Abstract In the 1780s observations of geological phenomena by American authors appeared in American publications. Europeans had also begun to explore the American geological landscape, notably the immigrant William Maclure. But an American geological community had not yet formed by 1807. Much of this apparent ‘delay’ in the development of the geological sciences in the United States resulted from the cultural and political realities of the new nation. In a new and democratic–egalitarian society, it took time to negotiate the nature of the appropriate public support for the practice of science. Individuals with the resources to provide private patronage for scientific undertakings were exceedingly few. The educational institutions that would ultimately be a major factor in the transmission and extension of geological knowledge were only then beginning to multiply and grow. In 1807 Benjamin Silliman completed his first year of science instruction at Yale, but offered only chemistry and mineralogy. Geology would wait several more years. Other institutions and individuals critical to the future of geology in the United States were ‘born’ in 1807 – including the United States Coast Survey, and Louis Agassiz and David Dale Owen. Roughly another decade would pass before a ‘geological community’ would emerge in the United States.

Abstract When Louis Agassiz went to America in 1846, he took with him, or was soon joined by, a whole retinue of Swiss protègès and assistants who in the preceding decade had turned his scientific work into a corporate, collective enterprise. Among the new arrivals were E. Desor, A. Guyot, L. Lesquereux, C. Girard, and L. Pourtalès—a labour pool that enabled Agassiz to re-assemble the Neuchâtel ‘scientific factory’ on American shores. Indeed, some of the troop immediately went to work under Agassiz's supervision, plunging eagerly into the rich new fields of investigation that America afforded them. Although it was seemingly productive, by 1850 the group had dispersed. Some of the Neuchâtel naturalists, urged on by the egalitarian politics of the day, lost patience with Agassiz's domineering ways and determined to strike out on their own, fashioning independent careers. Others, still loyal to Agassiz, left to establish themselves in regular posts. All of these young naturalists struggled to adapt to American culture and make a go of it. Although Agassiz himself was hospitably received and well provided for, his followers found that they were looked down upon because of their foreign manners, broken English, and idealized scientific pursuits that appeared lacking in usefulness to their practically-minded hosts. Nor did they have abundant prospects for earning a living, obliged as they were to compete with native-born Americans for the few full-time scientific positions then available. Nevertheless, in the end they were remarkably successful. Lesquereux in palaeobotany and Guyot in physical geography reached the top in their fields in America. These two, along with Pourtalès, were honoured by election to the National Academy of Sciences. As for the others, Desor was launched on a productive career as a Quaternary geologist, when a family matter recalled him to Switzerland, and Girard was building an excellent reputation in ichthyology and herpetology, when he was obliged to return to Europe because of his support for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Working in geology and natural history, where broad experience and comparative observation paid dividends, the Swiss turned their European background into an advantage.

Abstract When an 18-year-old Arthur Smith Woodward arrived at the new home of the natural history collections of the British Museum on Cromwell Road, South Kensington in August 1882, he could not have envisaged the treasure trove of vertebrate fossils that awaited him. Even before the move to South Kensington, the collections already contained many fossil fish specimens first described and figured by the famous Swiss zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz in his monumental work Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles . The fabulous fossil fish collections of Lord Egerton and the Earl of Enniskillen arrived shortly after, including many more of Agassiz’s type specimens. However, Agassiz had left much work undone and ideas on fossil fish systematics had changed in the 50 years since he had started publishing his research. Making full use of the collection, and adding to it, Smith Woodward embarked on a scientific career that was to see him become the world’s leading authority on fossil fishes. When he retired from the Museum at the age of 60, his successors inherited the most extensive and well-documented collection of fossil fishes in the world.

Abstract Smith Woodward embarked on the production of a catalogue of fossil fishes half a century after Louis Agassiz began a similar exercise. These two palaeontological goliaths remain the only authorities who saw all relevant fossil fish material in all important collections. Between their works there was a substantial increase in the number of species recognized, reflecting the nineteenth-century passion for collecting, the rise of museums, as well as an acceptance that species change through time. Agassiz was working in pre-evolutionary days but Smith Woodward’s view on fish diversity was strongly influenced by the theory of evolution and specifically the writings of Thomas Henry Huxley as well as those of Edward Drinker Cope and Ramsay Heatley Traquair and their ideas of grades of evolution. Many of Smith Woodward’s generic and species descriptions survive today as his lasting legacy. Higher classification has changed considerably with new discoveries and differing methods of classification.

