academy of sclera] PERSONAL RELATIONS 197 



learned to feed beginners chiefly with an abundance of well-described facts and of well-ascer- 

 tained explanations, and not to expect them to show as a rule either appetite for alternative 

 hypotheses or capacity for suspended judgment. As to the "exposition of a doctrine" he 

 would have without question strongly emphasized the modern geological doctrine of evolutionary 

 uniformitarianism, and would have supported it by all manner of apt illustrations; it would 

 have been rather with regard to mooted geological problems, such as isostasy and mountain 

 building which are best treated before more advanced students, that he would have presented 

 multiple hypotheses; but, although it has been venturesomely suggested as worth a trial, perhaps 

 he would not have gone so far as intentionally to lead his advanced students to an erroneous conclu- 

 sion — for even advanced students will swallow such a conclusion willingly enough if it is offered 

 with a sugar-coated argument — in order to give them practice afterwards in the difficult art 

 of changing their minds. Surely, had Cornell secured him in 1892 he would have made New 

 York State as classic ground in physiography in the next 20 years as James Hall had made 

 it in paleontology half a century earlier. 



In the same year with the doubled course at Johns Hopkins, the Brooklyn Institute heard 

 Gilbert on volcanoes, the moon, and wind work; the State- university at Lawrence, Kans., 

 heard him twice, on Coon Butte and volcanoes; and Chicago and Cornell Universities once 

 each on Coon Butte. It may be added that the popularity of the last-named lecture was due 

 much more to the philosophical manner in which its subject was treated than to the inherent 

 importance of the little geographical feature on which it was based. In some cases, however, 

 the lecturer appears to have carried the philosophical analysis of his subjects over far; as when 

 he explained to a popular audience the 17 independent factors which had to be considered in 

 studjong the history of Niagara River and in determining the age of the Falls, for that was 

 farther than such an audience cared to follow. Nevertheless, his lecture on this subject was 

 repeatedly asked for; as at Cornell and at the city of Niagara Falls in 1897, at Vassar College 

 in 1898, and at Teachers College, New York, in 1899. In the last year Gilbert spoke also at 

 Ohio State University on "Edward Orton, geologist," this address probably being the substance 

 of the memoir that he had prepared on Orton, his senior on the Ohio Geological Survey 30 

 years before, for the Geological Society of America. 



LITERARY WORK 



After Gilbert's withdrawal from administrative duties he accepted several invitations from 

 publishers to take part in what is here called, perhaps inappropriately, literary work. Thus 

 from 1893 to 1895 he prepared for a new edition of Johnson's Universal Encyclopedia — to which 

 he had previously contributed a few paragraphs in 1878 — about 130 brief articles on geologists 

 and on geological and geographical subjects, through which he plodded in alphabetical order. 

 Just how and why he was beguiled into accepting a labor of this sort does not appear; the com- 

 pensation received for it, which was fairly liberal as such compensations go, may have been 

 an inducement, for his salary as geologist on the national survey was not lavish; and the authori- 

 tative quality of his articles may be some compensation to the more studious fraction of the read- 

 ing public for the distraction of the article-writer from studies of a higher order; but in the present 

 connection this patchwork task is chiefly significant as illustrating the discontinuity of mental 

 effort that seems, as already mentioned, to have characterized Gilbert's undertakings in the later 

 years of his life. His contributions are good examples of concise treatment, the attainment of 

 which cost him a considerable amount of effort. Among the articles is a very colorless biograph- 

 ical sketch of himself. The following extract from a paragraph on the Adirondacks may be taken 

 as a sample of many others : 



The mountains consist of crystalline rocks, and about their flanks these are overlapped by Cambrian and 

 Silurian sediments. Their surface characters were greatly modified by the Pleistocene ice sheet, which traversed 

 them from N to S, scouring the soil from their summits and depositing the material in an irregular way in the 

 mountain valleys, so as to obstruct the drainage and produce a great number of lakes. 



The absence of reference to the bearing of the overlapping Paleozoic strata on the early 

 history of the region and the exclusion of glacial erosion from a share in the production of the 

 lake basins are noteworthy. 



