sketcher and geologist, was born in Utica, New York, on 12 February 1813, eldest son of James Dana and Harriet, née Dwight. He graduated from Yale University in 1833, and three years later became assistant to the Yale professor of natural history, Benjamin Silliman, whose daughter he married. Dana was appointed geologist to the United States Exploring Expedition under Charles Wilkes and set sail in the Peacock in August 1838. The expedition reached Sydney on 29 November 1839. Here Dana made the acquaintance of the colony’s natural historians, including Alexander Macleay and William Branwhite Clarke . Dana and Clarke made several geological excursions together, travelling to Toongabbie and Prospect on 26 December 1839 and again on 17 January 1840. A major contribution to Australian geology was Dana’s description and mapping of the rock formations between the Hunter and Shoalhaven rivers.
Clarke and Dana spent the first two weeks of January in the Illawarra district, an expedition which apparently remained a pleasant memory, for in a letter to Clarke written in September 1851 Dana recalled that the 'Illawarra District is a perfect gem of a place for geology as well as for landscape beauty; it is one of the loveliest spots on the globe’. His sketches of the area included the spectacular basaltic columns at Kiama on the south coast which, he stated, 'will bear comparison with the rocks of Staffa’. It was during his two months in New South Wales that Dana first read (in the newspapers) a brief account of Darwin’s theory of the origin of atolls. 'The paragraphs threw a flood of light over the subject and called forth feelings of peculiar satisfaction, and of gratefulness to Mr. Darwin’, he wrote in 1872. He left Sydney in the Peacock in February 1840 for New Zealand where the scientists rejoined Wilkes and the fleet.
After the expedition’s return to the United States in June 1842, Dana was retained to assist in the preparation and publication of the official reports. He was responsible for three volumes – Zoophytes (1846), Geology (1849) and Crustacea (1852) – and their accompanying atlases. He prepared most of the illustrations for the engraver and colourist himself, either from his own specimens or from his original sketches. In the preface to Crustacea: Atlas (1855) he wrote: 'After the engraving of the Plates of this Atlas was completed, a large part of the original drawings were destroyed by fire in Philadelphia. In consequence, many of the following plates which were to have been coloured from the missing drawings, are issued uncoloured … I have had, half a dozen plates excepted, neither the assistance of an amanuensis nor a draftsman. The plates, however, owe much to the artistic skill and taste of Mr. Joseph Drayton [q.v.], artist of the Expedition, who has superintended the engraving and printing and contributed in many ways to the beauty of the work’.
When his part of this project was completed in 1856 Dana returned to Yale where, in 1846, he had been appointed to his late father-in-law’s chair of natural history (later geology). His Zoophytes volume and its atlas had been especially admired and, using his notes, specimens and sketches from the expedition, Dana extended this into his seminal work, Corals and Coral Islands , published in 1872. Appleman considers Dana 'the most influential American geologist of the nineteenth century’ and 'a towering figure in the history of geology’.
