Walcott in the Survey looked to Harvard to produce field mappers of rocks. Graduate students had the choice between process and history, geography linked to school teaching, microscopical petrography and crystallography linked to the minerals and rock collections, or evolution linked to museums and fossils. Beecher of Yale had found hairs on the legs of fossil trilobites. Someone else had found fossil bacteria. A group of petrographers got together and founded an artificial classification of fire-made rocks based on chemistry—no use at all to the field man with a rock specimen. Agassiz had built a magnificent museum. The research motive was based on collections; the public exhibit motive was based on evolution and big, rare things. The publication motive imitated Europe; “be as technical as possible, detest reporters and newspapers, and never be popular.”
In 1897 Harvard University gave me a Ph.D. degree, after a double thesis and an oral examination. I passed the examination very awkwardly, as my capacity for remembering text book information is nil. My theses were (1) on an invention, a mineral hardness instrument; and (2) on the included fragments found in Boston dikes.
The microsclerometer, as the instrument was called (that is, a microscope scratcher), was designed to diamond drill a mineral to a fixed depth. The hardness was measured by the time consumed, on the theory that the energy required for the standard hole varied with the time, and the time with the hardness. The number of rotations with a constant speed motor is a measure of the time.
The paper was published in America and Germany, and elaborately reviewed by a microscopical society in England. The instrument was borrowed by H. C. Boynton, a graduate student in metallurgy, and he got good results on the microscopic crystals that constitute steel. The inventing and constructing with the aid of Sven Nelson, a Swedish mechanician of ability, were to me an education in themselves. For one thing, I learned how enthusiastically science feeds on ultra-little things.
My petrography of included quartz fragments in basalt dikes was partly published, but made no hit at all. It was outdoor work, it concerned the granite problem, it revealed the “fluid” of granite minerals as “waters or vapors” having no effect on augite, the green fusible mineral of basalt. But the same fluid was revealed as corroding quartz inclusions, harder and supposedly more infusible.
If temperature had anything to do with it, the granite fluid could melt holes in quartz inclusions, but the mantle of augite dark crystals which the basalt had plastered on the outside of the quartz fragments remained unmelted. This was my first adventure with the ancient problem of fusion, or melting. I became convinced that granite fluids, like the makers of gold quartz veins, are low temperature vapors or gasses. This agrees with what is now well known, that silica has a low melting point. But melting and temperature are not the whole story.
To me, the spreading of one’s fame by scientific papers was commercialization. “You must make your name known” and “what have you published?” rang through the scientific halls of learning. No suggestion of art, literature, drama, beauty, or philosophy ever came to me from my scientific colleagues. Some literary friends, like William Garrott Brown and my classmate William Vaughn Moody, thought readability important. Brown warned me against the dullness of small papers in scientific writing. Agassiz warned me against exactly the opposite, namely, against popularizing or being interesting. This antithesis between science journals and art probably never comes into the field of vision of many young scientific writers. They see only “Write for your scientific peers and for no one else, that is your world.” All my life I have been plagued by “be as technical as possible” versus “tell the public what it all means.”
I suspect that our system is producing diagrams and statistics in geology (and perhaps in science generally) and no longer produces works of art. I know few geologists who are fine draftsmen. They accept photography instead. I know none who is a literary stylist. They write for ultra conciseness and tabulations. The nineteenth century taught classical English and drawing.
Geology is a science of the dreamland of the earth’s interior and of millennia of the ages and of the overwhelming expanse of rich, productive, unknown ores under ocean bottoms. It is a field for men of letters, and for new Magellans, Humboldts, and Darwins bursting with imagination and the will to explore.
This seeming digression is really germane to the purport of this book. It is one man’s review of a half century of evolving discovery. Also a half century of evolving error and departure from the ways of the leaders. The leaders, from William Smith’s thoroughness with strata in England, to Clarence King’s summary of a thousand miles across the Cordillera, explored upward and outward. It persuaded governments. Persuasion before the court of public opinion no longer uses and employs explorer men of letters. The United Nations is not employing Clarence Kings on the world geology of the remaining three quarters of the earth.