ISOSTATIC THEORY 
99 
Range tectonics prevail and the conception of isostatic compensa¬ 
tion prove valid for crustal segments so small as single mountain 
ridges the greatest aid ever devised for advancing ore exploration 
would become a practical reality. 
European scientists were never prone to view the speculative 
conclusions of the Powellian coterie of government geologists 
with the same complacency as Americans. Among the latter there 
appeared to be few to question. I happened to be one of these 
In my own particular case I well remember that I early had found 
many incongruities and entertained many misgivings. But at a 
continent’s breadth away no satisfactory test was possible. The 
phenomena were not to be viewed at a distance. I long craved 
to inspect conditions at close range. Opportunity at last came. 
With the penchant of the army officer for dramatic effect rather 
than for the coolly balanced judgement of the scientist, Major 
Powell surely gathered about him a personnel having brilliant 
imaginative powers. But in initiating the rather unscientific 
Powellian policy of geologic saisissement Captain Duttoh entirely 
missed the larger physiographic significance of his important ob¬ 
servations on the prodigious erosion which the Utah region had 
manifestly undergone in relatively late geologic times. He readily 
fell into speculations along other lines. With him inductive 
reasoning took tectonic rather than physiographic turn. 
Dutton’s main calculation was an estimate of the crustal effects 
of sedimental loading and unloading through vast erosion. He en¬ 
deavored to demonstrate that the converse of Hershel’s thesis of 
crustal insinking was also true. Therefore, the Utah and Great 
Basin tracts, from which such enormous volumes of rock waste 
had been so lately removed, should display measurable evidence of 
continual and notable upraising. As a definite thesis the hypothesis 
of isostasy was just beginning to take form. 
With bent of mind so decidedly tectonic Dutton turned eyes^to 
the westward of the Utah High Plateaus for illustrative sub¬ 
stantiation of his theory. In the Great Basin ranges he firmly 
believed that he should find satisfactory proofs. Like Gilbert, 
Powell, and Russell, he fancied the erosional derivation of these 
desert mountains to be entirely out of the question. By this 
famous quartette the tremendous potency of eolation, or wind- 
scour, in arid lands was little suspected. 
When the arid Utah mountains first became the subject of 
