[Delivered at the Memorial Services, Natural Science Auditorium, May 3, 1911]

It was in the autumn of 1875, that, as a student on this campus, I first made the acquaintance of Professor Calvin. The letter of introduction that I brought to him from Kansas was a small collection of Cretaceous fossils. It was the second year of his incumbency of the professorship in this University. His duties, as was usual in those days for the college professor, were various and manifold.

Samuel Calvin's photo of the Palisades on the Cedar River

As though it were yesterday, how clearly do I remember the first class exercise of his which I had the privilege of attending. As a young man, he had already won recognition as a teacher and scientist of ability and promise. Pleasant and profitable to me were the hours I spent with him in his small museum and his classroom.

My name will not be found on any of his class lists, yet I have always felt that he was one of the teachers to whom I am indebted for my early inspiration in science. The acquaintance thus begun was kept up by occasional correspondence and interchange of scientific papers, but many years lapsed before I again had the pleasure of personal intercourse with him. In the last fifteen years I have met him from time to time.

It is now one year ago that I renewed my acquaintance with him on this campus. I spent the afternoon with him in his laboratory and museum, seeing something of what he had accomplished in all these years, and in talking of olden times -- a renewal of the days thirty-five years ago when we were both young, each with his life's work before him; and, whatever may have been my own, how fruitful and profitable has been that of our departed friend and teacher, that now is finished qui facit per alia, facit per se.

Had Professor Calvin been naught else but a teacher, natural science would still be greatly his debtor, for as a scholarly man and teacher he has left an ineffaceable record upon this University, upon this state, and upon science. Some of his students have later been mine, and I know what a debt of gratitude they avowed for him; how they, too, found inspiration in his calm enthusiasm and earnestness.

I have asked several eminent geologists what their impressions were of Calvin as a man and as a geologist. Unanimous have been their replies that he was a man of most winning personal character, a man whom all his colleagues liked; that he was a geologist of ability whose work was characterized by sound judgment, honesty, sanity and thoroughness. That he has been president of The Geological Society of America, an honor that few attain, is an evidence of what his fellow workers thought of him; and Professor Calvin was among the last of men to seek honor for honor's sake.

With rare good sense he knew how best he could serve science as a geologist of Iowa. The state must ever remain his debtor, not only to him as a teacher, but for his fifty years and more of patient research in the geology and allied sciences of his adopted state; few states of our union have been served better or as well. Of much, perhaps most of this work for Iowa others can speak better than I, for I am not primarily a geologist; I know his work best in other lines.

Science is bound together in an infinite complexity, and however many, or however few the threads we follow, they surely lead to larger strands whose ends we cannot see. It was thus that Professor Calvin's work as a scientist led him in many ways to broader fields than the geology of Iowa.

Of one of these ways I can speak appreciatively and understandingly. As a student of glaciology for many years, and as a naturalist of broad vision, none was better fitted than he to unravel the tangle of our Pleistocene life in America. The student of extinct vertebrates is rarely a geologist. He has been content for many years to study extinct animals simply as a part of life. He is only now beginning to get a proper conception of time, of the succession of faunas, of some of the vast world forces of the past that have brought the earth and its inhabitants to its present condition. The geologist has long known that there were well defined epochs in the long period of time that we call Pleistocene or Quatenary [sic], and in Europe the paleontologist has in a measure recognized these, and is now trying to write their history in terms of life.

But in America, we paleontologists have for the most part ignored the work of the geologist, and I will freely confess that I have been one of the erring ones. Because we were not geologists, we knew no time periods in the life of the quaternary, knew nothing of faunas. How important it is that we should know more of the creatures that wandered our broad continent from earliest glacial times to the present, I need not say. It is essential because the succession of life, the migrations, and the extinctions are so intimately linked with the history of man himself upon the earth.

It was Professor Calvin who began a new epoch in the Pleistocene paleontology of North America. In his analysis of the Aftonian fauna, he for the first time definitely located in time and place an American Pleistocene fauna. I doubt if any one else in North America could have done it as well as he, if at all. I think that I am safe in saying, that, outside of his adopted state, Professor Calvin will be longest known for this, his last scientific work, and the paleontologist can only regret that as a scientist he was not spared for another ten years to continue his researches in Pleistocene paleontology. Though he had passed his three score years and ten, he showed no abatement of his zeal or of his ability, nor would he, I am assured, had he reached four score.

I, with many others, shall miss his cordial greetings and hand-shake in future scientific gatherings -- miss his kindly Scottish face. But he has lived a man's life, done a man's work, and we have no regrets, save that he might have been spared longer. He rests in peace at the evening of a well spent life.

Professor S. W. Williston
University of Chicago
on behalf of the Geological Society of America