David White was an American paleobotanist and geologist.
Background
David White was born on his father's farm near Palmyra, Wayne County, N. Y. , the youngest of eight children, six boys and two girls. His father was Asa Kendrick White, a descendant of John White of Somersetshire, England, who was in Salem, Massachussets, in 1638 and later lived in Wenham and Lancaster; his mother, Elvira Foster, was a descendant of Christopher Foster, who emigrated to Boston in 1635 and in 1651 settled in Southampton, Long Island. Christened Charles David, he did not use the name Charles after 1886.
Education
Possibly the earliest influence to give a scientific trend to the boy's mind was exerted by an immigrant from Holland, Daniel Van Cruyningham, who worked as a farm hand for David's father, subsequently becoming principal of the nearby Marion Collegiate Institute, where David got his preparation for college, and from which he graduated in 1880. In 1882 he entered Cornell on a competitive county scholarship, graduating with the degree of B. S. in 1886.
Career
He worked on the farm for two years during the summer months and taught district school winters. He went to Washington as a paleobotanic draftsman for the Geological Survey but was soon at work on a bibliography of fossil publications. From the beginning of his Washington career until 1910, when he was placed in charge of the official work in the eastern coal fields of the United States, White devoted most of his time to research in the field of paleobotany. After that date he was gradually drawn more and more into administrative and advisory duties. In 1912 he was made chief geologist of the Geological Survey. The same year he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and became increasingly occupied on its committees and as an active officer. He also served as curator of paleobotany at the United States National Museum from 1903 to 1935. From 1924 to 1927 he was chairman of the division of geology and geography of the National Research Council and raised funds for a large-scale investigation of the origin and properties of petroleum. He gave up the post of chief geologist in 1922 to return to research, but his administrative duties still continued heavy. His first paleobotanical publication was "On Cretaceous Plants from Martha's Vineyard" (American Journal of Science, February 1890), but that he had already been working in what became his chosen field is shown by the authoritative monograph Fossil Flora of the Lower Coal Measures of Missouri (1899). He brought to his work an unusually keen and active mind and was never content with a mere description of fossils but was interested in their interpretation in terms of their chronology and environment, particularly their climatic significance, and the part which they took in the formation of coal and petroleum. Thus there emerged in these earlier studies the more or less adumbrated outlines of the problems to which he eventually furnished solutions that won him a high place in the history of science. The methodology underlying and vitalizing White's paleobotanical work is exemplified in his first papers on Paleozoic plants appearing in the early nineties to almost the same degree as in Flora of the Hermit Shale, Grand Canyon, Arizona, published by the Carnegie Institution in 1929. This method consisted essentially in a much greater precision than had been practised by the earlier scientists, and in the discrimination of slight differences, particularly if such differences could be shown to occur at different stratigraphic horizons. Its success demanded a combination of work on exposures in the field with office studies of the resulting collections, and it was in striking contrast to the older methods in which collections were made by a field man and then referred to an authority who usually was unfamiliar with the field relations or even the exact horizon from which the collections had been made. The first and perhaps the most startling demonstration of White's refined method was the proof that the familiar coal measures sequence of Pennsylvania did not extend unaltered throughout the whole Appalachian coal basin, but that the earlier (Pottsville) was greatly thickened in the central and southern coal fields, and that all of the coals of Tennessee and Alabama and much of those in southwestern West Virginia and northeastern Kentucky were of Pottsville age. These conclusions, stated in "Deposition of the Appalachian Pottsville", were contrary to prevailing opinion, but in a relatively short time they were generally accepted. White's method also rendered correlations, both interprovincial and intercontinental, more truthful than those that had been made previously. White early recognized that most coal beds consisted of the débris plants which grew in the vicinity (autochthonous) and were not formed by drifted accumulations (allochthonous). Equally early he recognized that coal was a biochemical and geodynamic metamorphism from what were essentially peats and lignites. Although appreciating that the type of plant material affected the type of coal, he believed that this was a minor factor compared with that of subsequent dynamic action, shown by the loss of hydrogen and oxygen. This conviction led him to make a classification of coals in which the degree of deoxygenation served as an index of coal evolution and this in turn led to the generalization announced in 1915 commonly known as the "carbon-ration hypothesis, " which not only enables the determination of the rank of a coal but also limits the extent of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons. Although this brilliant idea attracted little attention at the time, a few years afterward its economic importance was universally recognized in petroleum exploratory work. White's theory was eventually amplified and clarified in the last scientific paper which he wrote -"Metamorphism of Organic Sediments and Derived Oils, " completed only a few days before his death and published in the Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, May 1935. As chief geologist of the Survey, White actively supported a survey of national coal and oil resources and combated waste. He also concentrated the energies of the Geological Survey, particularly during the war period (1914 - 18), on a search for domestic sources for potash and on studies of American oil shales as future sources of gasoline. To him were intrusted the large collections of fossil plants accumulated during the field studies of the Brazilian coal commission. These plants from southern Brazil, of Permian age, associated with late Paleozoic glaciation, furnished him a basis for several contributions on geological climates, a subject to which several earlier papers were devoted. He was tall, erect, and active both mentally and physically, socially minded, always helpful in his contacts, and never thoughtlessly critical. He was especially interested in work among the Southern mountain people. Offers in the commercial field never tempted him; he preferred to devote himself to research that would be of general service rather than profit financially by employing his talent in behalf of special interests. In February 1931 he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, but recovered and returned to his work. Death came to him some four years later, in Washington, from a similar hemorrhage.
Achievements
David White has been listed as a noteworthy geologist by Marquis Who's Who.
Connections
On Feburary 2, 1888, he married Mary Elizabeth Houghton of Worcester, Massachussets, who had been a student with him at Cornell; they had no children.
