718 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
immense piles of strata misplaced and drifted. This discovery is not 
of Eduard Suess—if it is of any one man, that man is Marcel Ber- 
trand 1—but who would have dared, even dream of it, before having 
read ‘Der Entstehung der Alpen” and the first volumes of “Das 
Antlitz der Erde”? And when Suess in the chapters of Volume 3, 
which he consecrated to the Alps, adopts in his turn this manner of 
seeing, and speaks of the Helvetian nappes, the Lepontine nappes, 
the Austro-Alpine nappes, thrown one on the other, this theory so 
new and so audacious, seems to spring spontaneously and naturally 
from what he taught formerly. 
Genius never lacks detractors. The author of “Das Antlitz der 
Erde” has often been criticised and cried down. One of the bitter- 
nesses of his life was the incomprehension and ingratitude of some of 
his pupils; one of his consolations, on the other hand, was the imme- 
diate and lasting success of his book in foreign lands, and especially 
in France. He has been reproached on the score of obscurity and 
lack of preciseness; but this lack of clearness and preciseness is usu- 
ally, in the nature of things, the result of the imperfections of our 
knowledge, of the insufficiency of observations, of the difficulty of 
the problems confronted. ‘When Suess affirms,” as I said in 1910, 
in reviewing the last volume which had just appeared, “one is quite 
certain that he does not deceive; when he is unprecise, it is because 
preciseness at that time is impossible; when he is obscure, it is 
because he has not yet understood, and because he finds obscurity 
preferable to the clearness of an illusion created complete in all its 
parts by hisimagination.”” His splendor of style has been reproached, 
and, as it has been called, his geopoesy, as though the writer of 
genius were master of his tongue, as though the eagle could flutter 
about after the manner of a barnyard fowl. Finally, he has been 
reproached with not taking sides in the warmly controversial ques- 
tions, with preserving an indecisive, timid attitude, by which was 
shown his embarrassment. This last reproach would be grave 
enough if addressed to a theorist; but Eduard Suess was never a 
theorist. This man once accustomed to teaching and to conquering, 
ardent also in political disputes, had for a long time ceased to argue 
on scientific matters; he was content with seeing, and after having 
seen, with showing. No mind has been more intuitive, or more 
exclusively intuitive than his. * * * 
1““The concept of overthrusts in the Alps was first described in detail by Albert Heim and later developed 
by Marcel Bertrand; but neither of these geologists was the author of the idea of the great overthrust sheets, 
which owes its at present accepted form to Maurice Lugeon.””—BAiLEY WILLIS. 
