Abstract
A MASTER of research has passed in Thomas Crowder Chamberlin, emeritus professor of geology in the University of Chicago, whose death occurred on Nov. 15, shortly after celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday on Sept. 25. His place is with the greatest thinkers of the past. He leaves few if any equals among his contemporaries. His far-flung research into the processes of the universe is a challenge to younger students to spread wings of imagination toward the unknown, but only with thorough understanding of the course to be flown and constant checking of the navigation. Chamberlin, the glacialist, geophysicist, and cosmogonist, was a geologist in that large meaning which he expressed at the Cleveland meeting of the Geological Society of America a year ago, in calling upon his colleagues to overleap the bounds of a petrified, terrestrial science. Bocks are not dead. They are to be studied as living assemblages of energy, organised according to the laws of physics and chemistry. He bade geologists explore these domains intensively, as their own. He invited them to penetrate the marvellous cosmogonies of the atoms, where in those intimacies of Nature lies hidden the secret of evolution. He unrolled the history of the planet and traced our dynamic descent from our parent, the sun. His concept of geology embraced the solar system and touched the stars. Fully aware that he could not long sustain the effort, he appealed earnestly to his fellows to carry on in all the fields of science of which “astronomy is the foreign department.”
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WILLIS, B. Prof. T. C. Chamberlin. Nature 122, 930–931 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/122930b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/122930b0