Richard Montgomery Field (1885-1961; Sc.D. Harvard University, 1918) His dissertation research was on "The stratigraphy of the Middle Ordovician formations of central and north-central Pennsylvania". Among Field's early publications were "A natural classification of sedimentary rocks", "The great Bahama Bank; studies in marine carbonate sediments", "Paleoceanography of limestone seas", "Geology of the Bahamas", "Ordovician sections of Great Britain and their American equivalents", "Microbiology and the marine limestones", and "Ecology of calcareous sediments in the West Indies". His last publication was on "Geophysical - geochemical - geological significance of geosynclines" and thus went back to a major concept introduced by James Hall, of whom more is written below.
      In the early 1930s, Field transformed himself into a geophysicist, measuring gravitational anomalies in the Caribbean. He was president of the American Geophysical Union from 1938 to 1941, and he won AGU's William Bowie medal for "outstanding contributions to fundamental geophysics and for unselfish cooperation in research" in 1954.
     Field was remembered as "a genius at spotting the fruitful new field for research before anyone else appreciated its importance. He was equally a genius at spotting the young men who could embark on such research, and finally a genius at finding the wherewithal, the money, the submarine, the international connections, or whatever else was necessary" (quoted in Dott, 2001, GSA Bull. 113: 1008). Two examples of his recognition of talent were his recruitment of Harry H. Hess and J. Tuzo Wilson to the Geology program at Princeton.
     Field's ability to find wherewithal and funds was demonstrated when, in 1926, he organized Princeton's Summer School of Geology and Natural Resources, a yearly field course designed to train students in techniques of geological and geophysical research. The program still exists today. He also began the "Red Lodge Project" in 1930 and its successor, the Yellowstone-Bighorn Research Association, in 1936. Perhaps the most striking example of his skill in seeing a grand project to fruition was his annual use of a specially equipped Pullman railroad car (shown behind Field at right) to conduct Princeton geology field trips across North America in the 1920s.
      Field's D.Sc. advisor was Percy Edward Raymond (see below)

Percy Edward Raymond (1879-1952; Ph.D. Yale University, 1905). He began his geological education with an A.B. at Cornell, where his mentor was Gilbert Harris (see below). He went to Yale to study with Charles Emerson Beecher, but Beecher died in 1904. Raymond then left Yale to be Assistant Curator at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. However, he was soon invited back to Yale to help Charles Schuchert prepare for his teaching there, because the latter had never attended, let alone taught, a college class. Raymond and Schuchert became good friends, and Raymond finished his Ph.D. degree in 1905 with Schuchert (see below) as his advisor. The two remained friends until Schuchert's death, but Raymond's work was mostly with trilobites, which reflected Beecher's brief influence.
      Raymond was Assistant Curator at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh until 1910 and Paleontologist of the Geological Survey of Canada from 1910 to 1912, when he became a professor of paleontology at Harvard, a position he held until 1945. He is perhaps most noted for resuming excavations in the Burgess Shale, and for his textbook, Prehistoric Life. He was president of the Paleontological Society in 1934 and vice-president of the Geological Society of America in the same year. He was nonetheless remembered as someone who did not take himself excessively seriously and for his whimsical sense of humor. (See Henry C. Stetson's memorial in GSA Proceedings 1952 p. 121-126.)

Gilbert Dennison Harris (1864-1952: degree from Cornell University, 1887). Harris worked for the Arkansas Geological Survey from 1888 to 1890, the U.S. Geological Survey in 1892, and then for the Geological Survey of Texas. Harris's main interests lay in Eocene molluscs, and he went to Europe to study the London and Paris Basins. He was Professor of Paleontology at Cornell from 1894 to 1934. Much of his work in those years was in the Tertiary of the Gulf Coast, and he was in charge of a geological survey of Louisiana from 1899 to 1909. His work in those years also involved the origin of Gulf Coast salt domes.
      Harris was noted for only communicating with his colleagues by letter and for lecturing to undergraduates while standing at the side of the room. Near his retirement, he founded the Paleontolgical Research Institute in Ithaca, NY. Some would allege that he founded PRI to have a fireproof permanent storage place for his collections, having become convinced that the wooden storage cabinets provided by Cornell were a firetrap for his specimens. He personally printed many of the early issues of the Bulletin of American Paleontology on his own printing press. He was president of the Paleontological Society in 1936, and he was vice president of the Geological Society of America in 1937. (See A.A. Olsson's memorial in GSA Proceedings 1953, p. 125-130.)
     Harris's mentors at Cornell were Samuel Gardner Williams, Henry Shaler Williams (see below), and Charles Smith Prosser.

