LANE, ALFRED CHURCH

(b. Boston, Massachusetts, 29 January 1863; d. New York City, 15 April 1948)

geology.

Alfred Church Lane, a great-great-grandson of a Concord minuteman and grandson of an abolitionist, belonged to the eleventh generation of his family in New England. His father, Jonathan Abbot Lane, served some years as president of the Boston Merchants’ Association and the Massachusetts State Senate. His mother was Sarah Delia Clarke, a graduate of Mt. olyoke College. The Lanes were steadfast members of the Congregationalist church and the Republican party. As the only child in this prosperous and prominent Boston family, Alfred developed a wide range of interests, a sense of responsibility toward the local and world communities, and a deep faith in a righteous but loving personal God. At the end of his life he was described as a modern Renaissance man, distinguished as a scientist, humanist, and humanitarian.

Lane attended the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, where he received his bachelor’s degree in natural science in 1883. For the next two years he served as an instructor in mathematics at Harvard while working toward a Ph.D. degree in geology. It was common practice at that time for geology students to obtain some of their education at a German university, so Lane spent two years (1885–1887) at Heidelberg studying petrography under Harry Rosenbusch. Returning to Harvard, he received his A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in 1888. Throughout his long career, which spanned sixty active years, Lane emphasized the importance of applying mathematics, chemistry, and physics to geological problems, and his efforts were instrumental in changing geology from a qualitative natural philosophy to a quantitative science. Probably his single greatest contribution to science arose from the catalytic role he played in efforts to develop methods for measuring the age of the earth and of individual geological formations.

Lane’s career fell into three separate periods. For the first twenty years (1889–1909) he served as a member of the Geological Survey of Michigan. For the next twenty-seven years he was a professor of geology and mineralogy at Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts, and for the twelve years following his 1936 resignation he remained actively involved in scientific and public affairs.

In 1889 Lane joined the Michigan Geological Survey as a petrographer. In 1892 he was appointed assistant state geologist, and in 1899 state geologist of Michigan. On 15 April 1896 Lane married Susanne Foster Lauriat, and the couple had two sons and a daughter. During his years in Michigan, Lane initiated studies on essentially every aspect of Michigan geology—the copper deposits, iron ores, water resources, geomorphology, and stratigraphy— and he published papers applying his observations to wider problems, such as the role of eutectics in rock magmas, studies on the grain of igneous intrusives, theories of copper deposition, the nature of geothermal gradients, and the early surroundings of life. In 1908 Lane coined the word “connate,” still in use to describe interstitial waters trapped in sediments. His studies of the geology of Isle Royale in Lake Superior are commemorated by Lane Cove, named in his honor.

In 1909 Lane accepted the Pearson professorship of geology and mineralogy at Tufts College. At Tufts he instituted a rigorous type of training that was most uncommon in undergraduate courses then and now. He announced in the college catalog that all students enrolling in his classes needed a working knowledge of elementary chemistry, physics, and mathematics, and the ability to use French or German atlases. His advanced courses required calculus.

During World War I, Lane went to France to do educational work for the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and he stayed on through 1919 as head of the department of mining in the college organized by the American Expeditionary Force at the Université de Beaune. In 1929 he was appointed the first science consultant to the Library of Congress, and in 1931 he was elected president of the Geological Society of America.

In 1936 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enacted a bill requiring all teachers to take an oath swearing to uphold the constitutions of the United States and of the commonwealth. Lane opposed the oath in legislative hearings and in January 1936 he resigned his professorship rather than sign it. Many teachers publicly opposed the oath but only one other, Earle M. Winslow, chairman of the economics department at Tufts, resigned in protest. Lane was seventy-three years old. In a period when there was no generally agreed-upon retirement age, however, this action by a man of such towering reputation brought widespreadacclaim. Regrettably, the same action by Winslow, a much younger man who made a greater sacrifice, passed largely unnoticed.

Lane had a lifelong interest in finding methods to measure geologic time, and he recognized exciting new potentialities when radioactivity was discovered in 1896. In 1924, the National Research Council’s Division of Geology and Geography formed the Committee on the Measurement of Geologic Time by Atomic Disintegration, with Lane as chairman. At first the committee focused its attention mainly on radiometric methods, but it soon broadened its scope and shortened its name—deleting “by Atomic Disintegration.” To help keep the record straight Lane applied a Dewey decimal system in listing forty-six different methods—isotopic, astronomical, and geological—for measuring some fraction of geologic time.He sought quantitative results, but he never saw science as a quest for certainty.

