66 



Sierra Club Bulletin 



out the San Joaquin trip he showed the younger Le Conte's 

 "monumented trails" with great affection. 



Gilbert's pastimes were mainly intellectual. Night and day 

 on the Sierran trip he was continuously indulging in intellectual 

 exercises, except when reading of King's exploits, or telling of 

 Muir in the Sierra and in Alaska, of Harriman in Alaska, or of 

 Wheeler, Button, Walcott, Shaler, Davis, and others. 



He taught the writer the name of every tree and of every 

 flowering plant in the Sierra seen during the trip. . . . How 

 he praised the writer for seeing SalLv arc tic a first in catkin 

 near the Mono Pass, with the plant a quarter of an inch high 

 only, and the catkin two to three inches high ! How he made the 

 writer creep along cautiously so as to show him the water-ouzel, 

 the woodpecker, the coyote, the cougar, and the other denizens 

 of the forest and the glacial lakes ! On the trip to Wawona 

 and the giant trees he searched long to find the web of the spi- 

 der which forms its home in the shape of a paraboloid of revo- 

 lution. 



Yet with all his love for plants he told the vv^riter that sys- 

 tematic botany did not appear to broaden the mind so much as 

 the study of physics, chemistry, and engineering. "Where are 

 the names in botany such as Kelvin, J. J. Thomson, Newton, 

 d'Alembert, GaHleo, and so on?" To which I answered, "What 

 about Darwin, Huxley, Asa Gray, Bentham, Hooker?" "Yes," 

 he said, "they were great men because they wrote on the geo- 

 graphical distribution of plants, not so much because they were 

 systematists." In all his work one could see the mind working 

 like that of Powell, always dealing with the massive, the sub- 

 lime. 



If a horse or mule fell out on the trip, or a halt were made 

 for a meal, Gilbert would ask at once for a "problem" to be 

 given him to solve. The writer's stock of questions on maxima 

 and minima, on astronomy, on motion round curves, on inertia, 

 on flywheels, on nodes of curves, on physics, were soon used 

 up, as Gilbert could see through a problem very quickly. In 

 return he would always propound a difficult problem, such as 

 that of the loaf mentioned earlier, of the ages of Mary and 

 Ann, etc. At night, in the sleeping-bags, he would teach us the 

 names of all the principal stars, constellations, and so on. 



