Grove Karl Gilbert: A Great Engine of Research

1. In a Nutshell

1. In a Nutshell In later years, when his residence was elsewhere, visits to Rochester were frequent; he nearly always halted there on his journeys to the West and back. When returning from the Henry Mountains of Utah in the autumn of 1876 he was in time to attend his parents' golden wedding on November 30. - William Morris Davis Grove Karl Gilbert was born May 6, I843-ten years after Charles Lyell published the final volume of his Principles of Geology ; he died May I, I9I8-ten years before the proceedings of the first international symposium on continental drift were published. The seventy-five years of his life consequently spanned the heroic age of American geolog~ the period during which the science was intellectually and institutionally defined. Gilbert knew most of its grand figures-James Hall, James Dwight Dana, Jolln Strong Newberr ~ John Wesley Powell, Clarence Dutton, Joseph Le Conte, Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, and William Morris Davis. And he himself contributed impressively to the geology of the heroic age in its several cultural functions. Geology evolved as a mechanism for coping with certain intellectual problems, particularly the consciousness of a landscape whose spatial and temporal scales were rapidly expanding. Prior to the latter half of the eighteenth centur~ western civilization's geographic knowledge was limited to the coastlines of most of the world's continents. The only continental interior known with any precision was that of Europe. Equally scant was the recognized span of time. History began, according to Bishop Ussher's genealogical calculations, in 4004 B.C. Before Gilbert's birth, these narrow scales of time and place were shattered, as European and American ex- 4 IN A NUTSHELL plorers busily unveiled the interiors of all the continents and as evidence of past civilizations, organisms, mountains, and continents was discovered in the form of ruins and fossils. It was from the ensuing debate about the age and size of the earth that geology emerged. In particular, the unspeakable vastness of time became its special province. The resolution to this debate, which spanned nearly 150 years, came during Gilbert's lifetime. In a general wa~ the debate determined the shape of his career. He himself became one of the premier scientific explorers of the American West, thus contributing to the cascade of new information about the earth. At the same time, he addressed the theoretical questions which sought to interpret this new data and assimilate it into scientific form. His answers to the larger questions of the earth, as well as the methodology he proposed to accompany them, are classics of the science and continue to have significance. For America, moreover, geology had additional importance as a frontier institution, an economic and intellectual subsidy to the westward migration. The discovery of landforms, rich new soils, lodes of precious minerals, water resources, breathtaking vistas, and scenes of high adventure coincided with an outburst of cultural nationalism and a sprawling folk migration across North America. The developing sciences of the earth could not only help uncover that landscape but could aid in its assimilation as wellj they could delineate prime sites for agricultural settlement, for industr~ and for aesthetic appreciation. In short, the geologic sciences helped incorporate the western landscape into American political, social, and economic institutions as much as into its intellectual heritage. That Gilbert should spend the most profitable years of his career in the Far West was only natural: the opportunities were greatest there. At the same time, his work repaid those opportunities by skillfully pursuing problems of significance to western settlement and to the conservation of the western landscape. By the time Gilbert's career ended, American earth science had entered into the mainstream of American culture and ranked as one of the outstanding national traditions in science. It had a broadly based institutional foundation, enormous reserves of data, and a theoretical superstructure which not only answered the debate which first spawned geology but successfully integrated those concerns with the physical, biological, chemical, and social sciences. Equally significant, American geology had a magnificent traditionalmost a mythology-of exploration and insight which grew out of the experiences of the heroic age. So powerful was this tradition that, until very recent times, the story of American geology rightly The Education of a Classicist 5 meant the story of its heroic age. The biography of Grove Karl Gilbert belongs in the chronicle of that tradition, not merely as an especially curious episode within it but as the narrative of one of...