Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume X.djvu/582

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576 LOGAN LOGANSPORT farming in a scientific manner. He served several terms in the Pennsylvania legislature. At the outbreak of the French revolution he joined Jefferson and the republican party in opposition to the federalists. In 1798 he went to France to prevent war with the United States, and was well received ; but having taken letters of introduction from Jefferson instead of passports from the state depart- ment, he was denounced by the federalists on his return as the treasonable envoy of a faction who had undertaken to institute a correspon- dence with a foreign and hostile power. He was coldly received by Washington and Presi- dent Adams, and in the latter part of 1798 an act, known as the "Logan act," was passed by congress, making it a high misdemeanor for a private citizen to interfere in a controversy between the United States and a foreign coun- try. He was a member of the United States senate from 1801 to 1807; and in 1810 he went to England in the hope of preserving peace. LOGAN, John, a Scottish author, born near Edinburgh in 1Y48, died in London, Dec. 28, 1788. He completed his education at the university of Edinburgh, and was nominated a minister at Leith in 1773. In 1779 he deliv- ered in Edinburgh a course of lectures on the philosophy of history, and in the following year was an unsuccessful candidate for the chair of history. His parishioners objecting to his writing for the stage, and charging him with intemperance, he was obliged to retire on a small pension, and devoted himself in Lon- don to literary pursuits. He edited in 1770 Michael Bruce's poems, but omitted some of that author's productions and inserted his own in their stead. His "Ode to the Cuckoo" (1770), and his hymns, which form part of the psalmody of the church of Scotland, attest a lyrical genius of a high order.' A volume of his poems was published in 1781 (new ed., 1805, with the biography of the author). His other works include "Rnnnamede," a tragedy (1783) ; " Essay on the Manners of Asia " (1781-'7); "View of Ancient History" (2 vols., 1788); "Review of the principal Char- ges against Warren Hastings" (1788), which caused its publisher to be arraigned by the house of commons ; and two volumes of ser- mons (1790-'91 ; 8th ed., 1822). LOGAN, Sir William Edmond, a Canadian geolo- gist, born in Montreal in 1798. His father be- longed to a loyalist family who emigrated from Schenectady, N. Y., at the time of the war of independence. He was educated in the high school and university of Edinburgh, and en- gaged in commercial pursuits in London. In 1829 he became interested in copper-smelting and coal-mining operations in Swansea, South Wales, and during the seven years of his resi- dence there devoted himself to the study of the coal field of that region with great success, adding much to our knowledge of the nature and mode of formation of coal deposits. He showed among other things that the stratum of under-clay, as it is called, which always underlies coal beds, was the soil in which the plants yielding the coals grew, and thereby refuted the drift theory of the origin of coal. His minute and accurate maps and sections of this coal field were afterward adopted by the ordnance geological survey and published by the government. In 1841 he visited the coal fields of Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia, where he made important studies and commu- nicated several valuable memoirs, giving his results, to the geological society of London. At this time also he began the study of the older palaeozoic rocks of Canada, and a geo- logical survey of that country having been undertaken by the provincial government, he was placed at its head in 1842, a post which he held till his resignation in 1870. To him we owe a great part of our knowledge of the geology of the present provinces of Quebec and Ontario, from Gaspe" to Lake Superior. His labors in the Laurentides first made known the importance in American geology of the an- cient crystalline rocks, which have since re- ceived the name of the Laurentian and Norian series ; and his studies of the Appalachian range in Canada are models of patient and laborious investigation, although his deductions with re- gard to the age and geological equivalence of some of the rocks are questioned. After the accession of the maritime provinces to the Do- minion of Canada he made an elaborate study of the Pictou coal field of Nova Scotia. The results of his geological labors will be found in the reports of the geological survey of Canada, and in an elaborate map of north- eastern America prepared by him with the aid of Prof. James Hall. He has also com- municated numerous papers to the geological society of London, and to the American "Jour- nal of Science and Arts." He was the com- missioner from Canada to the great exhibitions of London in 1851 and 1862, and to that of Paris in 1855; and at the last he received for his geological contributions the great gold medal and the decoration of chevalier of the legion of honor, in which order he was subse- quently promoted to the rank of officer. He was knighted in 1856, and in the same year received from the London geological society the Wollaston palladium medal for his eminent services in geology. He has since received the Copley medal from the royal society of London, of which and of many other learned societies he has long been a member. Sir Wil- liam Logan has for many years been a member of the corporation of the university of McGill college in Montreal, from which he holds the degree of doctor of laws, and in which he has lately endowed the chair of geology. LOGANSPORT, a city and the capital of Cass co., Indiana, on the Wabash, at its junction with Eel river, and on the Wabash and Erie canal, 70 m. 1ST. by W. of Indianapolis; pop. in 1870, 8,950. The rivers are crossed by several bridges. The Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, the