Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/423

Rh spent in this country, partly in visiting the places in the Southern States where diamonds have been found, in continuance of his investigations on the origin of that gem. He had read papers on the subject at the meetings of the British Association in 1886 and 1887, and was planning to present his further results at the next meeting of that body; after which he hoped to carry on his glacial studies in Norway and other parts of Europe.

He sailed, with Mrs. Lewis, for Europe, on the 3d of July, 1888. He was affected during the latter part of his voyage with symptoms of illness, which developed, after he reached Manchester, England, into typhoid fever. From this he died on the 21st of July. Prof. G. F. Wright, author of "The Ice Age in North America" (New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1889), who was associated with him in the investigation of the terminal glacial moraine, has furnished the estimate which follows, of the general value of his work. The more particularized review of his glacial investigations with which this paper continues, has been furnished us by Mr. Warren Upham, who was also the author of a sketch of Lewis in the "American Geologist."

"It is impossible," says Prof. Wright, "to overestimate the value to the world of such a career as Lewis set before him, and already at his early death had largely realized. His vigor of body and mind, pleasing address, liberal education, high social position, and abundant means, insured to him flattering success in almost any direction. He could easily have attained eminence in the politics of his State and nation. He could have entered upon a business career with fair prospect of becoming a millionaire. Or he could have settled down, as the majority of those thus situated do, to the seductive pleasures of society, and have been one of its chief ornaments. Instead of this, he threw all the resources of his nature and of his position into the most laudable work of enlarging the stock of the world's knowledge.

"The leisure hours of his boyhood were spent in his laboratory and in roaming over the hills in the vicinity of Philadelphia in search of facts to explain their origin. After graduating from the university, he offered himself as an assistant to the Geological Survey of the State, and for one or two seasons accompanied the surveyors in the dull routine of their work. He afterward was commissioned to prosecute independently investigations into the nature of the gravel deposits of the rivers entering the Atlantic between New York and Norfolk, Va. It was with the results of these youthful investigations that he came to the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Boston, in 1880, with two or three papers which at once attracted the attention both of that body and of the wider audience reached by the printed reports. Lewis was specially delighted on that