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HITCHCOCK, EDWARD (b. Deerfield, Massachusetts,
24 May 1793; d. Amherst, Massachusetts, 27
February 1864), geology.
Hitchcock wrote extensively on the relation of science
to religion, on the geomorphology of the Connecticut
River Valley, on fossil tracks of extinct vertebrates,
and on the metamorphosis of sediments.
The son of Justin Hitchcock and Mercy Hoyt,
Hitchcock was born into a pious, respected, but poor
family. Because of his father's meager income from
the hatter's trade, Edward worked his way through
Deerfield Academy, where his observations on the
comet of 1811 marked the beginning of a lifelong
career in science. While Hitchcock was preceptor of
the academy (1815-1819), his eyes weakened, ending
his brief career in astronomy. An encounter with
Amos Eaton at Amherst, sometime during Hitchcock's
Deerfield tenure, and an exchange of letters
and minerals with Benjamin Silliman of Yale in 1817,
turned his interest to natural history. Yale awarded
him an honorary master of arts in 1818, Harvard an
honorary doctor of laws in 1840, and Middlebury
College an honorary doctor of divinity in 1846. Following
a short-lived conversion to Unitarianism as
a youth, he settled into his family's faith, Congregationalism.
He studied theology at Yale in 1820(?) and
acted as pastor in Conway, Massachusetts, from June
1821 to October 1825.
He was professor of chemistry and natural history
at Amherst College from 1825 to 1845, having prepared
himself for science-teaching by auditing Silliman's
courses at Yale (October 1825-January 1826).
In 1840 he co-founded, with other state geologists,
the American Association of Geologists, parent of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science,
and in 1863 he became a charter member of
the National Academy of Sciences. Hitchcock was
president of Amherst College from December 1844
to November 1854 and also taught natural theology
and geology there from 1845 until his death. His
marriage on 13 June 1821 to Orra White resulted in
six children, two of whom, Charles Henry and
Edward, Jr., chose scientific careers; Charles became
state geologist for Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire.
Mrs. Hitchcock illustrated her husband's works
and assisted him in scientific enterprises. Despite a
careful diet and zealous devotion to temperance,
Hitchcock suffered from chronic intestinal and gall
bladder complaints so debilitating as to hamper his
geological fieldwork.
Hitchcock's scientific textbooks and popular works
stemmed largely from his teaching at Amherst, while
his technical geological monographs grew mostly
from his appointments as state geologist of Massachusetts
(1830-1833, 1837-1841) and of Vermont (1856-1861).
Hitchcock was appointed in 1836 to the New
York State Survey and although he resigned after
only a month, his influence was evident in the survey's
outcome. John Dix, who organized the survey,
adopted the zoological and botanical features that
characterized Hitchcock's earlier geological survey of
Massachusetts, on which Hitchcock wrote a final report,
Geology of Massachusetts (1833), the first of its
kind. Dix's report, patterned after Hitchcock's, was
expanded by the scientists of the New York survey
into a twelve-volume work that marked a major development
in geological science.
Hitchcock saw his task in Wernerian terms, using
German rocks from Heidelberg in a collection at
Amherst to identify the New England stratigraphic
equivalents by comparing lithologies. As early as
1824 he had provided an appendix to Eaton's A
Geological and Agricultural Survey of the District
Adjoining the Erie Canal, in which he offered a different
geological interpretation of the section across
Massachusetts from the New York line to Boston.
Although he personally admired Charles Lyell,
Hitchcock predicated his geological explanations
upon the changing intensity over time of agents such
as glaciation and flooding, rather than upon constant,
gradual operation of such forces. He did not accept
those explanations, however, which were based upon
causative forces no longer in operation in the modern
world. Hitchcock has therefore been proclaimed both
a catastrophist and a uniformitarian. He gradually
introduced a partial glacial hypothesis into his
