232 Clarence King. 



At two successive periods in his youth, those to whom he 

 would naturally have looked for financial' support were over- 

 whelmed by commercial disaster, leaving him to provide not only 

 for his own wants but for those of other members of his family. 

 In his later life circumstances entirely beyond his control more 

 than once baffled or annulled the efforts he was making to 

 establish himself on such a financial basis that he would feel 

 justified in applying his entire time to his chosen pursuits in 

 science and literature. He was consequently obliged to devote 

 more of his time and energy to the directly remunerative side 

 of his profession — that of the mining engineer — than he other- 

 wise would have done. This was especially true of his later 

 years, though even in earlier life his services had been not 

 infrequently sought in cases of great moment. 



He owed his prominent position in this profession not alone 

 to his ability and experience as a geologist, which exceeded 

 that of most of his fellow workers, but to his high standard of 

 personal integrity and the rapidity and acuteness of his judg- 

 ment. These qualities were early illustrated in an incident 

 which gave him perhaps greater prominence in the financial 

 world than any act of his life — his exposure of the diamond 

 fraud of 1872. An apparently well authenticated discovery 

 had been made of diamonds in sufficient quantity to affect the 

 diamond markets of the world. Although its position was 

 kept carefully concealed, through the intimate knowledge of 

 the country possessed by his assistants, King was enabled to 

 determine that it must be located in an area already surveyed 

 by them, and at once fitted out a party to examine it. When 

 this examination, undertaken primarily in the interest of science, 

 had proved that the alleged discovery was an elaborate and 

 skilfully planned fraud, it was his prompt action and unshakable 

 integrity alone that averted a financial disaster which threatened 

 to rival that of the Mississippi Bubble of Law. 



In the many important mining suits in which he served as 

 scientific adviser, and which involved most difficult and compli- 

 cated problems of geological structure, combined with their 

 still more difficult interpretation under the terms of the United 

 States mining laws, he was generally intrusted with the legal 

 as well as the scientific management of the case. As he made 

 it a practice to never trust the eye of another, but to verify 

 every fact by his own personal observation, he obtained such a 

 thorough knowledge of his subject that the most skillful lawyers 

 w T ere unable to shake his testimony by their cross-examination. 



In his examination of mines, he visited almost every part of 

 the American continent, and thus acquired a personal fami- 

 liarity witJi deep-seated phenomena that it seldoms falls to the 

 lot of a geologist to obtain. Hence he was exceptionally well 



