Grove Karl Gilbert: A Great Engine of Research

Notes

Notes 1. In a Nutshell 1. Letter from Gilbert to William Dall, 08-01-02, in William Dall Papers, Record Unit 7073, Smithsonian Archives; I am indebted to Alan Bain, an archivist at the Smithsonian, for bringing the letter to my attention. The relevant genealogical information is summarized in William Morris Davis, Biographical Memoir of Grove Karl Gilbert, 1843-1918, National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs 21, no. 2 (Washington , D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1926). Along with the Davis materials, there are records held by the family of Karl Gilbert Palmer; these are hereafter known as the Palmer Collection. 2. See the descriptions given by Archibald Gilbert to W. C. Mendenhall, in a letter, 10-3 in the Palmer Collection. 3. Letter from sister of Eliza Stanley Gilbert, 10-04-53, Palmer Collection ; letter from Barker, 12-13- 53, Palmer Collection. 4. Gilbert's enthusiasm for riddles is well documented in E. C. Andrews, "Grove Karl Gilbert," Sierra Club Bulletin I I ( 60-68. s. John Merz, A History Scientific Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1965 [1902]),2: 144. 6. The story comes from Andrews, "Grove Karl Gilbert," p. 63. The problem can be solved in a number of ways. The simplest method follows. The volume of a sphere is 4/3 of a hemisphere, 2/3 "ITr 3 • Call the radius of the "crumb" rl and the radius of the hemisphere comprising the "crust" r2 • The volume of the crumb is VI 2/3 "ITrI 3 • The volume of the crust, however, is the volume of the hemisphere of radius r2 minus the volume of the crumb. Hence the volume of the crust is V2 2/3 "ITr2 2/3 "ITrI . Since the volume of the crust equals that of the crumb, set the two equations equal to each other: VI = V2 2/3 "ITrI3 = 2/, "ITr/ - 2/3 "ITrI r l r/ - r l 3 2rl r2 3 r//2 rl r2 /V2 = ·7937r2 270 Notes to Pages 5-19 7. Davis, Biographical Memoir, p. 6. In the original text, Gilbert spelled "heart" as "hart." This was in keeping with his irregular adoption of the simplified spelling reforms. Unfortunately he was not consistent, so to prevent misunderstandings I have uniformly corrected his spellingthough not his punctuation-in his unpublished works so that it conforms to current orthography. For example, Gilbert replaced "height" with "hight," which only offers more confusion than clarification. 8. For his remarks on Cosmos Hall, see Gilbert, "Memoir of Edwin E. Howell," Geological Society of America Bulletin 23 (1912): 30. 9. The material on Humboldt is large. There are three usable biographies: Helmut de Terra, Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859 (New York: Knopf, 1955); Douglas Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); and Charlotte Kellner, Alexander von Humboldt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). Two other interesting descriptions are Erwin Ackerknecht, "Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Ethnolog ~" Isis 46 (September 1955): 83-95, and a chapter in Victor von Hagen, South America Called Them (New York: Knopf, 1945). The best accounts of Humboldtean influences in the United States are in William Goetzmann's Army Exploration in the American West, 18031863 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) and Exploration and Empire (New York: Knopf, 1966). I should add that Goetzmann has aptly dubbed the opening of the continental interiors "the second great age of discovery," and, of course, I am indebted to him for insights into the general intellectual problem that the discoveries created. See also his "Paradigm Lost," in Nathan Reingold, ed., The Sciences in the American Context: New Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press), pp.21-34· 10. From Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos, p. 76. II. Ibid., p. 257. 12. For an assessment of Humboldt's contributions to geograph~ see Preston James, All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas (Indianapolis : Odyssey Press, 1972). 13. A copy of the newspaper account is pasted into Gilbert's bound volumes of his publications, now stored in the U.S. Geological Survey National Center Library. Davis, Biographical Memoir, p. 7, quotes the article almost in its entirety. 14. Gilbert, "Notes of Investigation at Cohoes with Reference to theCircumstances of the Deposition of the Skeleton of the Mastodon," 21st Annual Report, State Cabinet of Natural History (Albany, 1871): 137139 . The episode can be placed in the larger context of knowledge about mastodons with Robert Silverberg, Mammoths, Mastodons, and Man (New York: McGraw...