My teaching was devised to cut up the map of Boston. I pasted the pieces in notebooks and sent out students in pairs, equipped with map books. They were to keep pencils sharp, use a uniform system, and hammer off specimens from ledges. They were to examine the rock under a magnifying glass, then name it; but I cautioned them, “If you don’t know the rock, call it ‘FRDK, funny rock don’t know.’” Students marked the page opposite each map with symbols for the rocks on that map. Then they came together in seminar, and we made a colored map of the geology of Boston. Laurence La Forge, now professor at Tufts College, was my student and later my assistant. He published the results of our work many years after the study was made.
When teaching was extended into experimental geology and geology of the United States, laboratories were set up in the basement of Agassiz Museum and I was given carte blanche to furnish them. I equipped them with a water tank, a gas furnace for melting and recrystallizing minerals, pressure machines, an air compressor, and motors. Students were assigned experiments with wax, plaster, cement, sands, coal dust, and marble dust. They imitated strata, rivers, deltas, intrusions, and mountain folds, and familiarized themselves with the way solids break.
Each man took a special arbeit for his final thesis, and worked by himself with clock or metronome, thermometer or pressure gauge, spring balance or centimeter scale, and he reviewed the experiments of the past. Prominent among my students were Ralph Stone, afterwards state geologist for Pennsylvania; Vernon Marsters of Indiana; Julius Eggleston of Riverside, California; and Ernest Howe of Yale.
In the course on United States geology were such students as Amadeus Grabau who became leading paleontologist of China; Stefansson the arctic explorer; Ellsworth Huntington, afterwards the distinguished Yale author and geographer; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With so many Roosevelts at Harvard, I quite forgot my famous student until his first visit to Hawaii, in 1934. Mr. Roosevelt had remembered his geology professor, though, and an aide phoned the Volcano headquarters to request that I be at Hilo when the President’s ship arrived.
The United States geology course was the product of my two seasons in the Yellowstone and my interest in the great Hayden, King, and Powell surveys. The youthful geologists needed to know the continent and its details.
The big Washington monographs and folios have made a gallery of underground pictures of one of the greatest continents, and these are supplemented by the work of the Canadian geologists. America shows Appalachian folds and thrusts, fault blocks of the Utah plateaus, and eruptives of the Rockies. It contains the amazing metamorphism of very recently upheaved sea beds along the Pacific shore. It records the remnant sea bottoms and dust-storm deposits of the vast plains, bearing beside the obvious buffalo skulls, the old bones of whales, reptiles, and rhinos.
Superposed on all this is so-called physiography, the science of falling materials and water, the rotting of the lands, and the accumulation of debris. A net of rivers over ground and under ground is what stands out, and the living river pattern has changed incessantly through the ages. But through and over it is a moving process of the ages, kinetic, alive with glaciers, hot springs, underground heat or surface cold, soaking rains and rushing storms, earthquake and uplift, fault motions and sinkings. Everything is in motion to one who senses slow motion, occasionally breaking down resistance and charging ahead. And geology is a sense of slow motion and its jumps for 5 million years, with this human year, here and now, of great importance. Geology, like humanity, is not just history.
Under all are gas and heat; Saratoga Springs, Yellowstone, the Comstock Lode, and Mount Shasta. The series gets hotter from New York to California. And out at sea the refuse of the continent is dumping all day long. And science is anxiously waiting to learn how hot sea bottom is.
In addition to laboratory work, I wanted to conduct cross-country hikes for such subjects as botany, geology, and zoology in the forests and swamps and hills of Massachusetts. And it was in connection with these plans that I learned a lesson in simplicity. I went to President Eliot, remembering the high sounding “Pierian Sodality” name for the college orchestra, to get a classical calendar name for my cross-country tramps. He said, “What, in brief, is your idea?” I replied, “In ordinary language they will be natural history walks.” He took a pen and said, “Why not this for a name?” On the paper was written “Natural History Walks.”
An important part of our curriculum was the Tuesday evening geological conference, during which any graduate worker could give a paper. To these conferences came, at different times, Brooks, Spurr, Schrader, Goodrich, Mendenhall, P. S. Smith, Mansfield, Matthes, Lane, Crosby, Barton, Douglas Johnson, Daly, and all the Harvard staff. The men got confidence in public speaking and exhibiting, and the professors commented in kindly fashion. Topics ranged from summer work in the far west and current studies in meteorology under Ward to petrographic or experimental work with projection apparatus under Wolff and me. Jackson and Hyatt brought in fossils, and the Geological Survey was always in evidence as a goal for young men, or a subject for review. Shaler’s comments were accompanied by a string of good stories. The conferences taught students how to teach by making them speak in public. It was one of Shaler’s most productive inventions, and has been copied far and wide.