ORVILLE A. DERBY 213 



long delays in publishing his results, delays which led to the tying 

 up of his own results and those of his assistants. Without doubt 

 he hoped that the delays would enable him to put everything 

 beyond question and to make his reports final and complete instead 

 of preliminary and tentative. But the delays were prolonged from 

 year to year until his assistants became discouraged and the gov- 

 ernment more or less exasperated at the lack of practical results 

 for such great and long-continued expenditures. It was probably 

 this long delay that finally led to his resignation as state geologist 

 of Sao Paulo. 



Derby never felt obliged to show results. After he had been 

 state geologist of Sao Paulo for ten or twelve years, and had pub- 

 lished next to nothing on the geology of that state, I asked him 

 point blank, and with some feeling, where his results were. He 

 replied: "They are in my head." We had to change the subject. 

 But the important fact behind his delays is that the geology of Sao 

 Paulo is difficult and involves problems that he had not been able 

 to settle to his own satisfaction, and he was unwilling to commit 

 himself definitely to paper and thus lay himself open to adverse 

 criticism. 



It seemed unfortunate for Brazil, for himself, and for the cause 

 of science that he was unable to bring himself to take an active 

 interest in the economic geology of the country. But his first and 

 only interest in geology was in geology as a pure science. To him 

 a fossil was a thing of beauty, of interest and value, and a joy 

 forever, but a mine or an industry was, after all, only an industry 

 whose main object was money-getting. 



Derby was a man of unlimited grit. When once he decided 

 upon a course of action nothing turned him to the right or to the 

 left. His whole life is a demonstration of his power to make good 

 in spite of obstacles that would have been insurmountable for 

 most men — his determination to be the leading authority on the 

 geology of Brazil, cost what it might. 



How many of us would have lived for forty years, in a foreign 

 country, cut off, as he was, from all personal contact with the 

 geologists of the world at large and from the people of his own race 

 and from his own family ? And yet, from the time he went to Rio 



