48 JOHN WESLEY POWELL. 



The drainage is independent of the system of dips into which it is 

 lowered and on which it is "superimposed." 



If a mountain range is slowly uplifted athwart the course of a 

 large river, the river wears its channel deeper and maintains its 

 course. When the uplift is completed, the mountain stands in two 

 parts, divided by the river. The direction of the stream's flow is 

 independent of the dips of the rocks in the mountain, because the 

 drainage is "antecedent" to the uplift. 



His third important treatise on physical geography constitutes 

 the first three chapters of a monograph by the National Geographic 

 Society on the physiography of the United States. It sets forth 

 the broader processes by which the surface of the earth is modi- 

 fied, characterises the features to which these processes give rise, 

 and classifies the land of the United States into physiographic re- 

 gions or provinces. 



Anthropology is Powell's favorite science, and to it his greatest 

 contributions have been made. Nor need his preference occasion 

 surprise. Geology is young, and being young has had the advan- 

 tage of modern inductive methods from its birth. Its growth has 

 been so rapid that its great generalisations have been attained, and 

 present progress is by slow stages, adding here a little and there a 

 little. Great indeed must be the future geologist who can earn the 

 reputation of Lyell. But the study of man was begun in the far 

 distant past, and it accumulated by early methods so large a body 

 of theory that when better methods became known it was at first 

 unable to accept and use them. It has resulted that inductive an- 

 thropology is a less developed science than geology. Moreover, 

 anthropology is the great science of the future, for its results are to 

 guide the development of human institutions. It has barely dis- 

 covered its high destiny, and is beginning to train its powers for 

 serious work. 



The days that Powell has spent in intercourse with Indians for 

 the purpose of studying their languages, their modes of thought, 

 their institutions, their arts and their philosophies, aggregate sev- 

 eral years of time. On the material thus gathered many printed 

 volumes of description might be based. But the time necessary to- 

 arrange and edit this material was never given because his ener- 

 gies were consumed by more important work. A small portion 

 only was published. A sketch of the Ancient Province of Tusayan 

 appeared in Scribner's Monthly in 1875; an address read at the 

 Boston meeting of the American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science was devoted to the Political System of the Wvandots ; a 



