging
through
the attic
371
^»*yl»
s
J^_h^
23
24
25
27
Figure
13.
Faculty members and graduate students
in
front
of
K inland
Hall,
1950 (the
names
of
faculty members
are
italicized):
1)
Adolph
Knopf, 2)
Carl O. Dunbar,
3)
Karl M. Waage;
4)
Joseph
T.
Gregory,
5) Heikki
G.
Ignatius;
6)
William
H.
Hays;
7)
Dwight
R.
Crandell;
8) Chester R. Longwell;
9)
Eleanora B.
Knopf, 10)
Horace Winchell;
11) John Rodgers;
12)
John Imbrie;
13)
Walter
W.
Wheeler;
14) Charles
P.
Thornton;
15)
Spencer
S.
Shannon,
Jr.; 16)
Colin
W.
Stearn; 17) George White;
18) E. R.
Ward Neale; 19) John
E.
Sanders;
20)
E.
Carl Halstead;
21) J.
Thomas Dutro, Jr.;
22)
Sanborn Partridge;
23) Richard
F.
Flint,
24)
Charles
H.
Smith;
25)
John
A.
Elson;
26)
James
W.
Clarke;
27)
Grant
M.
Wright;
28)
Henry
W.
Coulter;
29)
Richard
V.
Dietrich.
was succeeded
by G.
Edward Lewis (Ph.D., 1937),
who
left
for
the
U.S.
Geological Survey
in 1945,
then
in 1946 by
Joseph
T.
Gregory.
Karl
M.
Waage,
a
recent Princeton
Ph.D.
(1946),
was ap-
pointed
in
invertebrate paleontology
and
stratigraphy. John
Rodgers (Ph.D.,
1944) was
appointed
in
sedimentary geology
in
1946,
but was
then asked
to
switch
to
structural geology
in
anticipation
of
Longwell's retirement.
In 1951,
Mead LeRoy
Jensen received
his Ph.D.
from M.I.T.
and was
appointed
in
economic geology.
At
Yale
he
quickly organized
a
laboratory
for
measuring sulfur isotope ratios, starting what later became
a
strong trend toward geochemistry. John
E.
Sanders,
who
received
his
Ph.D. in 1953 for a
thesis
on
"Geology
of the
Pressmen's
Home Area, Hawkins County, Tennessee,"
was
appointed
As-
sistant Professor
in 1956.
Also
in 1956
Karl
K.
Turekian
was
appointed Assistant Professor
in the
field of geochemistry. Before
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
372
B.
J. Skinner and
B.
L. Narendra
the beginning of the next stage in 1965, J. T. Gregory, Walton,
Jensen, and Sanders had all departed, and several new appoint-
ments had been made. Vertebrate paleontology became very
strong with three new men: Elwyn L. Simons, John H. Ostrom,
and Alfred W. Crompton. A. Lee McAlester was appointed in
invertebrate paleontology, Sydney P. Clark, Jr., in geophysics,
and Philip M. Orville, in petrology. In effect, the careers of these
people belong with the next stage, but all were appointed prior to
1965.
The biggest change during the stage from 1945 to 1965,
however, was the erection of a new building. Since 1904, most of
the geologists (except for those who had offices in the Peabody
Museum) had been housed in Kirtland Hall. The building was
two long blocks away from the new Peabody Museum as well as
from the buildings that housed the Departments of Chemistry,
Physics, and Zoology. Having outgrown the long-occupied quar-
ters,
the Department of Geology needed to move. Through a
generous gift from C. Mahlon Kline (Ph.B., 1901), an expanded
science complex was created on the north end of the Yale cam-
pus,
where the Peabody Museum and the existing chemistry,
physics, astronomy, and biology facilities already were situated.
Three new Kline buildings were erected, one each for biology,
chemistry, and geology. In 1963, the Department of Geology
moved into its new quarters adjacent to the Peabody Museum.
Soon after the move a diversification of activities and an expan-
sion of the faculty took place.
7 r
T-^ T . i , i i .
