Named in memory of Florence Bascom (1862–1945), the first woman geologist in the United States. She was an expert in crystallography, mineralogy and petrography and worked in the fields of metamorphism and crystallography in their infancy. Bascom was also an educator who trained a generation of young women as professionals at Bryn Mawr, where she founded the geology department. She was the first woman hired by the U.S. Geological Survey and the first woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America. Her pioneering work earned her a position among the country’s hundred leading geologists in the early twentieth century. (M 31610) _ _.