258 GROVE KARL GILBERT— DAVIS [Mej101B ^'S; 



seen in New South Wales. His paper made a strong impression on those who received it in 

 this country, and one of them suggested to Gilbert that he might well send a copy of his report 

 on the "Glaciers of Alaska" to the antipodal geologist; but as this suggestion was received 

 before he had himself seen Andrews's paper he demurred, remarking that as each presentation 

 copy of the Alaskan report cost him $3 he could not afford to distribute it freely; but on seeing 

 the paper and its excellent photographs, the like of which he had vainly tried to secure in 

 Alaska, he sent the volume promptly and gladly; and with it a letter from which the following 

 significant extracts are taken: 



I am also interested in a psychological point you mention. Your sensitiveness to the topographic pecu- 

 liarities of Southern New Zealand was due to previous training in non-glacial regions. I myself had a 

 similar experience except that the sequence of events was inverse. My youth was passed and my early 

 geologic studies were made in a glaciated region. ... I think it quite possible that the English geologists who 

 frame such curious arguments against the actuality of ice sculpture have never seen anything else, and are there- 

 fore not sensitive to the contrasts between the two types of sculpture. 



It was on the basis of an acquaintance thus begun that, on the occasion of Andrews's 

 trans-American journey to England in 1908, he was welcomed by Gilbert and Johnson in San 

 Francisco and invited to spend a couple of months camping in the mountains where various 

 problems of glacial sculpture are so finely displayed. 



It is not to be questioned that glacial problems were actively discussed by the keen-eyed 

 trio, but the account of the excursion given by the stranger 5 has more to say of personal than 

 of scientific matters, for it appears that upon a vacation trip such as this, Gilbert's interests, 

 like those of his companions, were not restricted to geology or physiography. He pointed out 

 all manner of plants and animals, from dwarfed willows less than an inch high near Mono Pass, 

 to a spider that made a web in the shape of a paraboloid of revolution in the district of the 

 big trees. During progress through the highland forest he challenged his companions to cap 

 verses ; at rests he would give and ask for mathematical problems ; in the night he pointed out 

 the constellations; Ms mind was always active. The visitor was entertained by his com- 

 panions with readings from American authors and with reminiscences of American geologists: 

 Gilbert told of a trip when Shaler and he stopped at a country tavern where a bowl and a single 

 roller towel did duty for all comers in preparation for the noonday meal. "Shaler," Gilbert 

 said, "was fond of dichotomous classification: he said to me — 'There are two kinds of men, 

 those who wipe on the outside of the towel and those who wipe on the inside; I belong 

 to the smaller group."' Truly, it was a liberal education for the Australian to travel over 

 the mountains in such company, an education which many an American must envy him. 



EARTHQUAKES ANTJ FAULTS 



Gilbert was in California at the time of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. What he 

 saw there must have brought to his mind the views regarding the relation of faults and earth- 

 quakes which he had announced a quarter of a century earlier in an article first published in 

 the Salt Lake Tribune for September 20, 1883, and reprinted in the American Journal of Science 

 a year later. He then described the little fault scarps of unknown though recent date in 

 the alluvium at the western base of the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, and compared them to 

 similiar scarps produced in 1872 by the Owens Valley earthquake at the eastern base of the 

 Sierra Nevada, where long gathering strains had caused an old fault to snap and slip again. 

 He added that the few inhabitants of that arid region noticed that the adobe houses near the 

 earthquake scarp were destroyed, while the frame houses survived the shock; hence the 

 destroyed houses were rebuilt in wood; but he regarded this precaution as unnecessary, 

 because after a shock "the accumulated earthquake force is for the present spent, and many 

 generations will probably pass before it manifests itself again." On the other hand, "any 

 locality on the fault fine of a large mountain range, which has been exempt from earthquake 

 for a long time, is by so much nearer to the date of recurrence"; hence in Utah, those parts of 

 the Wasatch base where the alluvial scarp is low or wanting were regarded as peculiarly liable 



< E. C. Andrews. Orove Karl Gilbert, Sierra Club Bulletin, ii, 1910, 60-69. 



