564 
pleted in the year 1878. During the fol- 
lowing twenty years no investigations of 
this character were carried on in the State. 
In 1897, however, the Legislature organ- 
ized the present Geological and Natural 
History Survey and gave to it for the first 
two years an appropriation of $5,000 annu- 
ally, which was doubled during the second 
biennial period. The government of the 
Survey is in a Board of Commissioners, con- 
sisting of the governor of the State, the 
president of the State University, the State 
superintendent of Public Instruction, the 
president of the Commission of Fisheries, 
and the president of the Wisconsin Acad- 
emy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. The di- 
rector of the survey from the first has been 
H. A. Birge, professor of zoology in the 
University of Wisconsin. The work of the 
Survey has been done along three lines: 
economic, scientific and educational. 
The first piece of work of economic im- 
portance was the investigation of the build- 
ing stones of the State, to which two years 
were devoted by Dr. E. R. Buckley, who is 
in charge of this department, and, as a re- 
sult,a full report on the building stones was 
published as a bulletin of the Survey in 1899. 
After the completion of this work, Dr. Buck- 
ley turned his attention to the clays and the 
clay industries, on which he is still engaged. 
A general report on this subject will appear 
during the present winter, and the work will 
be continued probably for at least a year or 
two inthefuture. The geological structure 
of the Keweenawan, or copper-bearing 
rocks, of Douglas and adjacent counties of 
northern Wisconsin has been worked out by 
Professor U. 8. Grant, and a preliminary re- 
port has been published. 
Of the several scientific investigations, 
the most important is the geology of the 
erystalline rocks in the central part of the 
5S! vte—a region which was almost entirely 
uninhabited at the time of the earlier sur- 
vey. Itsinvestigation has been assigned to 
SCLENCE. 
[N. 8. Vou. XIII. No. 328. 
Dr. 8. Weidman, who has been carrying on 
field work since the organization of the Sur- 
vey and who will prepare a complete report 
of the geology of the region when he has 
completed the task of working out, in the 
field, the difficult and intricate relations of 
the rocks. 
Another line of work has been on the 
lakes which are so abundant in Wisconsin. 
A hydrographic survey has been made of 
more than 60 of the more important lakes 
in the southeastern part of the State, and 
maps of these lakes have been published. 
The investigation of the biology of the 
waters has been fairly begun. The physica 
geography of the lake region of southern 
and eastern Wisconsin is now being studied 
by Mr. N. M. Fenneman. 
The first educational bulletin has recently 
been published by Professor R. D. Salisbury, 
on the physical geography of the region 
about Devil’s Lake. This is intended to set 
forth the geography and the surface geolog 
of the region in such a way as to bring out the 
principles of physical geography involved, 
so that the book will be primarily of value 
to the teachers and students of the subject, 
but it is also a contribution to our knowl- 
edge of that region. 
This brief notice touches only the most 
important directions in which the Survey 
has been working, leaving unmentioned 
many subjects to which less attention has 
been given. 
So far as the experience of the Wisconsin 
Survey goes, it appears that the State is 
quite willing that a considerable amount of 
money should be devoted to investigations 
whose value is scientific in the fullest sense 
of the word, and it also expects a considerable 
amount of attention to be given to subjects 
of economic value and of immediate prac- 
tical importance. ‘This seems to me to be 
entirely right. The State has a right to ex- 
pect an economic return for money expended 
in a State survey, especially as there are 
