20 ^ CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



Leland Stanford, and D. 0. Mills," with "AVhitney's help." But it cost Brewer 

 "two years' unpaid labor, $2,000 of [my] pocket, and the accompanying loss of 

 [my] salary at Yale." The botany volume sold to the public for four dollars. The 

 three volumes on birds were printed largely at the expense of Alexander Agassiz, 

 with Baird contributing a thousand dollars on his portion. The geological ma- 

 terials were published largely through the "M.C.Z." of Cambridge: "the gravel 

 volume will form one of the Memoirs of the Zoological Museum." 



Whitney stayed on with the State Survey until 1874, the next year taking 

 the Sturgis-Hooper Professorship of Geology at Harvard, which he held until 

 his death in 1896. "Honors did not come to him as abundantly as to many per- 

 haps less worthj^," concludes the historian of geology, G. P. Merrill. Some strong- 

 worded opposition to the State Survey came even from scientists. Dr. "William 

 P. Gibbons wrote in the Overland Monthly: 



... as to any report on botany, or any collection of California plants, three sets 

 have been made up: one for the California Academy of Sciences; one for the University 

 of California; while one has been sent out of the State, and eastern botanists have 

 the credit of devoting their time to working it up, in occasional paroxysms, without 

 remuneration. It would have been far better for the interests of the State and of 

 science had this [California Geological] commission never existed. 



Dr. Gibbons evinced more local pride than imagination when he said : 



California scientists would have accomplished more work, without aid from the 

 State, than has thus far, to all practical purposes, been achieved by the commission. 



Gibbons' assessment appeared in August, 1875. The first volume of the "Botany 

 Report" was published the following year, and the second volume, in a neces- 

 sarily smaller edition, four years later. Kellogg, Bolander, Behr, and perhaps 

 a few others, might have eventually described the greater part of the California 

 flora, but the number of avoidable synonyms may well have increased thereby 

 because of the inability of the resident botanists to check against the existing 

 specimens in Eastern herbaria. 



Thlrty-two-year-old AYilliam Henry Brewer accompanied Whitney and his 

 family from Massachusetts to California via Aspinwall. When the party stepped 

 ashore from the Golden Age on November 14, 1860, they were greeted by Mr. 

 S. Osgood Putnam, of the California Steam Navigation Company, who had backed 

 the State Survey appropriation in the legislature. Brewer had finished at the 

 Sheffield Scientific School at Yale in 1852 — a member of its first class — and had 

 studied abroad under the chemists Liebig and Bunsen. Along the academic way 

 he had acquired a lively taste for botany and a near dead-shot judgment in geol- 

 ogy. He had applied for a post on Captain Gunnison's expedition but had been 

 turned down; Gunnison and his party, it will be remembered, were massacred 

 by a band of Indians in Utah. Brewer was "fond of travel, not for rest, but for 

 the recreation which he found in careful observation and record of facts in all 

 departments of human interest." No botanical collector in California up to his 

 time made as careful field tickets as did Brewer; fortunately, too, his field book 

 is preserved at the Gray Herbarium. His journal, edited by F. P. Farquhar and 

 first published in 1930 under the title Up and Down California in 1860-1864, is a 

 rich but unscheduled dividend of the State Survey ! 



William More Gabb of Philadelphia was the same age as Brewer when he 

 joined the State Survey but there the likeness breaks, for hardly could two men 



