Charles Henry Hitchcock was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, August 23, 1836, the son of Prof. Edward Hitchcock, the eminent geologist, who was afterward president of Amherst College. The family is of English origin, and was planted in America by two brothers who came over at nearly the same time and made homes for themselves in New Haven, removing later to towns near by. Luke Hitchcock, the ancestor of the subject of this sketch, came in 1695, and finally settled at Wethersfield, Connecticut. His descendants in the direct line lived at Springfield, Granville, Deerfield, and Amherst, Massachusetts. Professor Hitchcock is in the seventh generation from Luke, and is equally removed from Elder John White, his maternal ancestor, who came to Canton, Massachusetts, toward the end of the seventeenth century, and removed thence to the Connecticut Valley. Both lines of ancestry were purely English, and all the progenitors were men of integrity, regarded in their times as worthy to fill offices of trust in church and town. Two of them served in the Revolutionary army.
The father of Professor Hitchcock was one of the most distinguished geologists and educators of his time, and his services, especially as State Geologist of Massachusetts, have already been described in the Popular Science Monthly.[58] His mother was the daughter of Jacob White, a well-to-do farmer of Amherst, who, believing in the education of women, had given her the best opportunities for study available at the time. She could read the Greek Testament and calculate eclipses, and was a gifted artist with pencil and brush. She prepared with her own hands many of the numerous illustrations in her husband's reports, and also diagrams for the lecture room. She took indefatigable pains with the education of her children, placing their moral and religious welfare first. Of the eight children of the family, six of whom reached maturity, the surviving brother is professor of physical culture, and, for the time being, acting president at Amherst College, and one of the two surviving sisters, the widow of the Rev. C. M. Terry, has been for several years matron of the Hubbard Cottage, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
Beginning with 1835, the year before Professor Hitchcock was born, his father, Professor Edward Hitchcock, was largely occupied with the study of the "fossil bird tracks" in the New Red Sandstone of the Connecticut Valley, and with the discussions to which the investigation gave rise, the story of which has been told by Prof. C. H. Hitchcock himself in the Popular Science Monthly (vol. iii, August, 1873). Besides the search for the fossils and their collection and comparison, and the examination of the literature that might throw light on the subject, there were studies into the proper interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis, the debate with Prof. Moses Stewart, of Andover, and the gradual approach of the American clergy to general acquiescence in the belief that geology is not at variance with Scripture. Professor Hitchcock's childhood was largely spent under the influence of these studies and discussions. The boy seemed to be full of promise, and because of his observing ways and proneness to speculation was called "the young philosopher." He used to bring his mother the very small flowers of Spergula rubra, which are so obscure that older eyes often fail to notice them. He seemed to be fonder of his father than the other children, and was never so happy as with him. Through this constant intercourse Charles became absorbed in his father's pursuits, and grew up into a knowledge of geology from Nature and from verbal explanations—a more satisfactory method than that of learning from books; and he was associated with his father in all his geological work from the time when he was first old enough to be of service. Thus, before 1856 he was acquainted, from inspection, with the terraces and reputed beaches and drift phenomena of all western Massachusetts; he had handled every specimen of a foot mark in the Appleton Cabinet, and by 1861 was the principal assistant on the Vermont Survey, having prepared for the press the greater part of the matter of the report. He had enjoyed the best educational advantages of his day, having completed the classical and preparatory courses of Williston Seminary, and been graduated thence in 1852, then graduated from Amherst College in 1856, a short time before his twentieth birthday. Among his early classmates and college friends were Dr. Cyrus Northrup, president of Minnesota University; Dr. Richard Mather, professor of Greek at Amherst College; the Rev. Dr. Goodwin, of Chicago; and Dr. William Hayes Ward, editor of The Independent. After graduation he spent a year in special study of Hebrew and chemistry at Yale College, two years at Andover Theological Seminary, and one year in Europe, studying in the Royal School of Mines under Professor Huxley, and in the British Museum investigating the crustacea and trilobites. Here he enjoyed the friendship of Professor Richard Owen, and had the guidance of Dr. H. Woodward.
In 1857 Mr. Hitchcock was appointed assistant geologist to the Geological Survey of Vermont. He served the full term of the survey, and had charge of the preparation of the report relating to the stratigraphical geology, the measurement and delineation of the sections, and the compilation of the geological map.
In 1861 he received the appointment of State Geologist of Maine, in which service he spent two summers in field work, preparing two reports of progress, which were published in connection with the report of the secretary of the Board of Agriculture. Besides the general reconnoissance, he discovered the existence of large areas of Upper Silurian and Devonian terranes. He has embodied his views of the distribution of the formations in his general map of the United States.
