236 Clarence King. 



His further investigations along the same general lines on the 

 fundamental principles of upheaval and subsidence were in an 

 advanced stage of completion when they were cut off by his 

 untimely death. 



It is practically impossible to adequately characterize King's 

 literary work, for the greater part of what he did was never 

 published, and very likely never even written. It was his 

 habit to work out in his head any subject which interested 

 him, even down to its minutest details, before putting a pen 

 to paper ; once this was accomplished to his satisfaction, he 

 wrote with such ease and rapidity that the words actually 

 flowed from his pen. Probably one reason that he did not 

 write more was that his own literary taste was so refined and 

 exacting that he was never thoroughly satisfied with his own 

 conceptions. In his scientific writing, there was generally 

 some imperious necessity that made it urgent upon him to 

 give his results to the public in spite of the imperfections he 

 might still see in them, but in literature such necessity rarely 

 appeared. What he did publish he himself held in compara- 

 tively light esteem, but in the opinion of the best literary 

 writers of the day, with most of whom he was on terns of 

 friendly and intimate intercourse, his writings, and even more 

 his affluent and delightful talks, disclosed a literary quality 

 that might have given him a foremost place among American 

 men of letters. 



His one literary book, "Mountaineering in the Sierra 

 Nevada," went through more editions in England than in this 

 country and was very generally regarded there as far the best 

 book of its kind that had ever been written. It was primarily 

 a series of articles giving an account of his early experiences 

 in California among the mountains that he loved so well and 

 the peculiar people that he met. He undertook it, he once 

 said, as an experiment to see if it were possible to write scenic 

 description in such a way that the general public would 

 read it. 



Of his occasional articles in current periodicals, two appeared 

 in the Century in 1886, and three in the Forum. Of the 

 latter, two on Cuba, published in the years immediately pre- 

 ceding the Spanish War, were written under the impulse of 

 strong feelings of sympathy with the cause of the insurgents, 

 with whom he had come into intimate personal contact during 

 a winter spent on the island at the country house of a friend. 



Of his Century articles, one was a delicate tribute to his 

 closest friend, John Hay, as one of the biographers of Lincoln ; 

 the other, a short sketch of his search for the " Helmet of 

 Mambrino " for a fellow Cervantista, was that which more 

 than anything he ever published disclosed the exquisite deli- 



