Chapter 1. Iddings' petrographic education

Extract from beginning of chapter:

GRADUATE STUDY AT YALE

My first vivid impression of petrography as a definite study in itself was gotten by watching George Hawes¹ working with a microscope over thin sections of granite from New Hampshire. His enthusiasm, his radiant smile, the glow of his blushing cheeks, and the merry twinkle of his bright eyes as he turned from the microscope to explain its uses in determining the minerals, brilliantly illuminated like bits of stained glass in a church window, were my introduction to what seemed to me a most interesting subject. This was in 1878 when I was a graduate student in the Sheffield Scientific School² at Yale, and Hawes, an instructor in blowpipe analysis, was studying in one corner of his laboratory in the Peabody Museum the rocks of New Hampshire for Professor Charles H. Hitchcock.³ Up to that time, my acquaintance with rocks was confined to definitions in Manual of Geology (J.D. Dana, 1874) and to collections of hand specimens and such material as one sees in buildings and monuments. As a boy I became familiar with the red sandstone and trap rocks of Orange, New Jersey, and encountered the same in the vicinity of New Haven, Connecticut.⁴ Besides these I had seen the gneisses and schists of Manhattan Island,⁵ and the garnet-bearing mica-schists along the Patuxent River in Montgomery County, Maryland. At this period, geology and mineralogy were for me merely a means to an end, namely, the profession of a mining engineer and the acquisition of a