26 THE U. S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY 



this proposal was enacted into law, and on July i the person- 

 nel of the Technologic Branch of the Survey was organized 

 as the Bureau of Mines, the chief of that branch becoming the 

 first director of the new bureau. 



By the same act, the investigation of structural materials 

 was transferred to the Bureau of Standards. 



Land Classification Work. The three important phases of 

 the Survey's work just traced — in forestry, reclamation, and 

 mining technology — had all been undertaken in pursuance of 

 special statutory authority. About 1905, however, an ac- 

 tivity of prime importance was begun without any change in 

 the law. 



The very first clause in the definition of functions in the 

 act of 1879 creating the Survey had provided that the Survey 

 should have charge of "the classification of the public lands." 

 This phrase, however, was from the first interpreted by the 

 Survey, and inferentially also by Congress, as calling for a 

 mere geologic and mineralogic examination of the public lands 

 without reference to the public land laws. For over twenty 

 years this interpretation governed, but then the, General Land 

 Office and the Secretary of the Interior began to call more fre- 

 quently upon the Survey for its opinion, based on informa- 

 tion either already gathered by it or obtained by special in- 

 vestigation, as to the applicability of particular provisions of 

 the land laws to specific tracts of public land to which patent 

 was sought by private parties or with respect to which official 

 action was contemplated. In 1906 the Survey undertook, with 

 the approval of the Secretary of the Interior, a systematic 

 valuation of the public lands that were believed to contain coal, 

 in order to determine the prices at which such lands should be 

 sold by the government under the coal land law. This work is 

 still in progress and to it has been added the examination and 

 classification of oil, phosphate, potash, and mineral lands, and 

 of lands suitable for water-power sites, as well as enlarged 

 homesteads and stock-raising homesteads. Today the classi- 