1865 1885 1905 1925 1945 1965
Figure 14. Numbers of
Ph.D.
degrees awarded in geology at Yale each
year averaged over decade intervals. Each decade is plotted at the mid-
point of the interval. Prior to the turn of the century, fewer than 10
students received degrees in each
decade;
the succeeding 45 years, to the
end of World War
II,
saw an average of 25 students per decade; during
the third period, from 1950 to the present, about 60 students graduated
each decade, giving averages per year of less than 1, 2.5, and 6,
respectively.
subsequently left) and then led by George Veronis (1966) and
Barry Saltzman (1968), and (2) solid earth geophysics, led by
S. P. Clark, Jr. (1962). There have been a number of subsequent
appointments in both areas.
GRADUATE DEGREES IN GEOLOGY FROM YALE
STAGE 7: FROM ABOUT 1965 TO THE PRESENT
Bateman retired in 1957 but remained active as Editor of
Economic Geology, the position he had held since 1919, until a
very few years before his death in 1971. Flint also retired in 1970,
and died in 1976; his colleague and close friend, A. Lincoln
Washburn (Ph.D., 1942), who had been appointed Professor in
1960,
relinquished all teaching duties in 1966 to become a Senior
Research Associate. In 1970 Washburn left for the University of
Washington. With the departure of Flint and Washburn, the 75
years of studies in the areas of classical geomorphology and glaci-
ology came to an end, although the closely related area of Pleisto-
cene studies continues today through research in climatology,
hydrology, and marine geochemistry.
Geochemistry, which had grown strongly under the gui-
dance of Turekian, started to occupy more attention. Richard L.
Armstrong (Ph.D., 1964) began a radiometric dating laboratory
soon after his appointment as Assistant Professor in 1964. Minze
L.
Stuiver came from Holland in 1959 to operate the Yale Radio-
carbon Laboratory, a project initiated and strongly supported by
Flint, but left for the University of Washington in 1969.
The most important change that has occurred during the
current stage, however, is an expansion of the Department to
become the Department of Geology and Geophysics (1968), and
the appointment of a geophysics faculty. Appointments have
been made in two areas: (1) the physics of oceans and atmos-
pheres, begun with the appointment of Theodore D. Foster (who
We have mentioned some of the students who were at Yale
and the roles they played later in life as faculty members in the
development of the science. A complete accounting of all Yale
students who have made important contributions to geology is
beyond the scope of this paper. A total of 351 people had re-
ceived PhD.'s in geology by December 1984. The first was
awarded in 1867 to William North Rice, but completion of
degrees was sporadic for many years, and until the beginning of
the 20th century Yale averaged fewer than one degree per year.
Starting about 1900, a noticeable increase in the production rate
occurred (Fig. 14); the award rate rose to about 2.5 degrees per
year and remained at that level until the end of World War II.
The rise actually started in 1903, and coincided with the first
appointments made specifically for graduate instruction. Starting
about 1950, another distinct jump occurred, to an average award
rate of 6 degrees per year— a rate maintained to the present day.
This second jump was apparently generated by the increased size
of the graduate student body as returned servicemen swelled its
ranks after World War II, and by the maintenance of the in-
creased student-body size by an inflow of government funds sup-
porting the research carried out by the students.
DEGREES HELD BY YALE FACULTY
During the first century of geological instruction the instruc-
tors were, by and large, educated at Yale. This is not surprising,
considering the small number of institutions where geologists
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
Rummaging
through the
attic
373
Stages
inn.,' 1 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
Year
Figure 15. The percentage of Yale geology faculty members educated at
Yale
was
very high during
the
early stages but
has
declined steadily
as
has the percentage of the faculty without doctoral degrees.
were trained;
as the
number of institutions increased,
the
percent-
age
of
faculty appointees
who
held Yale bachelor's degrees
de-
creased.
The
fraction of the faculty educated
at
Yale has declined
steadily throughout
the
twentieth century
and
appears
to
have
bottomed
out at
about
10
percent (Fig.
