MEMOIR OF CLARENCE EDWARD DUTTON 
11 
He was appointed adjutant of the Twenty-first Connecticut Volun- 
teers in September, 1.862 , and the following year, March 1, promoted to 
captaincy. In 1864 lie was transferred to the Ordnance Corps of the 
Regular Army, and served through the remainder of the war.. While 
assigned to the Watervliet Arsenal in 1865 he began his scientific studies, 
which, as lie informed me, took two directions, and both were pursued 
with ardor. The first was invertebrate paleontology, under the guidance 
of Hall and Whitfield. The second was the study of steel, in cooperation 
with Alexander L. Holley, of the Bessemer Steel Works, of Troy. 
At the end of five years he was transferred to Frankford Arsenal, 
Philadelphia, and thence to Washington, D. C. Being cut off from im- 
mediate contact with steel, his thoughts concentrated on geology, espe- 
cially on the physical side of the subject. He became a member of the 
Philosophical Society of Washington in _1872, a nd met Professor Henry 
and Professor Baird, who took great interest in him. Through the 
former and Major Powell he was induced to consent to a detail for ..duty 
with the Powell Survey, beginning May 15, 1815. 
He devoted jnn years to the study of the great plateau region of the 
West, and published his results in. the three reports entitled “The Geology 
of the High Plateaus of Htah” ( 6 ) / “The Tertiary History of the Grand 
Canyon District” (7), and “Mount Taylor and the Zuni Plateau” (16). 
The plateau region of the West is remarkable, not only for the simplicity 
of its geological phenomena, but also- for the variety and the enormous 
scale of the exposures. 
Dutton’s general conclusions are summarized in the closing chapter of 
the report on Mount Taylor and the Zuni Plateau. Although contrib- 
uting much to the geological history of the region, he evidently dwells 
with greater pleasure on the physical problems, and remarks, in describ- 
ing the facts, that “not a trace of systematic plication has yet been found 
there,” referring especially to the Zuni part of the plateau region. 
“The terras anticlinal and synclinal have almost dropped out of the vocabu- 
lary of the western geologist. The strata are often flexed, but the type of 
flexure is the monocline. 
“The country at large shows no traces of a widespread, universal horizontal 
compression; on the contrary, it discloses the absence of such stress. We 
seem here to get nearer to the real nature of the process which has built the 
mountains. Shorn of that extreme complexity which confuses and bewilders 
us in more highly developed structures, the great central facts and the true 
essence of the mechanical processes involved become much clearer. The moun- 
tains of, the West have not been produced by horizontal compression, but by 
the action of some unknown forces beneath, which have pushed them up.” 
1 The numbers in ( ) refer to list at end of this article. 
