Personal and Scientific A^ezvs. 65 
at $221,970. None of these lands have been sold. The build- 
ings erected at Butte were not paid for l\v the state, l)ut ])v 
thirty-year bonds secured by these lands, the state, however, 
having guaranteed both principal and interest. 
Mr. H. W. Pearson, of Duluth, recently brought a novel 
suit ag'ainst the Great Northern Railroad company It was 
tried at St. Paul and the question at issue, viz : that of a 
money consideration of a million and a half of dollars for dis- 
covering coal in Montana and Washington, was left undecided 
by a disagreement of the jury. 
Mr. Pearson induced the president of the Great Northern 
company (Mr. J. J. Hill) to employ him to search for coal 
along the line of the Great Northern R. R. in 1896, under the 
ruidance of a new hypothesis and law which he (Pearson) 
claimed to have discovered. The law of Pearson, on examination 
by competent geologists, proved to be wholly groundless and 
puerile. It assumed that the earth's crust has neyer been 
elevated and depressed, that the ocean had flooded alternately 
the northern and the southern hemispheres under the disturb- 
ing action of ice-caps as suggested by Croll, that such floodjng 
disrupted the then growing forests and carried the debris as 
driftwood against pre-existing highland barriers that were not 
submerged, that such driftwood, so lodged, was accumulated 
so as to form coal, that all coal "on earth" could thus be located 
when once the topography and the oceanic currents were 
known, that the deposits of Wales, those of Pennsylvania, Ohio 
etc., were of glacial or post-glacial date, that the Montana and 
Washington coals, whether Cretaceous or Tertiary, were of the 
same age as those of Wales and Pennsylvania, that the coals 
known to have greater elevation Avere of earlier date than 
those of lower altitude, that the CrolHan submergences were 
greater in earlier geological (glacial?) time than in the later, 
that the evidences of such submergences consist in the beaches 
that are scattered over the country, that the beaches that have 
been described about glacial lakes in the United States such as 
the "boulevard beach" at Duluth, and those of lake Agassiz, 
are ancient ocean beaches, and cotcmporary, that the Coiumbia 
formation of the Atlantic sea-board, and the Lafayette of the 
interior, were cotemporary, and due to the same submergence, 
that the whole science of geology was to be remodeled on this 
law, forming a "new geology." and that this new gcologv was 
simply a reversion to the geological principles that were in 
vogue a hundred years ago. 
Strange to sav, this wild, anarchistic notion figured large- 
ly in the suit._ Pe it said, however, to the credit of the intelli- 
eence of the jury, the disagreenionl was due not U> the theorv 
but to a difference of opinion as to actual, original discovery of 
any coal by Pearson, for he liad designated certain coal beds 