15;
Table
1).
During
the
first stage
of
geology
at
Yale,
up to the
year
1850,
the
sole faculty member, Benjamin Silliman,
did not
hold
a
doctoral degree. During
the
second stage,
1850 to 1880, the
American
Ph.D.
degree
was
introduced
and the
first holders
of
doctoral degrees were appointed
to the
faculty.
As
shown
in
Figure 15,
the
percentage of faculty members
not
holding earned
doctoral degrees dropped steadily
and
reached zero during stage
6. There
was a
marked preference
for
Yale doctoral degrees
through stage
4,
when
65
percent
of the
total faculty
had
Yale
doctorates while
an
additional
18
percent lacked doctorates.
From
the
fourth stage onward,
the
number
of
faculty members
holding Yale doctorates
has
declined steadily. With
the
retire-
ment of John Rodgers
in
June
1985,
Yale geology will
be in an
unusual situation,
at
least temporarily—for
the
first time
in
more
than
a
century,
it
will have only
one
faculty member with
a
Yale
doctorate.
WOMEN GEOLOGISTS
AT
YALE
Yale's record
of
awards
of PhD.
degrees
in
geology
to
women
is
unimpressive. Women were admitted
for
graduate
studies
at
Yale as early
as
1892, but
it
was
not
until
1903
that
the
first woman geologist, Mignon Talbot, enrolled
to
work
in pa-
leontology with Beecher. Talbot received
a
Ph.D.
in
1904—near
record time—and spent
her
professional career teaching geology
at Mt. Holyoke College. The second woman
to
receive
a
Ph.D.,
in
1908,
was
Ruth Sawyer Harvey (Jones),
who
completed
a
thesis
on
the
"Drainage and glaciation
in the
central Housatonic basin"
of Connecticut, under
the
direction
of H. E.
Gregory. This
was
the first Yale thesis that specifically focused
on the
question
of
glaciation.
For a few
years Miss Harvey taught physical geog-
raphy
at the
Philadelphia High School
for
Girls,
but,
apart from
preparing
her
thesis
for
publication (Harvey, 1920),
she
seems
to
have done
no
further professional work after
her
marriage
in
1917.
The third woman
to
receive
a Ph.D. was
Gladys Mary
Wrigley,
in 1917, who
wrote
on the
"Roads
and
towns
of the
Central Andes" under
the
guidance
of
Bowman. Wrigley's work
was done
at a
time when geography
was
administratively consid-
ered
one of the
"geological sciences"
and the
geological
profession
can
only claim
her on the
basis
of an
institutional
technicality. Wrigley later worked with Bowman
in New
York
where
she
became editor
of
the Geographical Review.
Not
a
single
Ph.D.
degree
in
geology from Yale
was
awarded
to a
woman
for the
next
32
years. These were
the
years
when Eleanora Bliss Knopf carried
out
her studies
at a
desk
in her
husband's room,
and
when photographs taken
of
department
members (Figs.
11 and 12)
included Mrs. Knopf and occasionally
wives of graduate students
or
visitors,
but
only
a
very
few
female
graduate students, and none
who
completed the requirements
for
a doctoral degree.
We can
offer
no
explanation
for
this lamenta-
ble hiatus. Following World
War II, the
situation started
to
change, albeit rather slowly. Jean Milton Berdan, daughter
of a
famous Yale professor, received
her Ph.D. for a
thesis
on the
"Brachiopoda and Ostracoda of the Manlius Group of New York
State"
in 1949, and
Elizabeth Jean Lowry (Long) completed
a
thesis
on the
"Geology
of
part
of
the Roan Mountain Quadran-
gle,
Tennessee"
in 1951.
