ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS 119 



Discussion 



Professor Davis : I am much gratified to learn that the National Survey 

 proposed to take up again the study of the many intermont basins and extinct 

 lakes of the Great Basin, and desired to make a brief historical statement in 

 that connection. 



The younger members of our Society may not recall that 42 years ago, in 

 1879, when the several departmental geological surveys of the period of early 

 western exploration were abolished and the United States Geological Survey 

 was created to unify and replace them, G. K. Gilbert was one of six members 

 of the earlier surveys to be appointed as "geologist" in the new organization; 

 and that its first director, Clarence King, gave Gilbert charge of the Great 

 Basin division of the Survey, with headquarters at Salt Lake City, where he 

 was to continue the studies he had previously begun on the extinct Lake 

 Bonneville, with the expectation that the study of other extinct lakes in the 

 same region would be taken up later. 



When King resigned, in 1881, and Powell was made Director, Gilbert was 

 called to Washington, there "to complete his report on Lake Bonneville," while 

 his assistants were to continue the study of other Great Basin lakes. In 1884 

 he reported that, besides Bonneville, which he and his assistants had studied, 

 and Lahontan and Mono, which had been studied chiefly by Russell under his 

 direction, 25 of the smaller extinct lakes had been explored, but that a still 

 larger number probably remained to be examined. It was, however, only the 

 three larger lakes above named which were specially reported on; studies of 

 the smaller ones were stopped. 



Russell and other western-trained geologists were called to the East and 

 assigned to Appalachian studies under Gilbert's direction. Gilbert's comple- 

 tion of his Bonneville report was long delayed by his work on various other 

 tasks, and "the examination of the more southerly valleys [of the Great Basin], 

 . . . the study of the brines and the saline deposits, and the elaborate meas- 

 urement of post-Pleistocene displacements," all of which he had hoped to see 

 accomplished, were indefinitely postponed. 



So many were the distractions by which the Bonneville monograph was de- 

 layed that it was not published until 1890, nearly ten years after Gilbert had 

 been recalled from Salt Lake City to complete it. It is numbered Monograph I, 

 as if it were to have been the first to be issued ; but 15 others, including Rus- 

 sell's monograph on Lahontan, appeared before it. There can be no question 

 that Gilbert deeply regretted the necessity of transferring his attention from 

 research in the West to a variety of other duties in the East; he was in par- 

 ticular disappointed to have to give up his studies on the deformation of the 

 Bonneville basin, apparently due to the evaporation of the lake waters; for 

 he was there approaching a quantitative determination of a problem concern- 

 ing the balanced condition of the earth's crust which has later been given the 

 name of isostasy. 



In December, 1885, in his famous address as president of the Society of 

 American Naturalists, he examined this aspect of the Bonneville problem 

 under the title of "The inculcation of scientific method by example," and he 

 then said: "It is hardly necessary to assure you that my personal regret in 

 abandoning this research at its present stage is very great." That brief state- 



