Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/847

Rh only a short time before, to the great regret of many who had hoped to see and hear him there.

At the first meeting Professor Hitchcock laid before his co-laborers in geology an account, with specimens, of the fossil footprints of the Connecticut Valley sandstone, which have since become so celebrated and so closely connected with his name. The next year the meeting was again held in Philadelphia, and the third year in Boston. On that occasion (1842) the brothers Rogers—Henry Darwin and William Barton—presented to the body their immortal achievement, wrought out together over a vast field, of the structure of the Appalachian mountain system. Both were then young men, but little over thirty, and had labored with true brotherly as well as scientific co-operation, Henry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and William in Virginia. A most interesting account of their joint presentation of this memorable investigation was given in a letter from one who was present at the time, Mr. John L. Hayes, and printed in the memorial volume. Life and Letters of William B. Rogers, by his widow, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. After referring to the eminent men present—Dr. Morton, of Philadelphia, presiding, already becoming noted in the young science of anthropology, and the brilliant address of Professor Silliman, of New Haven, and others active in various departments of science: Hitchcock, Jackson, Emmons, of Taconic fame, "the brilliant French astronomer Nicollet, the mineralogist Beck, the paleontologist Hall, the microscopist Bailey, the zoölogist Gould, the philologist as well as naturalist Haldeman," and others, among them Mr. (afterward Sir) Charles Lyell, of England—he goes on to give the first place of interest and importance to the work of the brothers Rogers, and after describing it enthusiastically closes with the following words: "The brothers by their happy and amiable faculty of working in concert, more than duplicated their individual power. In making their joint exposition, William Rogers took upon himself the more modest but really more difficult part of describing the phenomena, leaving to his brother the part of explaining the theory. . . . Nothing could be more pleasing than the working together of these minds toward the same end."

It will be apparent to any one from these accounts of those early meetings, both their topics and their personnel, that there was not only ample scope for such an organization, and both need and readiness for it, but that it had in it from the first the germs of a wider association that should take in all departments of science, and give similar opportunities to all the scattered workers and students of the land. This fact soon became evident, and the idea was taken up earnestly by the Rogers brothers and actively pressed to its accomplishment. Henry D. Rogers was more prominent in the first stages of the