Then another hiatus occurred, until
1968,
when Rosemary Jacobson Vidale was awarded
a
Ph.D.
for
her thesis
on
"Calc-silicate bands
and
metasomatism
in a
chemi-
cal gradient." Following Rosemary Vidale,
12
more women have
received Ph.D.'s
in
geology
(for a
total
of 15
since
1949) and the
number of women students enrolled has risen
to a
point where
an
award rate
of 1.5 to 2 per
year
was
reached
by 1983. It is
interesting—and sad—to note, however, that despite
182
years
of
geology
at
Yale,
no
woman
has
yet been appointed
to the
regular
teaching faculty in the discipline. This situation will surely change
during
the
next step
of
Yale's geology history, because women
students
now
play
an
increasingly important role
in the
Department.
Women were first admitted
as
undergraduates
at
Yale
in
1969.
The
first major
to
graduate from
the
Department
of
Geol-
ogy and Geophysics
was
Margaret B. Coon,
in
1974.
The
follow-
ing year there were three women graduates
and the
number
has
risen
to a
point where eight women graduated
in 1983 and six in
1984.
From 1974
to
1984,
the
Department graduated
168
majors
in
all, of
whom
58
were women.
CLOSING REMARKS
The history
of
teaching
and
research
in the
geological
and
geophysical sciences
at
Yale
is one
that records
a
slow, steady
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
B.
J.
Skinner
and
B.
L.
Narendra
TABLE
1.
SOURCES
OF
UNDERGRADUATE
AND
DOCTORAL DEGREES
OF THE
YALE GEOLOGY FACULTY
(Members
are
listed
by
order
of
their appointments
to the
faculty.)
Stage Name
Bachelor's Doctoral Date
of
degree degree Appointment
1 B.
S i11iman
Yale
---
1802
2
J.D.
Dana Yale
...
1850
G.
J.
Brush Yale
1855
O.C.
Marsh Yale
1866
A. E.
Verrill Harvard ?1873
G.W.
Hawes Yale He idelberg
1873
E. S.
Dana Yale Yale
1874
3 S. L.
Penf ield Yale
—
1881
L. V.
Pirsson Yale
—
1882
C. E.
Beecher Michigan Yale
1891
H. S.
Williams Yale Yale
1892
H. E.
Gregory Yale Yale
1898
4
J.
Barrell Lehigh Yale
1903
W. E.
Ford Yale Yale
1903
C.
Schucher
t 1904
I.
Bowman Harvard Yale
1905
R. S.
Lull Rutgers Columbia
1906
G. R.
Wieland
Penn.
State Yale
1906
F.
Ward Yale Yale
1907
E.
Hunt ington Beloit Yale
1907
J.
D.
Irving Columbia Columbia
1907
A. M.
Bateman Queen's (Ont.) Yale
1915
J.
P.
Buwalda California (Berkeley) California (Berkeley)
1917
5
A.
Knopf California (Berkeley) California (Berkeley)
1920
E. B.
Knopf Bryn Mawr Bryn Mawr
C. R.
Longwell Mi ssour
i
Yale
1920
C. 0.
Dunbar Kansas Yale
1920
c. H.
warren Yale Yale
1922
w. M.
Agar Princeton Princeton
1923
K. C.
Heald Colorado College
Pi
ttsburgh
1924
R. F.
Flint Chicago Ch icago
1925
H. de
Terra Munich
1930
G. E.
Lewis Yale Yale
1938
G. Swi
tzer California Harvard
1940
6 H.
Winchell Wisconsin Harvard
1945
J.
Rodgers Cornell Yale
1946
K. M.
Waage Princeton Princeton
1946
J.
T.
Gregory Cali forn
i
a Cali forn
i
a
1946
M. • S.
Walton Ch icago Columbia
1948
J.
E.
Sanders Wesleyan (Ohio) Yale
1951
M. L.
Jensen Utah
M.I.T.
1951
K. K.
Turek
i an
Wheaton College
(Illinois)
Columbia
1956
A.
.L.
McAlester Southern Methodist Yale
1958
A.
,L.
Washburn Dartmouth Yale
1960
E.
.L.
Simons Rice
Princeton,
Oxford
1960
J.
. H.
Ostrom Union College Columbia
1961
P.
,M.
Orville
Cal.
