Andrew Cowper Lawson was born in Anstruther, a village on the Firth of Forth, in Scotland, the oldest of ten children of William and Jessie Kerr Lawson. His father was a sailor, who, a year after being shipwrecked off Cape Horn, moved his family to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where he found employment in a shipyard.
Andrew Lawson, six years old at the time, entered the public grammar school and, upon completion of the eighth grade in 1876, was admitted to the Hamilton Collegiate Institute. When his father's health failed, Lawson's mother was forced to earn a livelihood for the family as newspaper correspondent and freelance writer. Through her efforts, all of the children were given the opportunity to obtain a college education. When the family moved to Toronto, Lawson entered the university there. He received the B. A. degree in 1883, as gold medalist in natural science, and the M. A. in 1885. He also attended lectures on geology and mineralogy at McGill University. In 1886 Lawson enrolled at the Johns Hopkins University in order to study under George Huntington Williams, who was trained by Harry Rosenbusch in Germany and who had brought to America the new technique of studying rocks under the polarizing microscope. The petrology of the rocks of the Rainy Lake district was the subject of Lawson's doctoral dissertation; he received the degree in 1888.
While studying, Lawson contributed to the support of the family by tutoring and newspaper work. During the summer of 1882, as field assistant to Robert Bell of the Geological Survey of Canada, Lawson journeyed by buckboard across the plains of Saskatchewan and Alberta to the headwaters of the Athabasca. This expedition beyond the frontier left a lasting impression on him. Lawson joined the staff of the Geological Survey of Canada, and at the age of twenty-two he was assigned the task of mapping the Lake of the Woods area of Ontario, a region then inaccessible by rail and largely unsurveyed. Lawson's work there led to a new interpretation of the Precambrian. The Laurentian gneisses, previously regarded as the oldest rock formation, were found to be intrusive into and therefore younger than the schists. The schists, mainly of volcanic origin and formerly assigned to the Huronian, were called Keewatin by Lawson, a designation still used.
Lawson's next assignment was in the adjacent Rainy Lake area, where the Keewatin was found to be underlaid by a still older group of schists of sedimentary origin which he named Coutchiching for the place of their occurrence. Lawson's conclusions were considered rank heresy at the time and only after a hard fight did he convince the Geological Survey to publish the Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake reports. When he presented his findings at the International Geological Congress in London in 1888 Lawson established himself as one of the leading students of Precambrian geology.
In 1890 Lawson resigned from the Canadian Survey and after a brief interlude as consulting geologist in Vancouver, British Columbia, accepted an appointment as assistant professor of mineralogy and geology at the University of California at Berkeley. He became full professor in 1899, and professor emeritus in 1928. On arriving in California Lawson at once began mapping the geology of the environs of Berkeley. The project was extended to encompass the whole of the San Francisco Bay area. The results appeared as the San Francisco Folio of the Geologic Atlas of the United States, published in 1914 by the U. S. Geological Survey. This classic work established the geological framework of the central Coast Ranges.
Lawson proved to be an exceptionally able teacher. He established one of the first field courses in geology (as distinguished from field excursions) in America and trained generations of graduate students in both field work and microscopic petrography. His greatest influence on students, however, grew out of his seminar--a course based on critical reading and appraisal of published papers. His sharp mind, his forceful manner, and his contempt for shoddy thinking left an indelible imprint on all members of this class.
Lawson was also an effective organizer and administrator. He developed the course program in geology at Berkeley and in 1893 established the first scientific publication series there--the Bulletin of the Department of Geology, University of California, which he edited for thirty-five years. He was also a founder of the cordilleran section of the Geological Society of America and its first secretary (1900-1905; chairman 1907-1911). He became the chairman of the department of geology at Berkeley in 1907 and for a short period (1915 - 1918) was dean of the school of mines. After the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Lawson was named chairman of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission. The first report of this commission, published in 1908 by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, was the most complete and informative treatise on the subject and led to the formulation of the elastic rebound theory of the origin of earthquakes.
Lawson periodically returned to the study of the Precambrian, and in 1911, at the request of the director of the Geological Survey of Canada, he reexamined the geology of the Rainy Lake region--a study instigated by a controversy about the position of the Coutchiching schists which Lawson had described as the oldest rock known. Lawson's work led him to reaffirm the inferior position of the Coutchiching, but he demonstrated that a younger sedimentary series uncomformably overlies both the Laurentian gneisses and the rocks into which they are intruded. This series was in turn cut by granites of a younger age to which Lawson gave the name Algoman--a name still widely used.
Lawson was a great admirer of Grove Karl Gilbert and assigned his seminar Gilbert's classic works on the Henry Mountains of Utah and on Lake Bonneville. Gilbert may also have influenced Lawson's own interest in geomorphology--especially of the desert areas and of elevated strand lines. He early (1893) described the tilted shorelines of Lake Superior--the tilt being due to isostatic readjustment following the melting of the continental ice-sheet--and, in other papers of the same period, discussed the elevated and deformed shorelines of California. His interest in deserts encompassed the characteristic great alluvial fan accumulations and the topographic profiles of such regions. Isostasy was Lawson's chief interest in his later years. He attempted to reinterpret, by the principles of isostatic balance, the geologic history of such diverse features as deltas, Precambrian peneplains, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and folded mountains.
Lawson was an inveterate traveler and attended most of the International Geological Congresses, including those in London in 1888, Russia in 1897, Canada in 1913, Madrid in 1926, and Washington in 1933. He believed travel to be an essential ingredient in the education of a geologist, and also made many long journeys to other areas, including the Far East. He was president of the Seismological Society of America (1909) and of the Geological Society of America (1926) and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1924) and the American Philosophical Society.
Lawson was an enigmatic personality. He was a penetrating observer, especially in the field. He was a stimulating and fertile thinker and a formidable opponent in open debate, held in awe by his students and professional colleagues alike. Although his overpowering personality and contentiousness wilted thin-skinned opponents, there was another side to his personality that few realized. He was a gifted writer not only of scientific prose but also of poetry, much of which was published in the University of California Chronicle. His poems reveal a person of great sensitivity and perceptive nature; he was also a collector of paintings. Lawson died in San Leandro, California, just before his ninety-first birthday.
Lawson was known for his field studies of the Precambrian rocks of Ontario region. He was noted for his 1908 report on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake which became known as the "Lawson Report". He was also the first person to identify and name the San Andreas Fault in 1895, and after the 1906 quake, the first to delineate the entire length of the San Andreas Fault which previously had been noted only in the San Francisco Bay Area. He also named the Franciscan Complex. Lawson received a number of awards and honorary degrees. The mineral Lawsonite was named for him.
Member of the National Academy of Sciences
Member of the American Philosophical Society
In 1889 Lawson married Ludovika von Jansch of Brunn, Moravia, who was living in Ottawa. They had four sons. In 1931, two years after the death of his first wife, when Lawson was seventy years old, he married Isabel R. Collins, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of the director of the Geological Survey of Canada; their son was born when Lawson was eighty-seven.