Charles Schuchert (1858-1942). Schuchert never received an academic degree and in fact never finished high school. He nonethless went from working in his father's furniture factory to serving as Ulrich's lithographer to working as an assistant to Hall at the New York State Museum to being Curator of the U.S. National Museum from 1894 to1904 and then Professor of paleontology at Yale University from 1904 to 1923, serving as chairman of the Yale Geology Department from 1909 to 1921.
      Schuchert was author of A Text-Book of Geology (1915), Historical Geology of North America (1935), Textbook of Historical Geology, Paleogeography of North America, and The Earth and Its Rhythms (1927). His students included Percy Edward Raymond (1905), William Henry Twenhofel (1912), and Carl Owen Dunbar (1917).
      Schuchert was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1911 and won the Geological Society of America's Penrose Medal in 1934. He also won the National Academy of Science's Mary Clark Thompson Medal in 1934. He was the second president of the Paleontological Society in 1910 and president of the Geological Society of America in 1922. He was awarded honorary Sc.D. degrees by Yale in 1930 and Harvard in 1935. His impact on paleontology was such that the Paleontological Society now gives a Schuchert Medal. Schuchert's further honors can be found in a memorial by A. Knopf (1952, Nat. Acad. Sci. Biog. Mem., v. 27, p.363-389), in which Twenhofel is quoted as characterizing Schuchert as "A great man, a good man, a great scientist, [and] a great invesitgator".
      Schuchert's mentors were Edward Oscar Ulrich (see below), John Mason Clarke (see below), and James Hall (see below). However, in characteristic humor and humility, Schuchert maintained that his invitation to work with Hall hinged mostly on the latter's desire to get Schuchert's extensive collection of brachiopods to Albany.

Edward Oscar Ulrich (1857-1944; German Wallace and Baldwin College, Berea, Ohio (1874-1876), no degree; later honorary A.M. (1886) and Ph.D. (1892) from same institution) His research dealt with a remarkable range of Paleozoic invertebrate fossils. He was curator for the Cincinnati Society of Natural History from 1877 to 1881, paleontologist for a variety of geological surveys in the Midwest from 1885 to 1896, and geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey from 1897 to 1932. He was president of the Paleontological Society in 1915. He won the Geological Society of America's Penrose Medal in 1932 and the National Academy of Science's Mary Clark Thompson Medal in 1930. His mentor at the Cincinnati Society of Natural History was R. M. Byrnes.

John Mason Clarke (1857-1925; B.S. Amherst College, 1877). After his degree at Amherst, he studied at the University of Göttingen in Germany but was never able to finish his Ph.D. work there. He was professor of geology and mineralogy at Smith College, 1881-1884, then professor at Amherst. In 1886 he became Assistant Paleontologist of the state of New York. On James Hall's death in 1898, he became State Paleontologist of New York, and in 1904 he became State Geologist of New York. From 1894 onwards he was also a professor at Resselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. (See C. Schuchert (1925), Bull. GSA, 37, p. 49-93.)
      In 1909, Clarke was elected the first president of the Paleontological Society. He was president of the Geological Society of America in 1916. He was inducted in the National Academy of Science in 1909 and was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Geological Society of London. He won the National Academy of Science's Mary Clark Thompson Medal in 1925. He was awarded six honorary doctorates, of which the one from the Universiy of Marburg in 1898 he considered most important.
      Clarke's mentors were Benjamin Kendall Emerson (see below) at Amherst and Adolph von Koenen (see below) at Göttingen. He also worked under James Hall (see below) for 12 years in the Geological Survey of New York and was his successor there.

James Hall (1811-1898; B.N.S. Rensselaer School, 1832; M.A. Rensselaer School (Resselaer Polytechnic Institute), 1832). Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 1832- and Chief Geologist of the State of New York 1839-. He was also briefly state geologist for Iowa (1855) and Wisconsin (1857) and contibuted to the geological surveys of Vermont (1844), Minnesota (1859), and Canada. He was director of the New York State Museum at Albany from 1866 to 1894, and it was in that role that he recruited Charles Schuchert, or at least Schuchert's brachiopod collection, to Albany.
      Hall was the progenitor of the concepts of geosynclines and isostasy. His most famous published work, however, was the 13-volume Paleontology of New York. He also wrote the paleontological reports of Fremont's Expedition to Oregon and California (1843), the U.S. and Mexican Boundary Survey (1848), Stansbury's Exploration of the Salt Lake Valley (1849), the Pacific Railroad Surveys (1853), and the U.S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel (1877).
      Hall was awarded the Geological Society of London's Wollaston Medal in 1858. . One historical account notes that "Hall carried on an immense correspondence, hurried, hypochrondriacal, irascible, irate, and nearly all of it dealing with one survey or another." One sign of his drive for geological research is his participation an expedition into the Ural Mountains of Russia at the age of 86.
      Hall's mentor was Amos Eaton (see below)

Benjamin Kendall Emerson (1843-1932; Undergraduate degree from Amherst 1865; Ph.D., University of Göttingen, ca. 1870). His dissertation was "Die Liasmulde von Markoldendorf bei Einbeck" ("The early Jurassic Markoldendorf Basin near Einbeck", a town north of Göttingen). He was a professor at Amherst and at Smith, and much of his work concerned the geology of New England. He was president of the Geological Society of America in 1899 and 1900 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For more, see F. B. Loomis (1933), Bull. GSA, 44, p. 317-325, and A. C. Lane (1933), Proc. AAAS, 68, p. 625-67. His mentor is not known.

