THOMAS CONDON 281 
him the fullest credit when publishing his ideas or observations. 
These two old lovers of earth-science recall a comparison made by 
Suess,' in writing of an almost unknown geologist, Arnold Escher 
von der Linth: 
On the one side stood Sir Charles,? the calm, superior philosopher, the lucid 
thinker and able writer; on the other, dear old Arnold Escher, who intrusted his 
admirable sketches and diaries to everyone indiscriminately, but to whom every 
line he had to publish was a torment, and who was perhaps only quite in his 
element up in the snow and ice, when the wind swept his gray head and his 
eye roamed over a sea of peaks. 
From a scientific standpoint Professor Condon’s best contribution 
is doubtless his paper’ on “‘ The Willamette Sound.” Condon showed 
that this Pleistocene body of water filled the Willamette Valley, and 
extended north to Puget Sound, with a probable length of about three 
hundred miles. He worked out its extent and depth by means of 
terraces along the Columbia River and the ocean. 
Professor Condon’s book, The Two Islands,4 is a popular account 
of the geological history of the original “Oregon country.” The 
Klamath mountain group of southwestern Oregon and northern Cali- 
fornia was anisland (Siskyou Island) in the Cretaceous sea, separated 
from the Sierra Nevada by Diller’s Lassen Strait. The Blue Moun- 
tains, however, were not an island (Shoshone Island) at the time, for 
only in the Upper Cretaceous (early Chico) did the sea reach even 
the western part of the Blue Mountain region. But Condon’s treat- 
ment of the subject brought out the striking geological difference 
between the two mountain groups and the rest of the state, showing 
that they are two regions of Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks surrounded 
by Tertiary lavas and sediments. 
Thomas Condon was born in Ireland, March 3, 1822. When he 
was eleven years old, the family moved to New York City; later to 
the central part of New York state, where Condon finished his educa- 
tion, taught school, and made a collection of New York paleozoic 
t Preface to Das Antlitz der Erde, translation by Hertha Sollas. 
2 Sir Charles Lyell. 
3“ The Willamette Sound,’”’ Overland Monthly, Vol. VII, No. 5, pp. 468-73 (San 
Francisco, 1871); Reprinted as a chapter in The Two Islands. 
4The Two Islands and What Came of Them. (Portland, Ore.: The J. K. Gill 
Co., 1904.) 
