Wound up with a flourish in Washington last week was the 16th International Geological Congress: an eight-day series of conferences which was only one phase of an elaborate, expensive scientific party attended by 500 geologists from 25 nations. Nominally their host was the U. S. Geological Survey. Actually their host was a fellow geologist—far richer than the general run of scientists and dead two years.
Held every three or four years in various countries since the first convention in Paris (1878), the I. G. C. tries not only to reach international standards of nomenclature and to serve as an international clearinghouse for new discoveries and theories, but also to give visiting geologists a chance to pore over the rocks and con tours of the countries in which the meetings are held.
The 16th I. G. C. was scheduled for last year in the U. S., in which no meeting had been held since 1891. When expected Congressional appropriations were not forthcoming the meeting was postponed until this year. Far from advancing funds to finance the convention, the Roosevelt Administration has been picking up pennies for its economy program by firing 150 scientists from the Geological Survey.
The U. S. Chamber of Commerce helped out by lending its building for the Washington meeting. Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History proffered an official welcome reinforced by a filling lunch. Princeton's Dr. Alexander Hamilton Phillips had a few of the outlanders to dinner. But the I. G. C. needed cash—not only for 1,001 ordinary convention expenses but for dozens of excursions in the eastern U. S., before the convention proper, and afterward for transcontinental field trips.
In their extremity, the Geological Survey officials turned to the Geological Society of America. Two years ago that body was astounded to learn that it had inherited $4,225,000. The benefactor was the late Dr. Richard Alexander Fullerton Penrose, scholarly brother of Pennsyl vania's late famed Republican Boss Boies Penrose.
Graduated from Harvard in 1884, Scholar Penrose snapped up M. A. and Ph. D. degrees in two years more, got into field work for the Texas and Arkansas Geological Surveys. His academic career carried him to the University of Chicago's Chair of Economic Geology, presidency of the Society of Economic Geology and the Geological Society of America.
Meanwhile he multiplied inheritances from two brothers and his father (onetime professor of Obstetrics at the University of Pennsylvania) through utility and mining interests, particularly by shrewd investments in Utah copper. Claim holders listened to his advice as to an oracle. His friends considered his record as an investor as spotless as his reputation as a scientist. Nevertheless they were surprised at the size and liquidity of his holdings when he died. He had some French gold, a sheaf of Bank of England notes, accounts in one British and nine U. S. banks. A bachelor, he divided most of his $10,000,000 hoard between the American Philosophical Society and the Geological Society of America. The latter body long pondered what to do with its income, was glad to help the floundering I. G. C.