268 COAST AND GEODETIC SURVEY CENTENNIAL 



one of the few pursuits in life which gets all its momentum from pure 

 intellectual ardor, from a love of finding out what the truth is, regardless 

 of all human circumstances, as if the mind wished to put itself into 

 intimate communication with the mind of the Almighty itself. There 

 is something in scientific inquiry which is eminently spiritual in its 

 nature. It is the spirit of man wishing to square himself accurately 

 with his environment not only, but also wishing to get at the intimate 

 interpretations of his relationship to his environment; and when you 

 think of what the Geodetic Survey has been attempting to do — to make 

 a sort of profile picture, a sort of profile sketch, of the life of a nation, 

 so far as that life is physically sustained, — you can see that what we 

 have been doing has been, so to say, to test and outline the whole 

 underpinning of a great civilization; and just as the finding of all the 

 outlines of the earth's surface that underlie the sea is a process of mak- 

 ing the pathways for the great intercourse which has bound nations 

 together, so the work that we do upon the continent itself is the work 

 of interpreting and outlining the conditions which surround the life of 

 a great nation." 



E. Lester Jones, 

 Superintendent, U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. 



