One gets impatient with the later writings of Eaton, because he does not become liberalized with the progressive ideas in stratigraphic geology developing first in Europe and then in America, especially among the geologists of Philadelphia. Therefore it is not profitable to follow his work further.
Early American Text-books of Geology.—The first American text-book of geology bears the date of Boston 1816 and is entitled An Elementary Treatise on Mineralogy and Geology, its author being Parker Cleaveland of Bowdoin College. The second edition appeared in 1822. It also had a geologic map of the United States, practically a copy of Maclure’s. To mineralogy were devoted 585 pages, and to geology 55, of which 37 describe rocks and 5 the geology of the United States. The chronology is Wernerian. Of “geological systems” there are two, “primitive and secondary rocks.”
In 1818 appeared Amos Eaton’s Index to the Geology of the Northern States, having 54 pages, and in 1820 came the second edition, “wholly written over anew,” with 286 pages. The theory of the later edition is still that of Werner, with “improvements of Cuvier and Bakewell,” and yet one sees now-a-days but little in it of the far better English text-book. Eaton did very little to advance philosophic geology in America. What is of most value here are his personal observations in regard to the local geology of western Massachusetts, Connecticut, southwestern Vermont, and eastern New York (1, 69, 1819; also Merrill, p. 234).
We come now to the most comprehensive and advanced of the early text-books used in America. This is the third English edition of Robert Bakewell’s Introduction to Geology (400 pages, 1829), and the first American edition “with an Appendix Containing an Outline of his Course of Lectures on Geology at Yale College, by Benjamin Silliman” (128 pages). Bakewell’s good book is in keeping with the time, and while not so advanced as Conybeare and Phillips’s Outlines of 1822, yet is far more so than Silliman’s appendix. The latter is general and not specific as to details; it is still decidedly Wernerian, though in a modified form. Silliman says he is “neither Wernerian nor Huttonian,” and yet his summary on pages 120 to 126 shows clearly that he was not only a Wernerian but a pietist as well.
Unearthing of the Cenozoic and Mesozoic in North America.
The Discerning of the Tertiary.—The New England States, with their essentially igneous and metamorphic formations, could not furnish the proper geologic environment for the development of stratigraphers and paleontologists. So in America we see the rise of such geologists first in Philadelphia, where they had easy access to the horizontal and highly fossiliferous strata of the coastal plain. The first one to attract attention was Thomas Say, after him came John Finch, followed by Lardner Vanuxem, Isaac Lea, Samuel G. Morton, and T. A. Conrad. These men not only worked out the succession of the Cenozoic and the upper part of the Mesozoic, but blazed the way among the Paleozoic strata as well.
Thomas Say (1787–1834), in 1819, was the first American to point out the chronogenetic value of fossils in his article, Observations on some Species of Zoophytes, Shells, etc., principally Fossil (1, 381). He correctly states that the progress of geology “must be in part founded on a knowledge of the different genera and species of reliquiæ, which the various accessible strata of the earth present.” Say fully realizes the difficulties in the study of fossils, because of their fragmental character and changed nature, and that their correct interpretation requires a knowledge of similar living organisms.
The application of what Say pointed out came first in John Finch’s Geological Essay on the Tertiary Formations in America (7, 31, 1824). Even though the paper is still laboring under the mineral system and does not discern the presence of Cretaceous strata among his Tertiary formations, yet Finch also sees that “fossils constitute the medals of the ancient world, by which to ascertain the various periods.”
Finch now objects to the wide misuse in America of the term alluvial and holds that it is applied to what is elsewhere known as Tertiary. He says:
“Geology will achieve a triumph in America, when the term alluvial shall be banished from her Geological Essays, or confined to its legitimate domain, and then her tertiary formations will be seen to coincide with those of Europe, and the formations of London, Paris, and the Isle of Wight, will find kindred associations in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgias, the Floridas, and Louisiana.”