Background
He was born in Sag Harbor, New York, the son of William Frederick Foshag, a tailor, and Joanna Eva Riegler. During Foshag's boyhood the family moved to California, where his father became a citrus grower.
(The Smithsonian Series, V3.)
The Smithsonian Series, V3.
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He was born in Sag Harbor, New York, the son of William Frederick Foshag, a tailor, and Joanna Eva Riegler. During Foshag's boyhood the family moved to California, where his father became a citrus grower.
He attended the University of California at Berkeley, receiving a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1919 and a Ph. D. in geology in 1923.
In 1917-1918 he had worked as a control chemist for the Riverside Portland Cement Company; and throughout his career he remained on cordial terms with officials of similar firms, such as the American Potash and Chemical Company, which forwarded unusual mineral specimens and told him about mining sites of geological interest.
In 1919 Foshag joined the staff of the geology department of the National Museum (part of the Smithsonian Institution), where he spent the rest of his professional career as assistant curator (1919 - 1929), curator (1929 - 1948), and head curator (1948 - 1956).
During World War II, Foshag served as liaison between the United States and Mexico on the development of mineral resources for military purposes.
Foshag's work as an administrator had considerable influence on the development of the National Museum as a center for American research on gems and minerals. It was, however, in acquiring collections for scientific mineralogy, rather than gems, that he made the greatest advances.
In part through Foshag's and Earl V. Shannon's professional friendships with the owners, the Roebling and Canfield collections (25, 000 specimens) came to the museum in 1926, along with endowments ($200, 000) for additional acquisitions. These collections not only provided the Smithsonian with samples of virtually every mineral species but also yielded quality materials for research on the chemistry, crystallography, and origin of minerals.
Over the next three decades Foshag augmented the National Museum collections by frequent field expeditions to Mexico and the American Southwest. Besides using the Smithsonian collections in his own research, he encouraged others to study these materials.
Foshag also published many scholarly papers on mineralogy, some purely descriptive and others more theoretical. His earliest writings (mainly 1918 - 1924) were laboratory and field reports on the borates and their associated minerals from desert terrains in the Southwest.
During 1924-1936 he published several papers dealing with specimens from the mineralogically complex site of Franklin Furnace, New Jersey.
In 1926 he became interested in mineral deposits of Mexico, especially metallic ores; this work culminated in 1942 with a U. S. Geological Survey Bulletin on Mexican tin deposits, written with Carl Fries, Jr.
In 1938-1942, Foshag published papers on the chemistry and petrology of meteorites, and during the 1950's he worked on Central American jade, contributing geological analysis to what had been mainly an anthropological subject.
Foshag's knowledge of chemistry led him to include quantitative chemical analyses in nearly all of his mineralogical papers.
Foshag's papers proposed revisions in existing schemes of mineralogical classification, offered chemical and optical determinations that led to a more exact understanding of mineral composition or crystal structure, and reported new localities for minerals that had been poorly studied for lack of specimens.
Some dozen minerals that he described as new are still accepted as independent species. In addition to his achievements as a mineralogist, Foshag had virtually a second scientific career as a volcanologist.
By the time Paricuton slipped into quiescence in 1952, Foshag had enough field data and samples backlogged to continue publishing on the topic until his death at Westmoreland Hills, Maryland.
He published nearly 100 papers and described 13 new minerals, including foshagite. He had been interested in minerals associated with volcanic phenomena for some time before the volcano Paricuton suddenly appeared in a Mexican cornfield in February 1943. Foshag had become fluent in Spanish as a result of his work on Mexican minerals. Within a month of its appearance, he had observed Paricuton; and he returned frequently to chart its course, collaborating with scientists of the Instituto de Geologia (particularly Jenaro Gonz lez Reyes) to gather accounts of its inception and to monitor the daily notes of an observer stationed nearby. Foshag and Gonz lez's primary concern was to leave a factual account of the volcano's history as free of interpretation as possible for the use of other scientists, a goal embodied in their monograph Birth and Development of Paricuton Volcano (1956). Foshag also saw to it that the photographic record on Paricuton was very full, at one point persuading the United States Army to fly a helicopter near the rim while scientists took color movies of the volcano's outbursts. In addition, he published valuable analytic papers based on data from Paricuton, especially in regard to its aqueous and gaseous emanations.
He employed concepts of physical chemistry, such as phase relationships, to study rock and mineral origins. He also used goniometers to measure crystallographic variables, and he developed competence in microscopic petrography.
He married Merle Crisler on September 5, 1923; they had one son.
