My experiments with volcanoesJaggar, Thomas Augustus
Science
My experiments with volcanoes
Jaggar, Thomas Augustus
Geologists -- Biography; Volcanoes
Brontotherium’s skull in Chicago Natural History Museum dates from
about 30 million years ago. The bones are scattered, and few complete
skeletons have been found. Man’s ancestor may have started 10 million
years ago, but the nearest approach to an ape who lived in the trees of
old Bronto’s forests was an opossum. Furthermore, nothing like flint
tools have been found in the rhino strata. The apes started in Europe
and Asia in the next geologic period, and some fossilized monkeys have
been found in South America. But men and monkeys are too soft. They
don’t make good fossils.
The bones we found were of turtles, in clays upheaved on the top of the
Black Hills uplift. These clays were afterwards eroded into the present
valleys, and probably were contemporaneous with the riverbed silts,
where the rhinoceros skulls were found. So our turtles and rhinos were
no doubt neighbors in 29,998,000 B.C.
Our sojourn in the Black Hills was not without adventure. One evening
when Boutwell and I were riding home to Deadwood, I dismounted and
jumped into the shrubs of a gully to knock a rock specimen off a ledge.
From beneath my feet came a buz-z-z like a swarm of bees. I had jumped
right on a rattlesnake and could feel his coils against my ankle, and
no leggings that day. Boutwell called out, “Oh let me see him! I’ve
never seen a rattlesnake.” I made a suitable reply and, somehow, leapt
clear before the snake had a chance to strike.
Another adventure concerned my gold watch, a gift from my dad on my
twenty-first birthday. I lost it from a chain which broke against
the saddle pommel at some dismounting point. I advertised for it by
placards at railway stations and, amazingly, it was returned. A
Salvation Army man found the watch, badly trampled by my horse, at a
back country place, brought it to me in Deadwood, and received the
reward. I took it to the maker in Waltham, where it was restored; and I
am wearing it fifty-four years later, converted from a hunting case to
a stemwinder.
John Irving of Yale, whose father had been a mining geologist in the
Great Lakes district, was one of the most lovable companions I ever
camped and tramped with. We were together in the Black Hills, where
we hired a wagon outfit to cross the Hills to the Devil’s Tower. The
personnel was a masterpiece of improvisation. The cook was a fat boy
who told marvellous tales of adventures. Among other things, he had
been a human ostrich in the circus, and he assured us that chewing up
glass and swallowing it did no harm if you knew how. So elaborate was
his cooking that again and again we ran out of grub. Furthermore, meals
were generally late, but we knew better than to hurry the supper and
his finishing touches. When finally a meal was ready, he advanced to
our tent, bowed, and called out, “Gentlemen, you will now proceed to
sagastuate.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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