18 The American Geologist. " Gannary, 190% 
and to exhibit the hungry desire to know the geology of his 
new environment. The earthquake of San Jacinto and the oc- 
currence of petroleum in California gave him topics for papers 
in the Grotocist, and he brought valuable new material before 
the Southern California Academy of Sciences, at Los Angeles, 
and more fully before the Cordilleran Section of the Geological 
Society of America, in San Francisco, as early as December, 
1900. 
The economic aspects of geology did not escape his atten- 
tion and his advice was sought and followed in some impor- 
tant cases in Ohio and California. His judgment pro or con, 
was always correct, because only announced after the most 
careful consideration; but pecuniary reward for his services 
was never the main object in view. 
In a paper previously mentioned—“Buffalo and Chicago, 
or What Might have been’’—he discusses as a purely scien- 
tific problem the features of hydrography upon which the prac- 
tical engineering work of the “Drainage Canal” was after- 
wards based, and in other instances he appears strongly in 
much the same relation to accomplished technical progress as 
that held by Joseph Henry with reference to the Morse tele- 
graph, or by Faraday, Tyndall, and Thompson and other 
great investigators to the practical electric machines. 
Dr. Edward Claypole was thoroughly equipped for the 
work of life, he was in every sense an “educated man”, as the 
term is recently defined by Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, who 
gives five tests of education, as follows :— 
1. “Correctness and precision in the use of the mother 
tongue.’ One of Dr. Claypole’s most apparent traits in his writ- 
ten or spoken language, was always the use of terse and fin- 
ished sentences, couched in elegant, but simple diction. With 
him, this was a natural result of his classical training, and it 
is not too much to claim for him a considerable share of influ- 
ence in aiding the movement towards linguistic precision. 
Below is a copy of a letter which was preserved among 
his papers. An editor, who had scrutinized the proof sheets 
of a paper submitted by him, had objected to the use of a 
certain phrase, and this present letter was sent as a protest 
against any change of the idiom: 
