JOHN WESLEY POWEU^ DAVIS 



exuberant impressionist: "Then again the restless sea retired, 

 and the golden, purple and black hosts of heaven made missiles 

 of their own misty bodies balls of hail, flakes of snow, and 

 drops of rain and when the storm of war came the new rocks 

 fled to the sea" (p. 214). 



One of the most marked characteristics of Powell's reports 

 is their freedom from citations of other authors. This was 

 natural enough as far as the description of local features are 

 concerned, for in the regions that he explored he had few geo- 

 logical predecessors, and to those he gives full credit. His 

 citations from the reports of the lamented Marvine are most 

 generous ; but in the statement of general schemes of mountain 

 and volcanic structures and of stream and valley classification 

 the case is different. These subjects had been studied in Eu- 

 rope also, and the failure to give due credit to the work of 

 foreign geologists in our Survey reports brought upon us a 

 certain measure of discredit abroad. The reason for inatten^\ 

 tion to European studies evidently was that our geological 

 frontiersmen found enough in the West to make up the whole 

 of their science; and besides they did not read French and 

 German, and they were so overwhelmed with work that they 

 had no time to spend in looking up prior statements of their 

 newly-perceived principles; so they overlooked foreign work 

 in a continent-wide spirit of North American provincialism.! 



ANTECEDENT RIVERS. 



A significant instance of this kind is found in Powell's fa- 

 mous discussion of the course of the Green River through the 

 Uinta Mountains. He wrote: "The river had the right of 

 way. In other words, it was running ere the mountains were 

 formed; not before the rocks, of which the mountains are 

 composed, were deposited, but before the formations were 

 folded, so as to make a mountain range. . . . The emer- 

 gence of the fold above the general surface of the country was 

 little or no faster than the general progress of the corrasion of 

 the channel. . . . The river was the saw which cut the 

 mountains in two. . . . The summit of the fold slowly 

 emerged, until the lower beds of sandstone were lifted to the 

 altitude at first occupied by the upper beds, and if these upper 



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