Some Biogeographers, Evolutionists and Ecologists:
Chrono-Biographical Sketches

Waterschoot van der Gracht, Willem A. J. M. van (Netherlands-United States 1873-1943)
geology

Dr. W. van der Gracht split his successful career as a petroleum geologist and executive between the private and public service sectors. A highly skilled field geologist who traveled widely, he became a leading interpreter of the world's Paleozoic strata and applied this knowledge at the highest levels both as a businessman and as a government official. He also managed to find the time to publish a fair volume of writings on both theoretical and descriptive subjects, though is now known mostly for his ideas on continental drift (he was a strong proponent).

--born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on 15 May 1873.
--1899: LL.D., University of Amsterdam
--1903: M.E., University of Freiberg
--1905-1917: director of the Geological Survey office of the Netherlands
--1905-1909: oversees a thorough investigation of the deep geology of the Netherlands
--1909: publishes his The Deeper Geology of the Netherlands and Adjacent Regions, with W. Jongmans
--1913-1914: advisor to a Dutch expedition to the Dutch East Indies
--1917: made president of the Roxana Petroleum Company in the United States
--1922-1928: holds executive positions with the Marland Oil Company
--1924: receives honorary D.Sc. from the Colorado School of Mines
--1926: attends conference on continental drift in New York
--1928: edits and contributes to Theory of Continental Drift; A Symposium on the Origin and Movement of Land Masses Both Inter-continental and Intra-continental, as Proposed by Alfred Wegener.
--1932-1940: director of the Netherlands Bureau of Mines
--1936: elected to the Netherlands Royal Academy of Science
--dies at Roermond, Netherlands, on 12 August 1943.

--Proceedings of the Geological Society of America for 1946 (1947): 231-236.
--Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Vol. 28(7) (1944): 1066-1070.