academy of sciences] n g> GEO LOGICAL SURVEY 123 



The history of the Great Basin mess is inseparably associated with that of the survey itself, 

 of which it was for 30 years a characteristic though sectional feature ; and for the most of that time 

 Gilbert was, when in Washington, the leading spirit as well as the senior member. How genial 

 was his smile of welcome; how jovial were his stories and how joyous the laugh that left his 

 friends happier for having been with him! His letters to members absent in the field frequently 

 contained references to the mess and its fortunes. It was locally known for the good fellowship 

 that the members enjoyed together, and it was widely renowned for the pleasure that an invi- 

 tation to sit in with members gave to many a geological visitor in Washington. Melancholy 

 indeed was the fate of such a visitor if, invited to the mess one year, he was not invited the year 

 following when he was again in the Capital City. But that was the fate of few, for the mess 

 was truly hospitable; its visitors, numbering two or three a week, counted up to a total of many 

 hundreds. They included such men as Hermann Credner, E. D. Cope, G. M. Dawson, James 

 Hall, Joseph Leconte, Emm, de Margerie, O. C. Marsh, Raphael Pumpelly, N. S. Shaler, and 

 other geological personages. It may be well believed that the visitors were sometimes amused 

 if not amazed at the wide range of personal and pungent remarks by which the lunch was 

 flavored; wagers on the outcome of elections and congressional measures were frequent, the 

 stakes usually being some choice dish of dessert. On one occasion, a member tabulated the 

 qualities of the others, and rated Gilbert as zero in cheek, combativeness, diplomacy, verbosity, 

 and vanity, but 100 in honesty and caution. It is not to be denied that good fellowship some- 

 times detained the mess members around the table after the end of the noon hour, thus endanger- 

 ing their good repute in the director's office; but as to that, it is credibly reported that a critic 

 of the survey one day, seeing the director and his chief adviser playing tenpins in an alley near 

 the office, snapped a photograph of them with a clock in the background, its hands pointing to 

 a mid-afternoon hour, in evidence of the way in which leading geologists wasted their time. 



With increase of membership and change to the caterer-controlled period, the mess outgrew 

 its original simplicity, and none of its later arrangements compare in primitiveness to those of 

 its first years. The little company of four then sometimes sat on rolls of bedding around a 

 packing box, as if to keep up the pleasant impression of lunching in a Great Basin camp. On 

 one occasion when they were thus grouped, Gilbert, vividly recounting a rare instance of hori- 

 zontal refraction in the desert, became so absorbed in his narration that he tossed a well-picked 

 chicken bone over his shoulder, as if the party were really seated in the sagebrush wilderness ; 

 and the bone haply struck an office messenger who entered the door at that very moment to 

 summon the narrator to the presence of the director; the messenger returned forthwith, reporting 

 that he had '"tracted Mr. Gilbert's 'tention." Of such are the joyous memories of long-gone 

 years still current among the surviving few! 

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