Adolph von Koenen (Ph.D., University of Berlin, 1865). Most of his research was concerned with fossil molluscs in northern Germany. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Science. His collections are still housed in the Paleotontology Institute of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. His mentor may have been someone named Bergmann.

Amos Eaton (1776-1842; B.A. Williams College, 1799). Eaton began his working life as a lawyer and land agent in Catskill, New York., but he was framed in a forgery trial in 1811 and was sentenced to life in prison. He studied science while in prison until 1817, when he was pardoned by New York Governor Dewitt Clinton. He then studied at Yale for a year with Benjamin Silliman and Eli Ives. After teaching at Williams, he was a travelling lecturer for the next few years, and completed a geological survey of the Albany area thanks to the funding of Stephen Van Rensselaer. This survey established Eaton as one of the foremost geologists in America, and he has been called the "Father of American Geology".
        In 1824 Eaton was named the first professor at his patron's new Rensselaer School (now Resselaer Polytechnic Institute). He was an ardent opponent of learning by rote and was famous for his field excursions in teaching. He also supported and taught at the Troy Women's Seminary. While at Rensselaer, he also began the first academic program in civil engineering. He authored textbooks and manuals in both geology and botany.
        Eaton's scientific mentors were Benjamin Silliman (see below) and Eli Ives (see below).

Benjamin Silliman, Sr. (1779-1864; B.A. Yale College, 1796; also studied at the University of Edinburgh). Silliman was professor of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at Yale from 1802 to 1853, and in fact was the first professor of those subjects in the U.S. He was the founder of the American Journal of Science. Silliman College and the mineral sillimanite were named after him. His students included Amos Eaton and James Dwight Dana (1833). .
        Originally trained in chemistry, Silliman turned to James Woodhouse (see below) for training in mineralogy and geology when he received his appointment at Yale.

Eli Ives ( (1779-1861) Professor of medicine and botany at Yale. Ives was the first physician to teach a course in pediatrics in America. He was also noted for his vast knowledge of indigenous medical herbs, about which he taught in his course on Materia Medica. His mentor was Eneas Munson (see below)

James Woodhouse (1770-1809; M.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1792). He was trained in chemistry and medicine but became enthused with geology, which he taught along with medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He founded the Chemical Society of Philadelphia, the first such society in the world. A vice-president of that organization characterized Woodhouse's role in chemistry as "a strenuous vindicator of its doctrines [and] a liberal inquirer after truth, an elegant and successful experimenter." Woodhouse's geological work included a chemical analysis of basalts from North Carolina. At his death, his mineral collection was donated to the American Philosophical Society.
     Woodhouse was chosen as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania (known commonly today as "Penn") in 1795, freeing him from the practice of medicine. Woodhouse taught in a laboratory and performed experiments in his lectures, a great novelty at that time. His enthusiasm for combining experimentation and education can be seen in his publication in 1797 of The Young Chemist's Pocket Companion, Connected with a Portable Laboratory. Even Silliman, who was harshly critical of Woodhouse, conceded that "I had not reason to regret that I attended on the lectures of Dr. Woodhouse. He supplied the first stepping stones by which I was enabled at no distant day to mount higher." Both Rush and Silliman characterized Woodhouse as an atheist, and Silliman was aghast that Woodhouse had ridiculed claims that the epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793 was a punishment sent by an angry god. (For more, see E.F. Smith, James Woodhouse A Pioneer in Chemistry (John C. Winston Co, 1918)).
    Woodhouse's mentor in medicine and chemistry was Benjamin Rush (see below).

Eneas Munson, Sr. (1734-1826; B.A. Yale College, 1753) After graduation from Yale, Munson studied divinity but his career as a minister was short, both because he became ill and because his reputation as a wit and prankster did not jibe well with the character of a minister. He then studied medicine with the Rev. John Derbe, a graduate of Yale, in Long Island. In 1760 he moved to New Haven. He was one of the founders of the New Haven County Medical Association and played a major role in securing the charter of the Connecticut Medical Society. He served as the Society's president from 1794 to 1801. The Society conferred an honorary M.D. on him in 1801.
     Munson was appointed first Professor of Materia and Botany at the Medical Institution of Yale College, largely as a form of recognition for his reputation as a physician and his knowledge of materia medical and chemistry. However, he was 79 at the time and not prepared to undertake teaching. The courses were taught by his pupil, Dr. Eli Ives (see above).
     Munson wrote on the yellow fever epidemic in New Haven in 1794, arguing that the disease was contagious, and also contributed two cases to the 1788 publication of the New Haven County Medical Society.