Tech.
Yale
1962
R.
,L.
Armstrong Yale Yale
1962
S.
,
P.
Clark.
Jr.
Harvard Harvard
1962
A. ,W.
Crompton Stellenbosch
Stellenbosch,
Cambr idge
1964
7 D,
• C.
Rhoads Cornell (Iowa)
Ch icago
1965
R, .A.
Berner Michigan Harvard
1965
T.
.D.
Foster Brown Cali fornia
1965
N,
.L.
Carter Pomona California (L.A.)
1966
B,
.J.
Skinner Adelaide Harvard
1966
J,
,c. G.
Walker Yale Columbia
1967
J,
.
R.
Va is*nys Yale California (Berkeley)
1967
G, .
Veronis Lafayette Brown
1968
B, .
Saltzman City College (N.Y.)
M.I.T.
1968
H.T.
Rossby Royal
Inst.
Technol.
M.I.T.
1968
(Sweden)
R,
.B.
Gordon Yale Yale
1968
D.M. Rye
Occidental Minnesota
1973
M.E.
Fiadeiro Lisbon California
(San
Diego)
1975
R.E.
Hall
Cal.
Tech.
California
(San
Diego)
1975
H,
.S.
Waff William
and
Mary Oregon
1975
D . R.
Pilbeam Cambr idge Yale
1975
R, . B.
Smith Rensselaer Johns Hopkins
1976
R.J.
Tracy Amherst Massachusetts
1978
D.
Schindel Michigan Harvard
1978
E.A.
Okal Paris
Cal.
Tech. 1978
J.
Longhi Notre Dame Harvard
1980
H
.J.
Bradbury Liverpool
Li
verpool
1980
R . L.
Hughes Melbourne Cambr idge
1982
L.J.
Hickey Villanova Princeton
1982
N.M.
Ribe Yale Chicago
1983
A.C
Lasaga
Pr
inceton Harvard
1984
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
Rummaging
through
the attic
375
expansion covering almost two centuries. Starting in 1802 with
one man, Benjamin Silliman, the teaching faculty has grown to a
total of 22 full-time members in 1984, corresponding to approx-
imately a doubling in the size of the faculty every 50 years. While
no one can predict the future with certainty, we believe there are
several reasons to expect that the faculty size may increase still
further in the future. One reason for such an expectation comes
from the broadening involvement of geologists—perhaps we
might better say earth scientists—in many aspects of society and
the economy. As Paul Bailly (1984) pointed out in his presiden-
tial address before the Geological Society of America, in
medium-sized and large countries, there is a strong correlation
between the Gross National Product (GNP) of a country and the
number of geologists employed. For every $50 million of GNP,
in 1980 U.S. dollars, one geologist is employed. Bailly also pointed
out that in economically developed countries, among which the
United States certainly belongs, there is approximately one geol-
ogist employed for every
7,000
people. Because both the GNP
and the population are expected to grow over the next 50 years,
the number of geologists employed will presumably grow too,
and it is not unreasonable to conclude that Yale's involvement in
that growth will require additions to the faculty. Numbers of
students will presumably increase too, so that the production rate
of Ph.D's could increase to a level of 12 to 15 a year, while
undergraduate majors might increase from today's figure of about
15 to as many as 30 to 35 a year.
A second reason for expecting that growth patterns of the
past will continue in the future is the growing diversity of geologi-
cal activities. During the first stages of the history of geology at
Yale, the principal activity of geologists was a descriptive natural
history of the Earth. During the century from about 1880 to
1980,
geology developed, as Bailly (1984) remarked, "into a
body of scientific disciplines with explanatory power and nascent
predictive power." In a very real sense, we are now poised on the
threshold of a new era in geology when large-scale testing of
predictions will occur as a result of major investigative programs.