Having chosen the ministry for his profession, Mr. Hitchcock studied theology under Dr. E. A. Park, of Andover, and the Rev. Dr. Taylor, of New Haven. Questions of the relations of theology and science were attracting much attention, and he treated of them in two papers in the Bibliotheca Sacra, one of which was afterward used for the guidance of theological students in several seminaries. As more opportunities were offered for scientific work, the ministry was given up. This was the time when the doctrine of natural selection came to the front for investigation, and the early history of mankind was receiving increased attention. Mr. Hitchcock came home from Europe in 1867 convinced of the truth of some form of evolution, of a considerable antiquity of man, and of the probability of a plural origin of the human race. Finding that some of his views on these subjects were not acceptable to his associates, he ceased to make them prominent in his class instructions, and devoted his attention to the more technical details of geology. Since then general opinion has advanced so far on these subjects that the views he held at that time seem now really conservative.
In 1868 he was appointed State Geologist for New Hampshire, and spent ten years in the survey of that State. The results of his work there were published in three large quarto volumes, with a folio atlas of maps, profiles, and sections. The rocks described consist principally of crystalline schists and marine igneous ejections. The geology of New Hampshire is of peculiar importance, because the situation of the State is such that a correct knowledge of its rocks promotes the understanding of many obscure terranes in the adjacent regions of Maine, Quebec, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Professor Hitchcock's report of the survey may justly be styled his chief work. The part best studied relates to the White Mountains and the Ammonoosuc mining district. Connected with the survey was the maintenance of a meteorological station throughout the year on the summit of Mount Washington. Daily statements of the weather conditions of this station during the winter of 1870-'71 were sent by telegraph to the principal newspapers, and called out much interest—before the United States Signal Service began its weather predictions.
The catalogue of Professor Hitchcock's publications comprises more than one hundred and fifty titles of papers, reports, and books. Perhaps the earliest thorough study represented among them was that of the fossil footmarks. The first of the published papers on this subject related to the tracks of animals in alluvial clay, and was published in the American Journal of Science in 1855. For several years after this he assisted his father in arranging the museum and compiling tables for the Ichnology. He made a complete catalogue descriptive of the more than twenty thousand individual impressions preserved in the Appleton Cabinet, which was printed, with descriptions of a few new species of footmarks, in the Supplement to the Ichnology of Massachusetts, edited by him after the death of his father in 1865. Although circumstances have prevented him from paying much attention to ichnology in later years, he has prepared several papers on the subject, the most important of which was one on the Recent Progress of Ichnology, which was read before the Boston Society of Natural History about twelve years ago. In it the ichnites were carefully catalogued anew and classified in the light of our knowledge of the numerous dinosaurs of the West; and the results of some studies of the slabs exhumed at Wethersfield, Connecticut, are well known. The list of the Connecticut footmarks was increased from one hundred and nineteen in the Ichnology to one hundred and seventy; and facts were cited to show that the Grallator, the three-toed animal most allied to birds, possessed a caudal appendage of a reptilian nature. The Trias of New Jersey had been found to illustrate new features in the Otozoum, whose tracks are often ornithic in aspect. A comparison of the features of the Triassic skeletons described by Marsh from Connecticut (Anchisaurus) shows that the creatures were rather allied to the Plesiornis than to the Anomœpus of the Ichnology, because of the great size of the fore feet. Notes upon footmarks have been gathered also from illustrations in Pennsylvania, Nova Scotia, Kansas, Nevada, and Florida.
Professor Hitchcock has studied the Quaternary or glacial deposits with great success. His first publication upon the terraces and allied phenomena of Vermont appeared while the old views of a submergence, with icebergs, prevailed, to account for the phenomena. A study of the glaciers of Switzerland in 1866 satisfied him of the truth of Agassiz's theory; and whenever the opportunity came for re-examination of the surface geology of northern New England, the facts were found to require a different theoretical explanation. He caused a thorough examination to be made of the Connecticut River terranes by Warren Upham in the New Hampshire Survey, and proved that all the high mountains of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine had been glaciated by a southeasterly movement. The ice came from the Laurentian highlands, pushed in a southern direction down the Champlain-Hudson Valley, with a southeasterly flow over New England and southwesterly over the Adirondacks; the last two courses having been subordinate to the first. At present the Laurentian hills are lower than the New England and New York mountains overridden by the ice, and probably the same was the case in the Glacial period. The best explanation of these paths is afforded by the suggestion that a gigantic ice cap accumulated north of the St. Lawrence, towering into the clouds so much that its overflow naturally descended over the White and Adirondack Mountains.
That glaciers should accumulate terminal moraines is axiomatic, but no geologist before 1868 had ventured to suggest where moraines might be located in the United States. In that year Professor Hitchcock delivered a lecture before the Lyceum of Natural History in New York and the Long Island Historical Society in Brooklyn, in which he affirmed that the drift deposits from Prospect Park along the backbone of Long Island for its entire length constituted the terminal moraine of the great continental ice sheet. This declaration inaugurated a new era in the study of the age of ice. The geologists in their several States found the terminal moraines, and the various phenomena began to be classified according to new laws. The search for moraines has resulted in a restatement of the incident of the age of ice; more than a dozen successive terminal moraines have been mapped between New York and Montana, which suggest to us the existence of several glacial periods. In compiling a catalogue of observations of the course of glacial striæ by the United States Geological Survey, it was found that Professor Hitchcock had recorded for New England as many as all other geologists had observed for the whole country.