Biographical Memoirs Volume 87 (2005) / Chapter Skim
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James Hall, Jr.
James Hall, Jr.
Pages 180-197
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From page 180... ...
Museum State York New the of Courtesy
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From page 181... ...
Later he was the organizing president of the International Geological Congress meetings at Buffalo, New York (1876) and at Paris (1878)
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Through his teacher, James encountered several leading members of the Boston Society of Natural History. Having developed a strong interest in science, Hall was attracted to a new college in Troy, New York, that emphasized science and employed revolutionary new approaches to learning with an active role for the student coupled with hands-on laboratory and field trip instruction.
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From page 183... ...
James Hall was engaged to assist his former teacher, Emmons, in the Second District in northeastern New York, where Hall's first assignment was to study iron deposits in the Adirondack Mountains. A year later the districts were revised; Conrad was appointed state paleontologist, and young Hall had demonstrated such competence as to be put in charge of a new Fourth District in western New York with assistants Horsford, Carr, and George W
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From page 184... ...
The authors of these great treatises and other foreign authors began corresponding with Hall, and soon European geologists began beating a path to Albany, most notably the famous British geologist Charles Lyell during his several American visits in the 1840s. During a visit in 1846, Eduard de Verneuil, a close associate of Murchison, tried to convince Hall not to introduce the name Cambrian to the New World, rather to use only Silurian for the lowest Paleozoic strata, a reflection of a famous Murchison-Sedgwick feud then raging in Britain about which name should prevail for the oldest Paleozoic subdivision.
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From page 185... ...
THE ALBANY TRAINING GROUND In 1857 Hall constructed a substantial brick laboratory building where he worked for the rest of his life. This Albany laboratory became a veritable training school for a host of young, budding geologists who would distinguish themselves in the history of American science.
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From page 186... ...
At first, Hall and others were greatly flattered by the attentions of their famous visitor, but Lyell's insatiable grilling, which had earned him the nickname "Pump," and his copying of their geologic maps gradually provoked a reaction of resentment and fear of being preempted. In March 1842 an anonymous letter signed "Hamlet" appeared in a Boston newspaper, which charged Lyell with geological piracy.
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From page 187... ...
He could rarely say "no" to even the most ridiculous schemes, and he ignored the entreaties of close friends -- such as Joseph Henry, physicist and first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution -- that he should ease his pace for the sake of his own health. BEYOND NEW YORK As he completed his Fourth District studies, Hall decided to see how far the New York stratigraphic classification might apply beyond his state.
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From page 188... ...
Hayden go to the White River badlands of Nebraska Territory (now in South Dakota) to collect newly discov
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Hall accepted the position with alacrity because his New York salary had been suspended in 1850 by an exceptionally hostile legislature. Moreover, he welcomed the opportunity to obtain and study fossils from the new state.
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Hall devoted little time to the Wisconsin initiative, so Carr and Daniels were really in charge. Whitney was engaged to study the lead deposits of southwestern Wisconsin and Charles Whittlesey to study the mineral deposits of northern Wisconsin.
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From page 191... ...
During the completion of his final large paleontological monograph, Hall had his last and sweetest wrangle with New York bureaucracy. The executive secretary of the regents, which oversaw his program, had become overly zealous in trying to impose strict accounting and efficiency procedures.
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From page 192... ...
In 1859 Hall published the following in the most commonly quoted source for his theory, Part 6 of the Paleontology of New York: "The line of greatest depression would be along the line of greatest accumulation [that is] the course of the original transporting current.
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From page 193... ...
, Hall had also emphasized the contrasts of thickness between the Appalachian region and the Midwest with detailed remarks about contrasting sedimentary rock types as well as thicknesses in various portions of the Paleozoic succession of the two regions. Here, too, he included a brief summary of his theory of mountains by stating that "the thickness of the entire series of sedimentary rocks, no matter how much disturbed or denuded, is not here great enough to produce mountain features" (vol.
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From page 194... ...
He drew attention at an early stage to large-scale stratigraphic patterns among some of the larger tectonic elements of the Earth's crust and revealed other shrewd stratigraphic insights, which were ahead of the times. By virtue of his breadth of experience in both the cratonic and orogenic regions of eastern North America, he was uniquely equipped to see such fundamental distinctions.
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From page 195... ...
Geology was the preeminent American science of the late nineteenth century as judged by none other than British physicist John Tyndall during a visit to the United States in the 1870s. Therefore, Hall's leadership role in the professionalization of science and his charter membership in the National Academy of Sciences assure an important niche in the history of American science in general.
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From page 196... ...
Des Moines. 1859 Description and figures of the organic remains of the Lower Helderberg Group and the Oriskany Sandstone: Natural history New York, pt.
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1875 On the relations of the Niagara and lower Helderberg Formations and their geographical distribution in the United States and Canada. Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the State Museum of New York.
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