Lane held the chairmanship for twenty-two years during which time he oversaw the formal meetings and issued the reports of the committee and acted as a one-man clearinghouse for specimens, data, methods, and ideas, He wrote letters to scientists around the world who were doing research on geologic time and, when feasible, he paid regular visits to their laboratories. He regarded it as especially important for different laboratories to analyze the same samples from well-documented sources, and he personally saw to it that such samples were made available. Lane took a special interest in the work of a young physicist, Alfred O. C. Nier, who joined the laboratory of Kenneth Bainbridge at Harvard in 1936 to build a mass spectrometer capable of measuring isotopic abundances of lead and uranium.

Lane corresponded regularly with Otto Hahn in Berlin, and in 1938, when Hahn succeeded in splitting uranium and thorium atoms by bombarding them with neutrons, he sent Lane the first report on the process to reach America(New York Times, 17 April 1948, p. 15). At that time, however, the event was not seen as a historic breakthrough in the effort to harness atomic energy. The 1939 report of Lane’s Committee abstracted Hahn’s results. pointing out that the splitting was strictly a laboratory phenomenon, not known to occur in nature, and of no apparent significance in geochemistry.

World War II brought an end to the free exchange of information among atomic scientists and a temporary lull in efforts to measure geologic time. But Lane found other things to do. He was involved with the Boy Scouts of America, and he never ceased actively participating in the Congregational church. where he served as deaconfor many years. He was vice president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1944 to 1946, and he belonged to numerous scientific, social, political, or historical societies, such as the American Civil Liberties Union. the New England Historic Geneological Society, and the Twentieth Century Association.

With the explosion of atomic bombs in 1945, Lane instantly recognized the awesome power and inherent danger. He wrote that we must find ways to put this new power to the service of international law and justice. He said that we can never be sure of peace in the world, but he joined the American Association for the United Nations in the hope that this body would act as a force for peace and worldwide cooperation.

In 1946 Lane resigned his chairmanship of the N.B.C. committee, partly because his eyesight was failing and partly because he wanted free time to pursue his many other interests. That year the committee report cited Arthur Holmes in England as having determined the age of the earth’s granitic layer as about 3.35 billion years. Holmes equated that with the age of the earth itself, and many scientists concurred. Ten years later the age of the earth was determined to be about 4.6 billion years. Lane remained keenly interested in dating individual geologic formations, and he anticipated a wealth of data (which he did not live to see) from measurements on newly discovered radioactive isotopes such as potassium 40, rubidium 87, and samarium 147.

Lane published 1, 087 papers on science, politics, economics, national and international issues, and religion. His single book was a small volume of poetry, which he had printed anonymously.

Lane appeared to be in good health in April 1948 when he drove with friends to New york to welcome back the Finne Ronne South Polar Expedition, which included Robert L. Nichols, his former student and successor as chairman of the geology department at Tufts. The reunion was held at the home office of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. There, toward the end of a day full of excitement, storytelling, and singing, Alfred C.Lane died suddenly of a heart attack. A plaque in Lane’s honor in the Goddard Chapel at Tufts is inscribed with the following statement, which he had written many years earlier: “Science and Religion aim to know, to share, and to spread the truth freely.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. No complete list of Lane’s 1.087 published titles has been complied. One hundred and seventeen of the more important publications are listed by Robert L. Nichols in his memorial to Alfred Church Lane in Geological Society of America: Proceedings (1952). 107–118. Lane’s own notes on his career may be found in the archives of Harvard University. Most of them are published in the reunion volumes of the Harvard class of 1883. Information on Lane’s scientific ideas comes form his articles. particularly the annual Report of the Committee on the Measurement of Geologic Time, published by the National Research Council, Division of Geology and Geography, between 1927 and 1946.

II. Secondary Literature. No biography of Lane has been written. The chief sources of information are memorials, the most detailed of which is the one by Robert L. Nichols, cited above. Others are by Leonard Carmichael. in Science, 108 (1948), 567–568; and by esper S. Larsen, Jr., in American Mineralogist, 34 (1949), 249– 252. Articles appeared in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune on 17 April 1948.

Ursula B. Marvin