Q '.43 THE McGEE MEMORIAL MEETING OF THE WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES HELD AT THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTION WASHINGTON, D. C. DECEMBER 5, 1913 BALTIMORE WILLIAMS & WILKINS COMPANY 1916 GIFT or W J McGEE APRIL 17, 1853 SEPTEMBER 4, 1912 THE McGEE MEMORIAL MEETING OF THE WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES HELD AT THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTION WASHINGTON, D. C. DECEMBER 5, 1913 BALTIMORE WILLIAMS & WILKINS COMPANY 1916 ACTION OF THE BOARD OF MANAGERS OF THE WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AUTHORIZING THE McGEE MEMORIAL MEETING 180th Meeting. January 11, 1913: "Mr. Pinchot presented by invitation a plan for a memorial meeting in commemoration of the life and service to science of Doctor W J McGee, 1 recently deceased. It was proposed to arrange for a selected list of papers covering the wide range of Doctor McGee's activities, and that the affiliated or- ganizations of which he was a member be invited to participate. After considerable discussion, all of which was favorable to the plan, Doctor Kober moved that a special committee, of which Mr. Pinchot should be chairman and President Coville a member, be appointed by the President to have charge of this meeting. Carried." The following Committee was appointed January 20, 1913: Frederick V. Coville, Henry Gannett, G. K. Gilbert, F. W. Hodge, J. A. Holmes, F. H. Newell, Gifford Pinchot, Chairman, Milton Whitney. 1 Dr. McGee preferred to write his name without periods. 3 o A rrn /I THE McGEE MEMORIAL MEETING OF THE WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES In opening the meeting Doctor Coville said: When death comes to a man who has rendered distinguished serv- ice to humanity, it commonly finds him occupying some high office and surrounded by the members of his family. But the end of Doctor McGee, according to the will of fate, came otherwise. It is peculiarly incumbent upon us, therefore, his friends and colleagues, to meet together for the purpose of paying honor to his memory. It is true that individually we shall honor him as long as each of us shall live. But we meet together at this time in order to give testi- mony publicly to the high esteem in which we hold him. The Car- negie Institution, through its President, Doctor Woodward, has granted to the Washington Academy of Sciences the use of this build- ing for this purpose. Doctor Woodward is out of the city. I regret greatly that he could not have been here to himself open the meet- ing, and to permit us to thank him personally. Doctor McGee was a member of numerous associations, many of which are represented here tonight by members who have been se- lected for the purpose. Many associations have passed resolutions in commemoration of Doctor McGee. In addition to the resolutions, many letters from individuals expressing appreciation of Doctor McGee have reached the Committee. The resolutions and letters which have been received can not be read tonight, but will find place in the commemorative volume which will be printed later. There is, however, one letter which was re- ceived from one closely and intimately related to Doctor McGee. This letter contains so much of human interest that the Committee has decided it should be read to you tonight. The letter came with a statement that it might be edited to suit the desires of the Com- mittee, but it is a document of such intimate personal relationship 5 6 McGEE MEMORIAL MEETING that the Committee has decided to have it read without any emenda- tion whatever. The letter is from Miss Emma R. McGee, of Iowa, a sister of Doctor McGee. 1 Doctor McGee's constructive intellectual activity was exercised in varied fields of science. From a farm boy Doctor McGee became a blacksmith; from a good blacksmith he became a good geologist. His work on the Atlantic Coastal Plain is one of the monumental works in geology; from that he went into anthropology and ethnology. Then he made an almost new science, for he went into the subject of Con- servation, and brought all the energies and knowledge of a lifetime into that work. I am reminded at this time of a statement made by a Russian bota- nist nearly a century ago when he had finished a very remarkable and very good piece of critical work: Errare quidem humanum est, sed discrimen statuimus inter errores qui excusari possunt, et qui non possunt. Solatio mihi est spes, vos, benevo- los lectores, errores meos in iis numeraturos esse, qui excusari possint. It is the business of the scientist to pursue the truth. We should so live that when we have finished our course, we can say, as Doctor McGee would have said: "To make mistakes is human, it is true, but there is a difference between errors which are excusable and those which are not excusable. It comforts me, my colleagues, to have the hope that you will place my mistakes among those you gladly forgive." In my own department of research, the vegetable world, Doctor McGee's work was of limited extent. Yet I always found his advice helpful, constructive, and suggestive. Even in this unfamiliar field, he was an intellectual editor whose criticism, which was often sought and always freely given, was of the highest value. It was in geology, geography, and anthropology that he did his chief work. He made lasting contributions to these sciences. In his later years he devoted his efforts to the creation of a sound public conception of our natural resources, and to their development and use to the point of greatest efficiency. Doctor McGee's relation to these subjects is more fully known to his immediate associates in the 1 See page 90. WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 7 various lines of activity with which he was identified. We shall listen with pleasure to their discussion of his life and work. The first speaker will be Doctor Milton Whitney, Chief of the Bureau of Soils, who was associated with Doctor McGee in his later studies of the uses of water in agriculture. Doctor Whitney said: For the last five and a half years of his extremely active life, Doc- tor McGee was intimately associated with me in the Bureau of Soils and was one of my principal and most valued advisors. In this in- timate and quiet association in executive work, where practical things have to be done and theories and speculations have to be translated into definite, constructive, and reasonable action, he presented a side of his character which perhaps some of his associates in the field of constructive legislation did not see. It is of this I speak tonight. Like all great reformers, he knew that to secure attention and re- form in methods the people must be shocked to overcome natural inertia and arouse them to action. His quotation of huge figures indicating that an area equivalent to 100,000 farms has been devastated in this country by soil erosion was a clarion call to attract attention to the need of proper conserva- tion of the soil in cultivating the fields and managing the forests and other protective covers. He did not mean that all erosion is harmful and necessarily destructive he was too eminent a geologist and physiographer to fail to see even more clearly than most of us, that erosion and leaching are natural processes in the life of the globe, just as evaporation and elimination of what we call waste material is a life process of the living body. Without these there would be an absence of surface relief and of physiographic form; there would be an absence of most of the mineral segregation that marks our mineral wealth; there would be an absence of those rejuvenated and most fer- tile soils of our younger flood plains, and of the renewal of our surface soils generally. His conception was that erosion is a necessary nat- ural process; his purpose was not to prevent erosion, but to control it in the interest of mankind. He no more considered erosion as a necessary evil than he would have condemned the rainfall because of occasional disastrous floods, 8 McGEE MEMORIAL MEETING or the movements of the air which bring fresh supplies of oxygen to the body because of occasional destructive storms. But he did mean to convey the idea that each farmer and each land owner has a duty to himself, to posterity, and to the country to protect our lands and our fields and waterways from destructive erosion, as it is the duty of builders to take all reasonable precautions in the construction of dams and buildings and ships, in the care of abutting properties, to enable them to withstand floods and storms. He would not have the soil with its cover, whose function it is to conserve and regulate the rainfall and act as a spillway, so ignorantly handled that the dam itself would give way with undue and unnecessary loss of life-giving matter and of property interests. He was not misled by the popular cry of soil exhaustion or soil robbery as indicating a fundamental and permanent impairment of soil material, which he knew better than any of us can not be accom- plished by human agencies. He knew that on the whole crop yields are increasing through more intelligent use, but he did deplore the vN tiNE MONTH ARER RECEIF] / *+n / JUN 16 1970 JUN24 1971 7 R ;^o TO JUN 1 6 1Q/1 fcOAN C-V LD 21-100m-7,'33 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY l&aberlp WILLIAMS * WILKIN8 COMPANY BALTIMORE, L T . S. A.