Henry Darwin Rogers (1 August 1808 – 26 May 1866) was an American geologist. His book, The Geology of Pennsylvania: A Government Survey (1858), was regarded as one of the most important publications on American geology issued up to that point.
School period
College/University
Gallery of Henry Rogers
College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, United States
Henry Rogers studied medicine or chemistry at the College of William & Mary from 1819 until 1828.
Career
Achievements
Membership
Geological Society of London
1832 - 1866
Geological Society of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly London, W1, England, United Kingdom
In 1832 Henry Rogers became a member of the Geological Society of London.
Henry Darwin Rogers was an American professor and geologist. He is noted as an American structural geologist who contributed much to the theory of mountain building through his studies of the geology of Pennsylvania.
Background
Ethnicity:
His parents were from Ireland, near Londonderry and emigrated to the United States where they first met and became married.
Henry Darwin Rogers was born on August 1, 1808, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the third of the four sons of Patrick Kerr and Hannah (Blythe) Rogers. Of his three brothers, William also became a geologist and James and Robert, chemists. Their father had fled Ireland in 1798 because he had publicly expressed strong sympathy for the leaders of the rebellion of that year. He settled in Philadelphia, where he obtained a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania. Later he became a professor of natural philosophy and chemistry at the College of William and Mary.
Education
Henry received much of his early education from his father. Then he studied medicine or chemistry at the College of William & Mary from 1819 until 1828.
In 1828 Rogers accepted a position as lecturer in chemistry in the Maryland Institute, Baltimore. Two years later he was appointed a professor of chemistry and natural philosophy in Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Becoming disgusted with the narrow bigotry of the trustees, he soon resigned, however, and for a brief period was employed on a railway survey in New England.
After arriving to London in 1832 to accompany Robert Dale Owen, Rogers soon became associated with friends who introduced him to the Geological Society of London, where he met De la Beche, Lyell, and others, and quickly became converted to a more strenuous calling.
Returning to the United States in 1833, he gave lectures on geology at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and in 1835 was appointed to the chair of geology and mineralogy at the University of Pennsylvania. This same year he was also made the director of the geological survey of New Jersey, and in 1836 he accepted a like position with the newly organized geological survey of Pennsylvania. The work of the New Jersey survey was practically finished in 1838, and the final report issued in 1840; that of Pennsylvania came to an untimely end in 1842 through lack of appropriations by the state legislature.
Rogers continued the survey at his own expense until 1847 when he finished Report on Pennsylvania (1858), which included a general account of the geology of the United States and of the coalfields of North America and Great Britain. Rogers and his brother William Barton Rogers jointly published On the Physical Structure of the Appalachian Chain (1842), expressing their findings on the structure of the Appalachians. In 1857 Rogers became the first American to be appointed Regius professor of natural history at the University of Glasgow.
In the meantime, he moved to Boston, where the final revision was prepared, funds being supplied by legislative action in 1851-55. Finding that the work of publication could be carried out more satisfactorily by an Edinburgh firm than in the United States, he went to that city in 1855, and while there was appointed Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Glasgow, a position he held until his death. This appointment marked the beginning of the Glasgow University School of geology, though as to his success as a teacher, expressed opinions are divided. Of his geological work in New Jersey, little need to be said, since but a brief time was devoted to it.
The work of the Pennsylvania survey cannot be passed over so lightly, however, since it is upon this and what grew out of it that his fame as a geologist largely rests, as well as that of his brother William, with whom he worked in hearty cooperation. His report was beyond question the most important document on the geology of America that had appeared up to that time, with the possible exception of the final reports of the New York survey.
In it, the two brothers advanced noteworthy ideas, previously announced to the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists regarding the structures of the Appalachian Mountains. These mountains, they showed, were not as had been commonly supposed, uplifted by an intrusion of molten material, but consisted of a series of parallel ridges characterized by predominant southeastern dips, and that they were true folds in the strata, in some cases so sharp and abrupt that the northwestern limb was bent back under the southwestern, or inverted. This view has been proved to be essentially correct.
Their ideas as to the cause of the folding - that the flexures "are the result of an outward, billowy movement proceeding from beneath" - have not, however, stood the test of time, indeed were never generally accepted; nor were those they put forward on the subject of glaciation. An objection raised by Rogers to the use of geographical names for the geological systems led him to adopt a wholly fanciful and, as it proved, impractical, scheme in which he represented the Paleozoic time as a geological day and subdivided it according to successive stages, as primal, auroral, matinal, levant, and so forth.
Rogers' health, never of the best, began failing soon after he went to Edinburgh, causing him to spend much time in the south of England and on the Riviera. In the fall of 1865, he returned to America, but in April 1866 went back to his University work at Glasgow, only to be taken seriously ill and die on May 29 following.
An interest in socialism led Rogers in 1832 to accompany Robert Dale Owen to London, with no more definite plans than "to be useful."
Views
Rogers' major interest was Pennsylvania, with its Appalachian Mountains, which Rogers saw as great folds of sedimentary rock. He believed that an interpretation of these folds would lead to an understanding of the dynamic processes that had shaped the earth.
Membership
In 1832 Henry Rogers became a member of the Geological Society of London.
Geological Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1832 - 1866
Personality
Rogers was described as dignified, quiet, and unassuming, even shy, but admired by all who knew him intimately. As a lecturer, he displayed varied knowledge and no little skill and grace of expression.
Connections
In March 1854 Henry Rogers was married in Boston to Eliza S. Lincoln, a half-sister of the wife of his brother William; they had one child, a daughter.