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. The confusion, the secrecy, and the loss of art are occasioned by vulgarization. In 1875 real men of distinction explored the earth. Now that is left to incorporated establishments, teaching trusts, and calculating machines. Clarence King was a linguist and was the son of a trader in China. His Yale training under Dana and Brush gave him real culture. His founding of the United States Geological Survey was the evolution of a genius who disliked politics and whose friends rejoiced with him in great prose, good pictures, and fine sculpture. Then he was wrecked by a false ambition and the decadence of the very thing which made him great, the simplicity of high thinking, noble writing, and cultivated friends. Lacking today are cultivated boys with an ambition to explore the globe, both under the sea and in the wilderness. Geology in 1897 was a jigsaw puzzle, with a choice between the museum and the field, between the easy thing of collections, fine microscopes, and the scientific societies, and the hard thing of exploring the globe. Collections and instruments were an overpowering attraction, particularly when photography and experiment were involved. But roughing it in the wilderness has made some of the finest characters I ever knew. Geological surveys of the west continued to occupy me during the summers. I worked in the Black Hills of South Dakota under Samuel Franklin Emmons, and my associates included John Mason Boutwell, John Duer Irving, Philip Sidney Smith, Bailey Willis, and N. H. Darton. Boutwell was to become a copper geologist and copper magnate in the mines of Utah; Irving, Professor of Economic Geology at Lehigh and Yale; and Smith, head of the Alaskan branch of the U. S. Geological Survey. Being with Emmons, Willis, and Darton in the Black Hills field was to learn variously how geologists work in the field and how their minds work. Emmons was of the Boston Brahmins, a Harvard man, mining geology his specialty, with the Clarence King tradition of the Great West, the 40th Parallel Survey.