1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Rogers, Henry Darwin

ROGERS, HENRY DARWIN (1808-1866), American geologist, was born at Philadelphia on the 1st of August 1808. At the age of twenty-one he was chosen professor of chemistry and natural philosophy at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania. After holding this post for three years, he went to Europe and took up the study of geology. Subsequently he was engaged for twenty-two years in the State surveys of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, his Reports on which were published during the years 1836-41. In 1842 he and his brother William Barton Rogers (1805-1882), who had been similarly occupied in Virginia (his Reports were published in 1838-41, and he wrote also on the connexion between thermal springs and anticlinal axes and faults), brought before the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists their conclusions on the physical structure of the Appalachian chain, and on the elevation of great mountain chains. The researches of H. D. Rogers were elaborated in his final Report on Pennsylvania (1858), in which he included a general account of the geology of the United States and of the coal-fields of North America and Great Britain. In this important work he dealt also with the structure of the great coal-fields, the method of formation of the strata, and the changes in the character of the coal from the bituminous type to anthracite. In 1857 he was appointed professor of natural history and geology at Glasgow. One of his later essays (1861) was on the parallel roads of Lochaber (Glen Roy), the origin of which he attributed to a vast inundation. He died at Glasgow on the 29th of May 1866.