The American Countercurrent - Eastward Flow of Geologists and Their Ideas in the Late Nineteenth Century

Whereas the trans-Atlantic flow of geological knowledge previously had been overwhelmingly westward, by the mid-nineteenth century, an eastward countercurrent had begun. That flow increased rapidly after the Civil War, when geology was at the forefront in the maturation of science in America. H.D. Rogers was appointed Regius Professor at the University of Glasgow in 1855. James Hall was chosen to be Organizing President of the first International Geological Congress in Paris (1878) and the first English-speaking foreign correspondent of the Academy of Sciences of France (1884). James D. Dane was almost as well known abroad as Hall, especially for his mountain-building theory. Increasingly, American theoretical contributions had to be reckoned with in such fields as Mountain Building, Structural and Precambrian Geology, Geomorphology and Glacial Geology, and Paleontology. By the first decade of the twentieth century, America had seized the initiative on several fronts, but especially in experimental petrology and physics of the earth's interior through the creation of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.