We soaked up the surprises of European scholarship. We pored over books in the bookshops, loaded ourselves with microscopes, goniometers, and four-volume textbooks. We found all the science of Europe in attractive unbound form and had it bound in half morocco. Mineral dealers were everywhere, offering beautifully labeled specimens. All things in Europe seemed inexpensive.
Rosenbusch, who had big brown eyes and a gray beard, came to look over my work on feldspar, in his laboratory. When I asked enthusiastically what make and model of German microscope I ought to buy, he turned me around and looked deep into my eyes: “Herr Jaggar,” he said, “Es is nicht das Mikroskop, es ist der Mensch.”
Another time he produced a dense black rock and said to Matteucci of Vesuvius, to Palache, and to me, “You are geologists. What for a rock is that?” We, of course, got it wrong, thinking it must be a lava. It turned out to be a black limestone, easily identified, had we scratched it instead of putting our lenses on it. He chuckled at the gullibility of geologists.
Osann gave a course on petrographic chemistry which met at 7 A.M.! We usually got there, but once or twice the teacher himself was late. We would gather around Osann, who was fat and genial, and say “Herr Professor, how about some sausages and beer and a little breakfast?” He always replied “Why not? There is plenty of time,” and we sought the nearest cafe.
Some professors got up at two o’clock in the morning and wrote, taking advantage of the quiet hours. Rosenbusch had a high desk and wrote standing up. Their objectives were to produce enormous tomes listing all crystals and all rocks and all publications, in all languages. This is German science. Its password is “thoroughness.”
The net effect of German scholarship on me was a feeling of irksomeness and resentment, but what I learned of thoroughness and of mechanisms I value extremely. I honor the memory of those teachers, and I honor their pupils, who by specialism have penetrated deeper and deeper into the smaller and smaller things of matter. The ultimate is the background material between the galaxies of the universe and the unknown background particles of life. But for me, the middle field—the development of mountains, rivers and sea bottoms, continents and volcanoes, earthquakes and depressions of land, the sky, clouds, and waters—all the outside world, needed experimental engineers. Intermediate bigger things like the crust of the earth and moon, within the time that is measured in human years, seemed to be neglected by science, and yet to be accessible to the giant power of engineering.
Rosenbusch set me at one feldspar specimen for an entire summer. I wanted things moving, changing, and evolving. I wanted a narrative of that tabular feldspar crystallizing, or better, a dish wherein to watch it crystallize. To me it seemed that Faraday or Pasteur would have described the quality of a moving feldspar medium in pressure, heat, gas, liquid, or changing particles. The qualitative investigator would have a furnace and make many trials and produce synthetic feldspar, and he would write a narrative approximating what the under earth must do. He would make melt or froth conditions successful in imitating such rocks as basalt or granite, using hot gases.
The problem of basalt and granite began to be recognized in the eighteenth century. Werner guessed, and taught his pupils, that these rocks were sea bottom deposits. A few determined Europeans in the nineteenth century—Fouqué and Michel-Lévy, Doelter, and Morozewicz—melted mineral mixtures and made igneous rocks by cooling them. The motive was approximation; the result was good and useful. No one reached melting by hot gases and absorption of hot gases. No one made granite. Volcanic rocks were imitated approximately as to crystals, but not as to gases. And the whole of volcanism was later proved to be gases, as is the whole of physics and astronomy and biology. Man is largely a puff of hydrogen.
These visions were what I brought back from Europe, along with much pondering of such experimenters as Daubrée, Lacroix, Stanislas Meunier, Reyer, and my teacher Goldschmidt, all brilliant imitators of the earth. Goldschmidt gave a course in blowpipe analysis which was completely original. His methods went far beyond those of his predecessors.
Meanwhile, W. M. Davis had written me to come home to Harvard and give the course in field geological surveying. This was in 1895–1896.