Memorial to Louis Caryl Graton 1880-1970
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Memorial to Louis Caryl Graton 1880-1970 DONALD H. McLAUGHLIN Homestake Mining Company, San Francisco, California A long span of life was granted to Louis Caryl Graton and he used it well. His active career as a scientist and a skilled professional in the field of mining geology, starting at the turn of the century, extended over a period of dramatic achievement in the geological sciences and in their many applications in the search for ores. Throughout these years of growth and change, Graton was alert and eager to appraise and master new concepts, as knowledge advanced in a broad front, and to utilize them in his own efforts to improve our understanding of geological processes and particularly of those by which ore deposits were brought about. To him, the methods of the scientist observation, experimentation and reasoning from the data were a cherished way of life, which was enhanced by the satisfaction he derived from applying his talents to practical ends in assisting governmental agencies and mining enterprises. Teaching was a vital part of his career, and to an extraordinary degree his students became involved in the research activities and in the succession of professional services that deeply engaged his interest. He was outstanding as an organizer of studies directed to specific major problems and as a leader of teams of geologists assembled for their solution. When significant results were obtained, he generously shared their publication with his younger colleagues or assisted them to attain independent status as authors. His most important papers, however, were those on which he worked alone, aided by his own wide range of knowledge and inspired by his ardent convictions concerning the direction in which the evidence pointed. Caryl Graton was born on June 10, 1880, in Parma, a small town in Monroe County, New York, where his father, Louis Graton, a native of Quebec, had met and married a young school teacher, Ella Gould. From his parents he acquired not only the sturdy qualities that made for longevity, but also a strict and clear sense of values that governed his life, not the least of which was an appreciation of the rewards to be won by hard consistent effort directed by a well-disciplined imagination. His younger years were spent in Hornell, New York, where he received his early schooling. He responded well to good teachers and his bent for science was revealed at an early age by the selection of “The Life of Louis Pasteur” as the subject of his address as Valedictorian upon graduation from high school at the age of sixteen. A scholarship won by successful completion of the State Regents examination made il possible for him to enroll in Cornell University in the autumn of 1896. In his 33 34 THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA undergraduate years. Heinrich Ries and R. S. Tarr gave him his first formal instruction in geology and A. G. Gill in mineralogy and petrography. Chemistry, however, nearly became his major interest. Indeed, Graton’s first publication, which dates from his sophomore year, was the result of a study with a fellow student on the system water, alcohol and potassium nitrate. The paper appeared in the second volume of the Journal of Physical Chemistry in 1898. After receiving the degree of Bachelor of Science in 1900, he spent the next two years in Canada in a succession of jobs that gave him his first experience in the mining districts of Ontario, including a short time at the Frood mine near Sudbury, which he came to know intimately in his much later association with the International Nickel Company. One winter season was spent in study at McGill University, where his progress in geology and mineralogy was advanced by work with Frank D. Adams and B. J. Harrington. Appointment as a demonstrator in chemistry that year should also be noted as his first engagement that involved teaching. Young Graton’s good work as an undergraduate, as well as his record in Canada, led to the winning of the Schuyler Scholarship, which enabled him to return to Cornell for graduate study in 1902-1903. A truly notable event at this stage of his career was the good fortune at the conclusion of his year at Cornell to be engaged by Waldemar Lindgren as an assistant, which was the beginning not only of his service on the United States Geological Survey, but of his close association with this eminent and wise geologist, whom he held throughout his life as a revered master and a close friend. An early assignment was to the Cripple Creek district. There he participated in the field work under the direction of Lindgren and F. L. Ransome, on which Professional Paper No. 54 was based. The section on petrology in this now classic work was prepared by Graton. These studies of the rocks and ores in the roots of an ancient crater marked the beginning of Graton’s life-long involvement with problems concerned with volcanic phenomena. The relationship between such geologic events and ore deposition became a subject that constantly held his attention and led him in his search for data not only into the depths of mines in old vents, as at Cerro de Pasco, but into the air when, from a small plane, he peered into the explosive clouds during an eruption of Paricutfn. Graton’s close association with Lindgren continued in subsequent assignments in New Mexico, leading to collaboration in another outstanding Professional Paper (No. 68), as well as several additional publications during the six years he was on the Survey. He worked independently, however, on the gold and tin deposits of the Southern Appalachians and was still involved with field and laboratory studies of the copper deposits in Shasta County, California, when he left Washington in 1909 to join the Harvard faculty. In addition to these activities, which were of inestimable value to a rising young geologist, he was given the task of assembling the data on copper in two successive volumes of Mineral Resources of the United States. This introduction to the facts of production, costs and metal prices, all related to profits in the mining industry, expanded his interests in a new direction. Although matters of this sort perhaps only provided background for his primary concern with the scientific aspects of ore deposition, they gave him an appreciation of the contributions made by LOUIS CARYL GRATON 35 engineers, managers, and financial leaders that made him, in his later years, a valued associate in the administration of mining enterprises. On June 30, 1906, a young friend of days in Hornell, Josephine Edith Bowman, became his wife in time to share some of his early experiences in the field while he was still on the Survey, among which was a rather hot summer in Shasta County, California, then far from the comfortable resort area it now is. During the remainder of their married life, she made their home in Cambridge a place that successive generations of students remembered for the warm and friendly hospitality they enjoyed and for the encouragement she gave them to include more than geology in their current enthusiasms. At the time Graton was apointed Assistant Professor of Economic Geology at Harvard University, the curriculum in mining engineering was still in existence there and he taught students in this school as well as in the Department of Geology and Geography under the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. After three years, he was promoted to Professor of Mining Geology and thirty-three years later he succeeded his old friend and colleague, R. A. Daly, as Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology, which chair he held until he became Professor Emeritus in 1949. For forty years, his service to Harvard was practically uninterrupted in spite of many demands upon him from agencies of the government and a number of mining enterprises that sought his aid in their problems. Throughout this long period, his life was filled with tasks, both academic and professional, that completely absorbed him. His teaching and research benefitted from this wide range of activities as well as the organizations that called upon him for advice. Engagements outside the university, however, appealed to him only if they offered opportunity to enlarge his knowledge of ore deposits and of the techniques necessary to make them of value as sources of metals. One of the first projects undertaken by Graton after he became a professor was a comprehensive study in the field and laboratory of certain copper ores that was designated “The Secondary Enrichment Investigation.” It was directed specifically to the geologic processes by which copper ore bodies—and particularly the immense deposits of disseminated sulphides known as the “porphyry coppers”—were increased in grade by the redeposition of copper, principally as the mineral chalcocite, that had been leached in the course of weathering from overlying parts of the deposit. Under the economic conditions and the state of the arts of mining and metallurgy that then prevailed, only those portions of the disseminated sulphide deposits that had been thus enriched were likely to be of commercial grade. Today, higher copper prices and greatly improved technology have lessened the importance of this distinction, but in 1914 supergene alteration by which lean deposits were raised in grade was a critical factor in determining the difference between ore and waste. The need for scientific study of this phenomenon, when clearly expounded as Graton could do so well, elicited the necessary financial support from a group of mining companies and the attack on the problem was organized in a broad way, worthy of the best Geological Survey or academic standards.