The natural activity behind the scenes of the conflicting interests represented by those connected with the several surveys may be seen in the legislative history of the moves leading up to the creation of the United States Geological Survey. In the last session of the 45th Congress the special legislation embodying the recommendations of the National Academy was included in the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Appropriation bill as it passed the House of Representatives, while the Sundry Civil Appropriation bill carried an item simply making effective the longer section in the other appropriation bill. The item in the Legislative appropriation bill created the office of the Director of the Geological Survey, provided his salary, and defined his duties, as well as specifically terminating the operations of the three older organizations. The item in the Sundry Civil bill as it passed the House appropriated $100,000 for the new Geological Survey, but when this appropriation bill was reported to the Senate a committee amendment added the words “of the Territories,” and further amendments offered on the floor changed the item so as to provide specifically and exclusively for the continuation of the Hayden Survey. Other amendments provided small appropriations for the completion of the reports of the Powell and Wheeler surveys, and the bill passed the Senate in this form. The Legislative Appropriation bill was similarly pruned, while in the Senate, of all reference to the proposed new organization. This bill, however, died in conference, but in the last hours of the session the conferees on the Sundry Civil bill took unto themselves legislative powers and transferred from the dead bill to the pending measure all the language which constitutes the “organic act” of the United States Geological Survey. This action was denounced in the Senate as “a wide departure from the authority that is possessed by a conference committee,” and it was further stated in debate that the inserted provision which created a new office and discontinued the existing surveys was one “which neither the Committee of the Senate nor the Senate itself ever saw.” This assertion was perhaps parliamentarily sound in that the language was new to the Sundry Civil bill, yet actually the Senate had only two days before stricken the same proposed legislation from the pending Legislative Appropriation bill. However, the House conferees—Representatives Atkins of Tennessee, Hewett of New York, and Hale of Maine—had realized their tactical advantage, and the Senate, after a brief debate, voted on March 3 to concur in the report of the committee of conference, thus reversing all their earlier action, in which the friends of the Hayden and Wheeler organizations apparently had commanded more votes than the advocates of the National Academy plan.