He had a row of shovels down the middle of his back
But he didn’t have a very big head.
Chorus:
Hammer, hammer, hammer on the stone
Chisel, chisel, chisel on the bone
There’s no more rest for poor old Steg
For Zittel couldn’t leave him alone.
Heidelberg days were memorable for the lectures of Rosenbusch, Goldschmidt, and Osann; for laboratory system; and for long collection trips. With specimen bag and hammer, we went to Saxony, Bohemia and the Vosges Mountains, the Black Forest, and the Oberwald. I had a large, pointed hammer named Umslopagaas, after Rider Haggard’s hero who wielded such a weapon. When Palache and Brock and I were in a quarry and an unwieldy boulder had to be broken, the yell arose, “Umslopagaas come quick!” The collection of rock specimens at “classical” localities, meant the textbook rocks of Rosenbusch, or of Zirkel of Leipzig. Every student dreamed of having a private collection.
After the Ascutney experience, I was impressed by Schneeberg granite in Saxony. At the border of the granite are slates, baked in zones back from the granite edge: hard horn rock, spotted rock, mica rock, then claystone. The colored geological map of Saxony was superb. This includes the mining district of the birthplace of geology in Europe, where in Freiberg, A. G. Werner had founded an arbitrary science in the eighteenth century, imagining granites to be crystallized from a world-wide ocean.
In one place I found a hand specimen with tiny granite tongues which had split their way, as liquid as alcohol, between the blackened folia of slate. The granite itself was all crystals, but here was proof of a fluid when the granite penetrated. What was it, how hot was it, a gas, a foam, a paste, or a liquid? The time this occurred was millions of years before Kaiser Wilhelm. I had found something similar in the Yellowstone, the little dikes of sylvan intrusives in Absaroka Mountains. The smallest tongues showed the most perfect granite in the microscope, of Tertiary intrusive stocks. It was as though in these siliceous invasions of basaltic agglomerate, nature made its best experimental granitization on a very small scale.