Planetary studies, ocean-floor drilling, global geodynamic studies,
and other large programs have already exposed geologists to ways
of working and thinking that could barely have been imagined a
generation or two ago. New, possibly larger and possibly even
more exciting programs have already been spawned. Examples
are the U.S.S.R.'s Deep Drilling Program, the Continental Scien-
tific Drilling Program in the United States, Canada's Lithoprobe,
and the U.S.'s COCORP programs of
deep,
crustal seismic sam-
pling. No doubt other such exciting ventures lie ahead, and they
will inevitably stimulate the field. Such programs provide a guar-
antee that the rate of development of the geological sciences will
continue to increase and to diversify in the future. Surely the
geological and geophysical activities at Yale will also continue to
grow and diversify in the future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors are grateful to John Rodgers and Karl Turekian
for reminiscing to us about former Yale personnel, and to them
and Karl Waage, Horace Winchell, Danny Rye, John Ostrom,
Catherine Skinner, and John Morgan for reading the paper and
providing helpful suggestions, and to Robert Tucker for preparing
the illustrations.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
The brief nature of this overview of Yale geology has pre-
cluded detailed reference to, and discussion of, the large body of
relevant manuscript material in the Yale University Archives.
This material includes the papers of Benjamin Silliman, the two
Danas, Brush, Marsh, Schuchert, Huntington, and other faculty
members. Constant sources of reference were the three volumes
of the Historical Register of Yale University (1939, 1952,1969),
which contain official records of faculty appointments. Sarjeant
(1980) greatly simplified the task of finding obituaries where
contemporary observations were recorded, particularly in regard
to the reasons for the appointment of our faculty members, the
effectiveness of their teaching, and the degree of influence they
had on their colleagues as well as on their students.
REFERENCES CITED
Bailly,
P.
A.,
1984,
Geologists and GNP—future
prospects:
Geological Society of
America
Bulletin,
v.
95,
p.
257-264.
Bateman, A. M., 1942, Economic mineral
deposits:
New York, John Wiley &
Sons,
898 p.
Boltwood,
B. B.,
1905,
On the
ultimate disintegration products of
the
radioactive
elements: American Journal of
Science,
4th
Ser.,
v.
20,
p.
253-267.
1907,
The disintegration products of uranium: American Journal of Science,
4th
Ser.,
v.
23,
p.
77-88.
Bowman, I.,
1911,
Forest
physiography:
New York,
John
Wiley &
Sons,
759
p.
Clap,
T., 1781, Conjectures upon the nature and motion of
meteors,
which are
above the
atmosphere:
Norwich,
Conn.,
John
Trumbull,
13
p.
Cleland, H. F., 1919, Memorial of
Henry
Shaler
Williams:
Geological Society of
America
Bulletin,
v.
30,
p.
47-65.
Coleman, R. G., 1968, Memorial of Adolph
Knopf:
American Mineralogist,
v.
53,
p.
567-576.
Cross,
W.,
1920,
Louis Valentine
Pirsson:
American Journal of Science, 4th Ser.,
v.
50,
p.173-187.
Dana, E. S., 1877, A text-book of mineralogy, with an extended treatise on
crystallography and physical mineralogy ... On the plan and with the
co-operation of Professor
James
D.
Dana:
New
York,
John Wiley
&
Sons,
485 p.
1932,
A textbook of mineralogy, with an extended treatise on crystallog-
raphy
and
physical mineralogy ... (fourth edition,
revised and
enlarged by
William
E.
Ford):
New
York,
John
Wiley
&
Sons,
851
p.
Dana, J. D., 1837, A system of mineralogy, including an extended treatise on
crystallography: New Haven,
Conn.,
Durrie &
Peck
and
Herrick
&
Noyes,
452+
119
p.
1848,
Manual of
mineralogy:
including observations on
mines,
rocks,
reduc-
tion of
ores,
and the applications of the science to the
arts...
designed for the
use
of schools
and
colleges:
New Haven,
Conn.,
Durrie
&
Peck,
430
p.
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
376
B.
J. Skinner and
B.
L. Narendra
1862,
Manual of
geology:
treating of the principles of the science with special
reference
to
American geological
history,
for
the use
of
colleges,
academies,
and
schools of
science:
Philadelphia, Theodore
Bliss &
Co.,
798 p.
