James Hall

James Hall was an American geologist and paleontologist, born in 1811 in Hingham, Massachusetts, and died in 1898 in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, often called the father of North American stratigraphy. Appointed in 1836 to the geological survey of New York and later the state's first paleontologist, he produced the influential 1843 volume Geology of New York documenting the stratigraphy of the state's western district. He originated the concept of the geosyncline, explaining how the accumulation of thick sediment in a subsiding trough leads neighboring regions to rise and form mountains, an idea that shaped geological theory for a century afterward.