A CENTURY OF GEOLOGY IN INDIANA. 155 



learn, was a small pamphlet entitled "The Redheaded Family," which 

 treated of the habits of our common woodpeckers. 



Thompson was appointed in tJie spring of 1885, and naming three as- 

 sistants of democratic proclivities, namely, W. H. Thompson, his brother, 

 S. S. Gorby, and Stephen E. Lee, and retaining Phinney and Brown, he began 

 searching for those facts which had remained undiscovered since the days of 

 David Dale Owen. 



First Report of Thompson. 



Thompson's first report, the "Fifteenth Annual Report of the Depart- 

 ment," covering the work done in 1885 and 1886, was issued in the fall of the 

 latter year. In his preface he mentions his discovery of the "Wabash Arch," 

 concerning which Gorby had a special paper in the report. Of it Thompson 

 says: "A few years ago, while engaged in making some preliminary railroad 

 surveys, I noted at a number of points in northern Indiana evidences of a 

 line of disturbance affecting the rock strata across the State, in a direction 

 generally east and west." This supposed upheaval or arch, which was dis- 

 cussed in detail in the next three of four volumes issued by the Department, 

 has been shown by Phinney and Kindle to be a "figment of the fancy." 

 Phinney's conclusions will be given under another heading, and Kindle, 

 writing of it, says: "Many of the dips recorded by the author of this hy- 

 pothetical arch afford evidence against it. About half of them are east or 

 west dips, while the supposed arch has an east and west axis, which calls for 

 north and south dips and fails to explain the others." On a later page Kindle, 

 in discussing the domes or tilted rocks at Wabash, Delphi and Kentland, 

 which furnished the main evidence on which Thompson and Gorby based 

 their supposed arch, continues: "There is at present no positive evidence as 

 to the nature of the forces which produced these domes. It seems probable, 

 however, that they may be analagous in origin to the 'mud lumps' at the 

 mouth of the Mississippi. The study of these interesting masses of the re- 

 cently elevated sea bottom shows that they rise up in domes or anti-clinals 

 and preserve their regular bedding. Whatever the cause may have been 

 which produced the Indiana domes, there is clear evidence that they were 

 developed about the close of the Niagara period."* 



Thompson began his report proper with what he calls a "Compendium of 

 the Geology and Mineralogy of Indiana," which in his preface he states is 

 aimed "To present in the shortest form a clear outline sketch of all that has 

 been discovered and reported upon by my own corps and by predecessors in 

 ofifice, so that this volume might, in a certain degree, place the student who 

 cannot get the earlier reports, in a situation to fairly understand the geology 

 of Indiana." He followed the custom of his predecessors and continued the 

 survey of isolated counties, his "compendium "of 60 pages being succeeded by 

 reports on the Geology of Tippecanoe, Washington and Benton Counties by 



*28th Rep. Ind. Dept. of Geol. & Nat. Resources, 1903, pp. 404-411. 