1892,
The system of mineralogy of James Dwight Dana 1837-1868. De-
scriptive mineralogy (sixth edition, by Edward Salisbury Dana ... entirely
rewritten and
much
enlarged):
New York, John Wiley
&
Sons,
1134
p.
Dunbar,
C.
O.,
1949,
Historical
geology:
New
York,
John
Wiley &
Sons,
567
p.
Dunbar,
C.
O.,
and
Rodgers, J., 1957, Principles of
stratigraphy:
New York, John
Wiley
&
Sons,
356
p.
Dunbar,
C.
O.,
and
Waage,
K.
M.,
1969,
Historical geology (third
edition):
New
York, John Wiley
&
Sons,
556
p.
Eaton,
A.,
1820, An index
to
the geology of
the northern states
(second edition):
Troy, N.Y., Wm. S.
Parker,
286
p.
Fisher,
G.
P.,
1866,
Life of Benjamin Silliman,
M.
D.,
LL.
D.,
2
vols.:
New York,
Charles Scribner
and
Co.,
407
p.
and
408 p.
Fleischer, M., 1983, Glossary of
mineral
species, 1983 (fourth
edition):
Tucson,
Ariz.,
Mineralogical
Record,
202
p.
Gilluly, J., 1977, American geology since 1910—a personal appraisal: Annual
Review of
Earth and
Planetary Sciences,
v.
5,
p.
1-12.
Gregory,
H.
E.,
1906,
January
29,
Letter
to
H.
T. [sic]
Williams
in
"History of the
Geological Department at Yale University" (a scrapbook compiled by
Gregory
ca.
1915):
Yale University. Records of
the
Department of Geology,
Yale University Archives.
1923,
Memorial of Joseph
Barrell:
Geological Society of America Bulletin,
v.
34,
p.
18-28.
Harvey, R. S., 1920, Drainage modifications and glaciation in the Danbury
region, Connecticut: Hartford, State Geological
and
Natural
History
Survey
of Connecticut Bulletin 30,59
p.
Historical Register of Yale University, 1701-1937, 1939: New Haven, Conn.,
Yale University, 589
p.
Historical Register of Yale University, 1937-1951, 1952: New Haven, Conn.,
Yale University, 327
p.
Historical Register of Yale University, 1951-1968, 1969: New Haven, Conn.,
Yale University, 878 p.
Jensen,
M.
L., 1952, One hundred
and
fifty
years
of geology
at
Yale:
American
Journal of Science,
v.
250,
p.
625-635.
Kemp,
J. F., 1919, Memorial of J. D. Irving: Geological Society of America
Bulletin,
v.
30,
p.
37-42.
Longwell, C. R.,
Knopf,
A., and Flint, R. F., 1948, Physical geology (third
edition): New York, John Wiley & Sons, 602 p. [The first (1932) and
second (1939) editions were published
as
Part I of A textbook of geology. ]
Lull,
R.
S.,
1915,
Triassic life of
the
Connecticut
Valley:
Hartford,
State Geologi-
cal
and
Natural History
Survey
of Connecticut
Bulletin
24,285 p.
1917, Organic evolution. A text-book: New York, The Macmillan Com-
pany, 729 p.
Merrill, G. P.,
1920,
Contributions
to a
history of American
state
geological and
natural
history
surveys:
U.S.
National
Museum Bulletin
109,549
p.
Morison,
S.
E.,
1936,
Three centuries of Harvard,
1636-1936:
Cambridge,
Mass.,
Harvard University
Press,
512
p.
Narendra,
B.
L.,
1979,
Benjamin
Silliman and the Peabody
Museum:
Discovery,
v.
14,
no.
2,
p.
12-29.
Nelson,
C.
M., 1977, Wieland, George
Reber,
in
Dictionary of American Biog-
raphy, Suppl. 5, 1951-1955: New York, Charles Scribner's Sons,
p.
742-744.
