MEMORIAL OF E. W. HILGARD 47 



"I am now engaged in the tough job of writing up wliat I have never seen 

 myself to any extent, . . . and as I tell Loughridge, 'It helps you along 

 wonderfully fast when you don't know much about the subject you are de- 

 scribing.' " 



"You can not be rigorously consistent in this as in many other things with- 

 out an occasional reductio ad al)su7'dum. And as varietj'' is the spice of life, 

 especially in Mormondom, I don't pretend to stick to the principle as above 

 laid down at the expense of having the heavens fall." 



"In this case I must hold with Mr. Gradgrind that 'facts is what we need, 

 sir ; hard, solid facts.' 



"Since receipt of your letter, I have 'paused for a reply' because of the get- 

 ting off of my Louisiana MS., 'the first bantling of a brood of twelve,' as I 

 informed the superintendent (General Walker)." 



Speaking of our cotton culture maps : 



"I don't believe in lines slanting right, left, vertical, and horizontal; they 

 bother me. Give the farmer color and plenty of it, and make the map look 

 pretty, like a pile of calico in the country store." 



When overworked and on the point of breaking down, he took a trip 

 into the mountains, remarking, ^^Ein khiger Feldherr schont sich.^' The 

 wisdom of this was shown when he came home after a month's absence 

 with renewed vigor. 



"I have just returned from the Upper San Joaquin Valley, where I nearly 

 froze — it being a semitropical climate. But I captured lots of soils and alkali." 



In these cotton culture reports Doctor Hilgard followed the precedent 

 set in his 1860 report, modified and amplified, however, by his experience 

 in California with arid soils. The interests of farmers and intending 

 immigrants are kept constantly in view, so that the reports are most 

 reliable handbooks of the States of which they treat, and deserve to be 

 far more widely known than they are. 



In a letter of 1913 his final comment on this great work is as follows: 



"The Census cotton report, for all the hard work it cost, has found little 

 appreciation because of the medium of publication — quarto at that. Don't let 

 us do it again." 



Commenting on this report. Prof. E. J. Wickson says in his address 

 at the memorial services in honor of Doctor Hilgard at the University of 

 California, January 30, 1916 : 



"But this monumental cotton work, based on the soil work, which was one 

 of its foundation walls, was nation wide in its influences. It was accepted 

 throughout the country as a demonstration that Hilgard could do the work 

 which his California reports and other publications were urging on the public 



