CLARENCE KING. 



bad-land country he reached the railroad, and proceeding to San 

 Francisco laid his facts before the managers of the company, 

 offering to take to the spot with his own outfit any experts they 

 might be willing to send to test the truth of his statements. 

 Their journey was rendered doubly difficult by the great bliz- 

 zard of that year that overtook them while in camp, but the 

 company's engineers fully confirmed the conclusions arrived at 

 by him and his party, and upon their return they were promptly 

 made public by the officers of the company, thus averting what 

 bid fair to be the most widespread and gigantic financial calam- 

 ity that the world had seen since the Missouri Bubble of Law. 



After the completion of field work of the Survey in 1873 there 

 was necessarily a long delay before the abundant collections in 

 the various scientific branches could be worked up by the re- 

 spective specialists, the lithologic collections alone numbering 

 about 5,000 specimens, for, under the high standards fixed for 

 his work, it was only to the highest authorities in their respective 

 branches that King was willing to entrust the final study of these 

 collections. 



Thus, under his instructions, the writer spent the summer of 

 1874 in Europe conferring with the heads of the leading Euro- 

 pean geological surveys as to their methods of work, and buying, 

 at King's expense, the best and latest geological literature, with 

 which at that time American libraries were but scantily pro- 

 vided. Furthermore, by personal persuasion he succeeded in 

 inducing Professor F. Zirkel, the founder of the science of mi- 

 croscopical petrography, to visit America and study in the pres- 

 ence of the collectors their numerous collections of eruptive rock 

 specimens, for at that time there was no geologist in America 

 who had any practical knowledge of this new branch of geology. 



King reserved for himself the final summarizing of the work 

 of his assistants, and the drawing of general conclusions and 

 theoretical deductions therefrom. This he did in the winter of 

 1877-'8 after the five government quartos and two great atlases 

 embodying the details worked out by his various assistants had 

 been printed. This summary was published in a volume, enti- 

 tled "Systematic Geology," of over 800 pages, profusely illus- 

 trated by reproductions of photographic views illustrating typical 

 geologic phenomena and analytical charts representing the im- 

 (5) 41 



