The Geological Sciences at Harvard University from 1788 to 1850

Formal course instruction in mineralogy and geology began in Harvard College in 1788 with Benjamin Waterhouse. He also assembled in the 1780's a reference and teaching collection of minerals, rocks, and ores—the first natural history collection at Harvard—that, following a gift by an English friend, J. C. Lettsom, became a cynosure of the College. Following Waterhouse's dismissal in 1812, the instruction was carried on by John Gorham until 1824. Waterhouse, his colleague Aaron Dexter, and Gorham all were professors in the Harvard Medical School, established 1782. The latter two men successively held an endowed chair therein, the Erving Professorship of Chemistry and Materia Medica. They produced some notable graduates: Parker Cleaveland in 1799, Lyman Spalding in 1797, Joseph Green Cogswell in 1806, John White Webster in 1811, John Fothergill Waterhouse in 1813, and Samuel Luther Dana and James Freeman Dana in 1813. Following years of futile effort by the Administration to establish a professorship of mineralogy and geology, with Cogswell as the selected candidate, the instruction in mineralogy and geology fell to John White Webster in 1824 in the Chemistry Department. The Erving Professorship also passed to him, with a change in title to Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy. Webster's death in 1850, following his conviction for murder in a famous trial, terminated the first period of development of the geological sciences at Harvard. In this period, in spite of the early start by Waterhouse, Harvard lagged much behind the developments at Yale and other colleges in New England and beyond. The main period of development of the geological sciences at Harvard come in the latter 1800's. It was a consequence primarily of the founding of the the Lawrence Scientific School in 1848, with its emphasis on the applied aspects of the sciences, the appointments of Josiah Dwight Whitney and Raphael Pumpelly in 1865 and 1866, respectively to a School of Mines and Practical Geology endowed as a sub-unit therein, and the appointment of Josiah Parsons Cooke in 1850 as successor to Webster in the Chemistry Department.