Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/278

264 American Philosophical Society, the Geological Society of Pennsylvania, the Geological Society of France, and of other scientific bodies in America and Europe.

A minute adopted by the Board of Trustees of the University of Nashville, on the occasion of the death of Prof. Troost, relates that, "born and liberally educated in Holland, he early manifested a zealous devotion to natural history and chemistry, more especially to the then infant sciences of geology and mineralogy. With a view to the more successful pursuit of his favorite studies he visited Paris, and was for several years the pupil of the celebrated Haüy. He removed to the United States about forty years ago, and in due time became an American citizen. His entire life was consecrated to geology and the kindred sciences, with what ability and success his published writings and his well earned reputation at home and abroad may eloquently testify. As a professor in this university during the last twenty-two years and a State geologist of Tennessee for the most part of that period, he won the confidence and respect of the community by invaluable service in both capacities, as well as by the unaffected modesty, kindness, and uniform courtesy of his deportment toward all men. In the various relations and stations of life, public and private, he was without reproach and above suspicion. Beloved, trusted, honored, venerated by all those most intimately connected or associated with him, he could not make an enemy—he had none."

as a whole was compared by Dr. H. R. Mill, in the introduction to his course of educational lectures of the Royal Geographical Society, to a pyramid of six courses of masonry, built of blocks obtained from different quarries. The first and fundamental course, built of material derived from pure mathematics, was mathematical geography, absolutely secure and firmly establislaed, underlying all the rest. Upon it, and resting on it, rose physical geography, the material for which was brought from physics, geology, meteorology, etc, all the determining conditions being fully known. This served as a foundation for biological geography, in which the imperfect comprehension of life introduced unstable and incomplete elements; but far fuller of uncertainty was the next tier of anthropo-geography, in which the additional unknown quantity of human nature exercised a preponderating influence, and the positive scientific facts from the quarries of anthropology, ethnology, and economics were few and by no means well co-ordinated. Arising from this came the layer of political geography, the scientific basis of which was mixed up and overlaid with arbitrary, transitory, and impracticable conditions arising from the workings of the human mind and the limitations of nationality. Upon this was reared the final story of the pyramid, commercial geography, a mass of rubble, the relation of which to its scientific foundation was not yet fully made out.