76 



GROVE KARL GILBERT— DAVIS 



[Memoirs National 

 [Vol. XXI, 



of the most instructive reports ever issued. Gilbert's thoughts must have frequently turned, 

 while he was still in the West, upon the form in which the report should be cast; and he was 

 doubtless aided in such thoughts by an indifference to, not to say a dislike for the companion- 

 ship of the usual run of camp helpers, with whom he had little or nothing in common. It 

 appears to be in part at least for this reason that he formed the habit of setting out from camp 

 early and returning late, thus securing an interval of 14 or 16 hours when he might be alone with 

 his problems. But this does not mean that he was indifferent to camp work; he was well 

 informed as to the duties of every man and beast in his outfit, and in this respect the apprentice- 

 ship in the Wheeler survey served him well. He made definite arrangements at the outset 

 of a field trip as to the distribution of work, and held every member of his party to a high stand- 

 ard of performance. He very properly left the work of the camp to his men, not so that he 

 should have no work to do himself, but because he had plenty of work of his own which his 

 men could not possibly perform. 



Moreover, his field work was not by any means limited to observation. He constantly 

 carried on a mental inquiry as to the meaning and interpretation of observed facts, and in 

 certain problems much of the inquiry was written down in the field, as extracts to be quoted 

 below from his notebooks will testify. His report is, however, not chiefly a transcript of his 

 field records, cast in narrative form. Its first 50 pages contain an able-minded generalization of 

 the facts of the Henry Mountains district ; and the second 50 are devoted to a keenly analytical 



■— -^>— -^--i> V-OJ-?" 



Fig. 9.— Mount Hillers, Henry Mountains; from Gilbert's notebook, 1876. 



inquiry as to the processes by which the facts of the district are best explained. When this is 

 understood one must marvel at the rapidity with which the report was put into shape, all the 

 more since the shape into which it was put represents the very best form of investigational 

 procedure. Surely whatever were the difficulties its author had previously experienced in 

 expressing his ideas in writing, he had now overcome them. 



As to the 50-page discussion of the processes of erosion which follows the 100-page account 

 of the Henry Mountains, that is expanded from a more condensed statement of earlier prepara- 

 tion which makes part of the illuminating and masterly article, already analyzed, entitled 

 "The Colorado Plateau province as a field for geological study;" an article which appears to 

 have been largely prompted by earlier observations in the plateau province as well as by the 

 field work of 1876 on the high plateaus and their eastern margin, where the phenomena of erosion 

 are displayed on a magnificent scale; but the expanded discussion contains many lessons from 

 the Henry Mountains also. 



The illustrations of the report call for mention. They include, in addition to a good num- 

 ber of smaller figures, 13 full-page views, chiefly of the laccolithic mountains, based on Gilbert's 

 own pencil sketches in the field. The originals, while not possessing the exceptional artistic 

 quality of Holmes's landscapes, give a good idea of the barren mountain forms; and they also 

 show that, had he been given time enough in earlier years, Gilbert might have prepared many 

 helpful outlines of the basin ranges for his Wheeler survey report, which as a matter of fact 

 is almost without such illustration, most of its figures being sections. Some of the Henry 



