122 The American Geologist. February, 182° 
Geological Survey to spend the summer in field-work in the ex- 
treme northern portion of that state, north of lake Superior. 
Accordingly he left home June 28, and did not return till Sept.: 
29. Three months were spent in arduous and trying work on the 
Archean rocks in a wilderness far removed from civilization and 
mail connections, where for seven weeks at a time no opportun- 
ity existed to send or receive a letter. The surveys were con- 
ducted in birch bark canoes, along the rocky shores of hundreds 
of small lakes, and the passage from lake to lake was made over 
‘sportages.”” His work extended into twenty-four townships. 
He noted and studied the rock-outcrops at 890 localities, and 
passed over 123 portages whose aggregate length was 43 miles. 
oD 
These portages are foot-trails, more or less blind, through forests, 
swamps and hilly districts and at times are extremely arduous, 
even to one having nothing to carry. The observations made 
were important, and were found to throw much light on some of 
the problems of Archean geology. The report on this work, in 
its official form, was published in the Fifteenth Annual Report of 
the Minnesota survey. 
1887. Having lectured in Oct., (86) at the Wayland Teacher's 
Institute, and at Chicago in November,~where he. found himself 
“posted, after the lecture in an advertised place where people who 
came to the lecture to see him, could take him by the hand and speak 
2 word,” and in Memphis, Tenn., where he was welcomed and 
entertained with the greatest cordiality, but where the clergymen 
declined on Sunday to make announcement of his intended Sunday 
evening lecture on Science Christianitu's Ally, at Middletown, Ct., 
before the students, at Meriden, Ct., at Detroit and Armada, 
Mich., he spent the most of his leisure in the winter of 1886-87 in 
the study of Archean problems connected with the preparation of 
his first Minnesota report. In March he received the provisional 
offer of the directorship of the Arkansas Geological Survey, then 
lately instituted, but in reply he imposed such conditions, (viz; 
that one half of his time should be spent at Ann Arbor) that the 
governor sought some one who could devote himself entirely to 
it, subsequently appointing Prof. J. C. Branner. In May he 
prepared a chapter on Geology and the Bible, published in 
Detroit in a volume styled Signal Lights, and others for the 
Homiletic Review, Swiss Cross, and Forum and prepared a descrip- 
tion, with drawings, of a skeleton of Platygonus compressus found in 
a 