The Superior Lobe of the Wisconsin glaciation was initially localized by the deep lowlands of the Lake Superior Basin, cut in relatively nonresistant late Precambrian red sandstone. It advanced southwest out of this lowland and crossed a low divide leading to the Minneapolis Lowland, which is underlain by Precambrian and Cambrian sandstones. The conspicuous drumlins of central Minnesota, and the rugged St. Croix Moraine that borders the drumlins on the west and loops across the Minneapolis Lowland, delimit the major stillstand of the Superior Lobe. Discovery of red drift with diagnostic rock types from the Lake Superior Basin (agate, amygdaloidal basalt, red and purple felsite, red sandstone) in southwestern Minnesota indicates that the Superior Lobe once extended farther southwest down the Minneapolis Lowland to the Minnesota River valley and beyond during a pre-Wisconsin or early Wisconsin glaciation. As the Superior Lobe wasted from the St. Croix Moraine, a series of sharp subparallel tunnel valleys were cut into the drumlin plain and even into the underlying bedrock by subglacial streams driven to high velocity by the hydrostatic pressure resulting from the load of many hundreds of meters of active ice. Subsequent thinning and stagnation of the Superior Lobe opened the tunnel valleys to atmospheric pressure and converted the subglacial streams from major erosional streams to small depositional streams, which formed discontinuous eskers along many of the tunnel valleys. After distant retreat the Superior Lobe readvanced three times out of its basin, twice after proglacial lakes had produced a supply of red clay to be overridden. These latter two readvances may represent surges of the ice lobe resulting from the buildup of basal meltwater behind the frozen toe of the ice lobe. The Des Moines Lobe, originating in the Red River Valley of Manitoba and western Minnesota, moved southeastward down the Minnesota River valley and thence northeastward up the Minneapolis Lowland, overriding a segment of the St. Croix Moraine and extending across the state to Wisconsin in the form of the Grantsburg Sublobe. Its drift is characteristically gray to yellowish-brown and highly calcareous. The ice incorporated masses of Superior Lobe drift as it overrode the St. Croix Moraine, stringing them out to produce a complex of foliated red and gray drift. The Grantsburg Sublobe blocked the Mississippi River and other drainage from central Minnesota to form glacial Lake Grantsburg about 16,000 yrs ago. By that time the Superior Lobe had withdrawn completely from central Minnesota, for it supplied meltwater (and red clay) only on the east, down the St. Croix River and its upper tributaries. Meanwhile, the main Des Moines Lobe, which thus far supplied ice only to the Grantsburg Sublobe, thickened sufficiently to spill southward out of the Minnesota Valley across a low divide into Iowa. This produced the lobe that reached Des Moines 14,000 yrs ago. Beheading of the Grantsburg Sublobe in this manner caused the stagnation of the latter, which then wasted to form the Anoka Sandplain in its stead. The St. Louis Sublobe protruded from the Des Moines Lobe in northwestern Minnesota at a later date (about 12,000 yrs ago). Its meltwater flowed down the St. Louis River toward Lake Superior, but it was diverted southward into the St. Croix drainage by the still-existing Superior Lobe. Final wastage of the entire Des Moines Lobe produced glacial Lake Agassiz in northwestern Minnesota and adjacent North Dakota and Manitoba.

Abstract In the early 1830s Charles Lyell was convinced that much of western Europe had been submerged during the Pleistocene by cold seas strewn with icebergs; the relicts of whose loads of rock and mud occurred on land as boulder clay and erratic blocks. Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz disagreed, considering in 1837 that these were the products of deposition by a great ice sheet. Archibald Geikie realized by 1863 that Lyell was wrong. Mountain glaciers had carved the topography of Scotland and other parts of the UK, feeding an ice sheet that left glacial erratics behind when it melted away. He hoped, in vain, to change Lyell’s mind. Archibald Geikie’s mantle passed to his brother James, who compiled evidence from around the world to demonstrate the correctness of his brother’s thesis. It was published in 1874 just before Lyell died still arguing for the correctness of his iceberg theory, which gave us the word ‘drift’ for the unconsolidated deposits mantling the UK. Even so, by then Lyell had gone some way – no doubt partly influenced by the Geikies – to accepting that in certain instances glacial action had, indeed, moved large erratic blocks – locally even uphill, as in the Jura.