HENRY S. WILLIAMS AND JAMES HALL - A CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE REAL KIND

James Hall (1811-1898), the great New York State Paleontologist, is well known to many geologists, and Henry Shaler Williams (1847-1918), also a paleontologist from New York, is almost as well known, but more for his stratigraphic work than for his prowess with fossils. But on a fateful day in September of 1884, four years before there was a GSA, these two titans of Devonian fossils, ended up on the opposite sides of a paleontological dispute. At the time one of the major geological organizations in the United States was the Geological Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and this group met Philadelphia in the fall of 1884. At this meeting Williams presented a paper concerning the Devonian fauna of New York in which he stated that, contrary to what Hall had said and published, both Spirifer mesostrialis and S. disjuncta appeared together in the same rock. Hall, who was in the audience, vigorously protested, and is quoted as saying that if anyone can show him such a sample, “[I’ll]...eat my hat and make the person who shows me the rock, a present of my coat and boots!” Whereupon, according to one report, Williams left the meeting, returned to Ithaca, New York, and sent to Hall, who was still at the meeting, a box enclosing just such a rock and requesting that Hall, after examining it, to please return his sample, along with his promised boots and hat. The incident happened and the samples were actually sent, but, as often occurs with the press, what appeared in the newspaper was more reporter hyperbole than fact. This paper will separate the reporter fiction from the far more dignified facts in this story of a real encounter between Hall and Williams.