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North American Index Fossils: Conularida, Pteropoda, Cephalopoda, Annelida, Trilobita, Phyllopoda, Ostracoda, Cirripedia, Malacostraca, Merostomata, ... Ophiuroidea, Asteroidea, Echinoidea and A
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Ordovician Fossils of North China (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Ordovician Fossils of North China
In his cl...)
Excerpt from Ordovician Fossils of North China
In his classical work on China, Ferdinand von Richthofen classified the great limestone formations which underlie the coal-bearing series of north China as Kohlen kalk and refere them to the Carboniferous Limestone of Europe. In this he was not altogether wrong, for we now recognize the existence of Lower Carboniferous (dinantian) limestones in north China, which carry many elements of the Carboniferous Limestone fauna of western Europe.
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Amadeus William Grabau was an expatriate American geologist and paleontologist.
Background
Grabau was born on January 9, 1870, in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, the third of ten children of Rev. William H. Grabau, a Lutheran minister, and Maria (von Rohr) Grabau. His grandfathers, Rev. Johannes A. A. Grabau and Henry von Rohr, led a group of German Lutherans to Buffalo, New York, for the sake of religious freedom. During a bitter ecclesiastical controversy, William Grabau resigned his Buffalo pastorate and moved to Wisconsin. Amadeus grew up in a family with a strongly Germanic outlook. His mother died when he was six, but he became deeply attached to his stepmother, who encouraged his intellectual pursuits.
Education
Grabau at first attended his father's parochial school but was later enrolled in the Cedarburgh high school. Later, for a time, the boy attended a high school in Buffalo; after he was apprenticed to a bookbinder, he continued his education through evening classes. Botany was his favorite study in Wisconsin, but in Buffalo he was attracted to the well-preserved Middle Devonian fossils of the region and became active in the Buffalo Society of the Natural Sciences. Grabau's performance in a correspondence course in mineralogy caught the eye of geologist William Otis Crosby, a curator of the Boston Society of Natural History, who in 1890 gave him a job in the society's mineral supply department. This appointment also enabled Grabau to become a special student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After additional preparation at the Boston Latin School, he matriculated at M. I. T. in 1891 and received the B. S. degree in 1896.
Career
In 1897, Grabau taught paleontology at M. I. T. He next received a fellowship from Harvard, where he took an M. S. degree in 1898 and a D. Sc. degree in 1900. While finishing his graduate studies, he taught geology at Tufts College and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After a year (1900-1901) as professor of geology at Rensselaer, he went to Columbia University as lecturer in paleontology, becoming in turn adjunct professor (1902) and professor of paleontology (1905). Although his earliest interests had been in the physiography of the glaciated areas near Buffalo, Grabau's attraction to fossils and their stratigraphic position become paramount. In Boston he was strongly influenced by Alpheus Hyatt and R. T. Jackson, who emphasized the biological aspects of paleontology. Work in the Devonian of western New York led to study of the Devonian of Michigan, and through it to inquiry into lateral changes in rock type and fauna. The Silurian rocks underlying the Devonian, and forming the falls at Niagara, also attracted his attention. While at Columbia, Grabau published many papers concerned primarily with the stratigraphy of the Silurian and Devonian of the northeastern United States but including some investigations in other areas and disciplines. He was, for example, one of the first persons to write extensively on deltaic and continental sedimentation. A series of short papers on gastropods attempted to support the idea of ontogeny as a reflection of phylogeny, and other speculative aspects of Darwinian evolution. These were not always well received. However, his magnificent two-volume work with Hervey W. Shimer, The North American Index of Fossils (1909-1910), is both a compilation of ranges and a classification which in some points was superior to the classic work of Karl von Zittel in this field; no one attempted to revise the work for more than thirty years. In paleontology his view of species tended to exceed the generally accepted limits of variation; he was a "splitter" rather than a "lumper. " Grabau was methodical in the classic Teutonic model. The elaborate terminology of his Geology of the Nonmetallic Mineral Deposits Other Than Silicates (1920) tended to confuse the reader, and he never established a "school" of followers. His two-volume Textbook of Geology (1920-1921) compares favorably with contemporary texts, and his earlier Principles of Stratigraphy (1913; 2nd ed. , 1924) possibly contains more material for the stratigrapher, paleontologist, and sedimentologist than any other single work. Anti-German sentiment in the United States, coupled with his pro-German pronouncements during World War I, forced Grabau to leave Columbia University in 1919. His views also led to a family estrangement, and he migrated to China. Though years later there was reconciliation, his wife and daughter never visited him in his adopted country. From 1920 on, Grabau made his home in Beijing. He was a professor of paleontology in the National University of Beijing and simultaneously chief paleontologist of the National Geological Survey of China. For two decades, while in charge of the survey's paleontological laboratory, he trained stratigraphers and paleontologists. A man of prodigious energy, within three years he had written a 500-page book, Stratigraphy of China (1923), a basic work revised five years later. While he continued to emphasize the Devonian and its fossils - publishing another 500-page monograph on Devonian brachiopods in 1931 - his writing ranged throughout the subject of the Paleozoic rocks of China. He produced major works on Chinese Permian brachiopods as well as a volume on this subject for the American Museum's Natural History of Central Asia. He also contributed several large papers on corals, while continuing a steady stream of shorter works. Grabau attended the 1933 International Geological Congress in Washington, D. C. Following his return to China he continued to write on specific topics in paleontology and stratigraphy, but his principal effort went into elaboration of his pulsation hypothesis. Further, he suggested that there was movement of the continents alternately toward and away from the poles to account for glacial and mild climates. His four books documenting these ideas with the geologic record of Cambrian and Ordovician strata show an amazing grasp of the world literature. These concepts as they applied throughout the geologic record are summarized in his last major work, The Rhythm of the Ages (1940). In 1937, when the Japanese took Beijing, Grabau remained behind because of illness and lack of communication facilities; according to some reports, he prevented the despoiling of geological collections and libraries. After 1941 he was interned. Crippled by arthritis and suffering from ill health and insufficient food, Grabau declined both mentally and physically. Although he lived to survive the war, his career had ended. He died in Beijing at the age of seventy-six of internal hemorrhage and was buried in the compound of the geological department of the National University of Beijing.