Pierson, G. W., 1952, Yale College, an educational history, 1871-1921: New
Haven,
Conn.,
Yale University
Press,
p.
48-49,65-94.
1955,
Yale, the university college, 1921-1937: New Haven, Conn., Yale
University
Press,
Chapters 7
and
8.
Pirsson,
L.
V.,
1918,
The
rise
of petrology as a science,
in
A century of science
in
America:
New Haven, Conn., Yale University
Press,
p.
248-267.
Pirsson, L. V., and Schuchert, C, 1915, A text-book of geology, for use in
universities,
colleges,
schools of science,
etc.,
and for the general
reader.
Two
vols.:
Part
I,
Physical geology, by Louis
V.
Pirsson;
Part
II,
Historical geol-
ogy, by Charles Schuchert: New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1051
p.
(also
published
as
one volume, 1915).
1929,
A textbook of geology.
Part
I,
Physical geology, by Louis
V.
Pirsson
(third edition, revised by W. M. Agar [and others]. Revision edited by
Chester
R.
Longwell): New York, John Wiley
&
Sons,
488
p.
Rodgers, J., 1977, Memorial to Eleanora Bliss
Knopf:
Geological Society of
America
Memorials,
v.
6, 4
p.
Rossiter,
M.
W., 1979, A portrait of
James
Dwight
Dana,
in
Wilson,
L.
G., ed.,
Benjamin Silliman and
his
circle: studies
on
the influence of Benjamin Silli-
man on science in America: New York, Science History Publications,
p.
105-127.
Rubey, W. W., 1974, Fifty years of
the
earth sciences—a
renaissance:
Annual
Review of
Earth and
Planetary Sciences,
v.
2,
p.
1-24.
Sarjeant, W.A.S., 1980, Geologists and the history of geology. An international
bibliography from the origins to 1978. 5 vols.: New York, Arno Press,
4517 p.
Schuchert,
C,
1897,
A synopsis of American fossil Brachiopoda:
U.S.
Geological
Survey Bulletin 87, 464
p.
1921,
in Reports
of the
President,
Provost, and Secretary of Yale University
and
of
the deans and directors
of
its
several
schools and departments
for the
academic year 1920-1921: New Haven, Conn., Yale University,
p.
177-181.
1928,
The hypothesis of continental displacement,
in
Theory of continental
drift:
a
symposium on the origin and movement of land
masses both
inter-
continental and intra-continental, as proposed by Alfred Wegener: Tulsa,
Okla.,
The
American Association of Petroleum Geologists,
p.
104-144.
Schuchert,
C,
and
Dunbar,
C.
O.,
1933,
A
textbook of
geology.
Part
II,
Historical
geology (third edition, largely rewritten): New York, John Wiley & Sons,
551 p.
Schuchert, C,
and
LeVene, C. M., 1940, O.
C.
Marsh, pioneer
in
paleontology:
New Haven,
Conn.,
Yale University
Press,
p.
230-247.
Silliman,
B.,
1810,
Sketch of
the
mineralogy of the town of New-Haven: Connec-
ticut Academy of
Arts
and Sciences Memoir, v. 1, part 1, p. 83-96. The
paper was read
to
the
Academy
on 1
September 1806.
Simpson, G. G.,
1958,
Memorial to
Richard Swann
Lull (1867-1957): Geologi-
cal Society of America Proceedings for
1957,
p.
127-134.
Thompson, G. L., 1964, Barrell, Joseph (1869-1919), in La Rocque, A., ed.,
Contributions
to the
history of geology,
1.
Biographies of
geologists:
Colum-
bus,
Ohio,
The Ohio
State University Department of Geology,
p.
9-11.
White, W. S., 1974, Memorial to Alan Mara Bateman, 1889-1971: Geological
Society of America Memorials,
v.
3,
p.
15-23.
Printed in
U.S.A.
Downloaded from https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/chapter-pdf/3731786/9780813754130_ch24.pdf
by Yale University, ronald smith
on 07 February 2019
