The New International Encyclopædia/Newberry, John Strong

NEWBERRY, John Strong (1822-92). An American geologist, born in Windsor, Conn. He spent most of his early life in the Western Reserve of Ohio, and received his college education at the Western Reserve University, at Hudson, Ohio, from which he graduated in 1846, and then entered the Cleveland Medical School, where he received the degree of M.D. in 1848. Going to Europe, he spent two years in Paris in post-graduate work in medicine and paleontology. On his return to the United States, in 1851, he took up the practice of medicine in Cleveland, but in 1855 he joined an exploring expedition under Lieutenant Williamson, sent out by the War Department to examine the country between San Francisco and the Columbia River. His geological investigations were published as a separate volume of the Reports of Explorations and Surveys to Ascertain the Most Practical and Economic Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast, Made in 1855-56 (Washington, 1857). In 1857-58 he acted as geologist to an expedition headed by Lieutenant Ives, sent out to explore the Colorado River. Newberry's paper relating to the geology, physiography, and Indian tribes, undoubtedly forms the most valuable and interesting part of the Report on the Colorado River of the West, Explored in 1857-58 (Washington, 1861). The next year Newberry again went into the field, this time as naturalist of an expedition under Captain Macombe, which explored southwestern Colorado and adjacent parts of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. The results of this appeared in 1876 under the title of Reports of the Exploring Expedition from Santa Fé to the Junction of the Grande and Green Rivers (Washington, 1876.) During the Civil War he performed the duties of secretary to the Sanitary Commission for the Mississippi Valley, and after the administration of this work he became attached to the Smithsonian Institution, at the same time holding a professorship in the Columbian University at Washington, to which he had been called in 1857. In 1866 he was offered the chair of geology and paleontology in the School of Mines, Columbia College, which he accepted, and held for twenty-four years. In 1869, when the Ohio Geological Survey was established he was made director and personally did much of the work described in several of the reports. He did much work for the Illinois Geological Survey, and also described the extensive collections of fossil plants gathered by Hayden's survey of the West. In 1867 he was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in the same year he was chosen president of the New York Academy of Sciences, which position he held for twenty-four years. He was also president of the Torrey Botanical Club from 1880 to 1890, and assisted in the organization of the Geological Society of America at Cleveland in 1888, and served as a member of the commission to organize an international geological congress, of which he subsequently became president. During the latter part of his life he resided in New Haven, Conn.

In addition to the works above mentioned, Dr. Newberry also wrote the following: The Rock Oils of Ohio (1859); Iron Resources of the United States (1874); The Structure and Relations of Dinichthys (1875); Report on the Fossil Fishes Collected on the Illinois Geological Survey (1886); Fossil Fishes and Fossil Plants of the Triassic Rocks of New Jersey and the Connecticut Valley (1888); Paleozoic Fishes of North America (1889); and Later Extinct Floras (1898).