JOHN WIvSI.KY POWEXL DAVIS 



outside of his own field. The names given to his types were 

 usually taken from local examples, although in certain cases 

 similar structures had long been well known in other fields. 

 His reason for thus passing over the earlier work of others 

 elsewhere was evidently that he wished simply to classify the 

 phenomena that he had himself observed. It was perhaps by" 

 reason of the habit of reducing his facts to schematic arrange- 

 ment that he gave an oversimplified account of the Basin 

 ranges, i He did not explicitly announce that the prefaulting 

 mass in the Great Basin was of complicated structure and pos- 

 sibly of irregular surface ; he indeed tacitly implied a horizon- 

 tal structure and plain surface when he wrote: "When the 

 blocks into which a district of country has been broken by 

 faults are greatly tilted, so that the strata dip at high angles, 

 the uplifted edges of such blocks often form long mountain 

 ridges. . . . Many of the ridge-like mountains of the Basin 

 province have this structure. Such a ridge is composed of 

 monoclinal strata, the one side presenting a bold escarped 

 front, the other a more gently sloped back conforming to a 

 greater or less degree with the dip" (Uinta Mountains, 16). 

 It is possible that the failure of later observers to find simple 

 monoclinal structures and forms in the Basin ranges corre- 

 sponding to this simple description is in part responsible for 

 the misunderstandings that have arisen regarding the origin 

 of the ranges. In another connection Powell's account of the 

 Basin ranges is more satisfactory, as will appear below. 



PHYSIOGRAPHIC WORK. 



Powell's contribution to the discussion of erosional processes, 

 and their effect in the development of land forms was of fully 

 as great value as his more strictly geological studies, and cer- 

 tainly exerted a marked influence v ii the work of later stu- 

 dents of physiographic problems. I It is not too much to say 

 that in this division of his studies/ne, with his able collabo- 

 rators, laid the foundations of what may be fairly called the 

 American school of geomorphology, now eagerly embraced by 

 modern physiographers everywhere, and that he thus con- 

 tributed immensely to the awakening and the advance of the 

 sluggish old science of geography. It is worth pointing out 



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