Outlines of Geologic History with Especial Reference to North America
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(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
The Potomac River Basin; Geographic History--Rainfall and Stream Flow--Pollution, Typhoid Fever, and Character of Water--Relation of Soils and Forest ... Water--Effect of Industrial Wates of Fishes
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Bailey Willis was born on March 31, 1857, in Idle Wild-on-Hudson, New York, the youngest of the four children, two of them boys, of Nathaniel Parker Willis, noted journalist and poet, by his second wife, Cornelia Grinnell. When Bailey was ten, his father died and his mother moved the family to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A talented woman, she stirred her son's interest in art and culture and, through the example of her uncle Henry Grinnell, a benefactor of polar exploration, in travel and adventure.
Education
In 1870 she took her son to Europe, where he spent four years in German boarding schools. On his return in 1874 he entered Columbia University, from which he received degrees in mechanical and civil engineering (1878, 1879).
Career
After graduation Willis was hired by Raphael Pumpelly, a prominent mining geologist and adventurer, to assist in an appraisal of iron and coal resources for the federal Tenth Census and in a private survey for the projected Northern Pacific Railroad. Both undertakings took him into remote and primitive areas of the country, often on his own.
In 1884, when the railroad company went bankrupt, Willis joined the United States Geological Survey, with which he was to be associated for nearly three decades. Major John Wesley Powell, the director, and many of his chief subordinates were rough-hewn, self-educated men, with whom Willis felt out of place. He nevertheless did notable work in the Southern Appalachians, supervising surveys by younger geologists for the folios of the Geological Atlas of the United States, of which he was editor. He synthesized these results in his first major publication, "The Mechanics of Appalachian Structure", in which the field observations of folding and faulting were interpreted by means of a series of laboratory experiments with models. The experiments revealed many important principles of geological dynamics, although it is now known that the models were far out of scale in the strength of the materials involved.
When Charles D. Walcott succeeded Powell in 1894 as director of the Geological Survey, Willis was given greater responsibilities, first as geologic map editor and then as geologic assistant to the director. The latter position, which he held from 1897 to 1902, gave him a roving assignment to observe the geology of many parts of the United States. He continued his early interest in the Pacific Northwest and studied such landmarks as Mount Rainier in Washington and the Lewis and Livingston ranges in Montana. He was influential in bringing both regions into the National Park system, the latter as Glacier National Park. Willis also collaborated with G. W. Stose on a geological map of North America which was published in 1912 to accompany Willis' monumental compilation Index to the Stratigraphy of North America. Both map and index endured for decades as standards of reference for North American geology. Willis was irked, however, by the constraints of administration and longed for wider fields, so that during his last decade with the survey he was on leave and abroad for long periods.
In 1903 he accepted the leadership of a geological expedition to northern China, organized under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In the course of a year, his party gathered enough data to fill the notable two-volume study Research in China (1907), which presented many new facts and interpretations regarding the geology of this hitherto poorly known region.
In 1910 - 1914 Willis supervised an investigation for the Argentine government of the empty pioneer country of northern Patagonia. The objective was primarily an appraisal of resources and of planning for future development, rather than a geological survey. The results were attractively printed in a report, Northern Patagonia (1914), but the recommendations had little effect. Willis severed his connection with the Geological Survey in 1915 to accept an invitation from President John C. Branner - himself a geologist - to head the department of geology at Stanford University. Although he officially retired from this post in 1922, Willis remained in close association with the university for the rest of his life.
He developed many interests in California geology, especially in faulting, seismology, and earthquake hazards; he was president of the Seismological Society of America from 1921 to 1926. He collaborated in preparing a "Fault Map of California"; and his short paper of 1927, "Folding or Shearing, Which?", although derided by many contemporaries, was prophetic of later tectonic concepts of the Pacific Coastal Belt in California.
He continued his foreign travels after his retirement especially for studies in faulting and seismology, to northern Chile (1923), to the rift valleys of East Africa (1929), and to the Philippines and other parts of the Far East (1936 - 1937).
During World War I he served as chief of the Latin American division of the Inquiry, the research group set up by Col. Edward M. House to gather geological and geographical information for use at the Paris Peace Conference. Willis' interests were primarily in the broader aspects of physical and dynamic geology, in the formation and origin of rock structures, and in their effect on the evolution of the landscape. He had little interest in geological details, in laboratory procedures, or in biological geology.
In the latter part of his career he summarized his geological philosophy in many theoretical papers. His hypotheses - of supposed "isthmian links" to explain biological and other resemblances between continents now separated by ocean basins, of compressional "ramping" rather than tensional separation to explain the rift valleys of East Africa and the Near East, and of hot fluid concentrations from the earth's interior (asthenoliths) to explain the gross tectonic features of the earth - seem in retrospect superficial and have been largely ignored.
His personality is preserved in his charming books of autobiography and travel, Living Africa (1930), A Yanqui in Patagonia (1947), and Friendly China (1949), some of them illustrated with his own sketches and watercolors.
Bailey Willis died on February 19, 1949, in Palo Alto, California, of myocardial failure, at the age of ninety-one. His remains were cremated.
Achievements
Bailey Willis was a prominent geologist, who is principally known for his research on earthquakes and earthquake resistant building.
Willis received many foreign honors. At home he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1920) and to the presidency of the Geological Society of America (1929), which in 1944 awarded him its Penrose Medal.
He also was awarded the Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie of France in 1910 and the Legion of Honor, Belgium, in 1936.
The Willis Wall on the north face of Mount Rainier is named for him.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Membership
Bailey Willis was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1920) and to the presidency of the Geological Society of America (1929).
Personality
Slight of build, but wiry and vigorous to the end, Bailey Willis was a notable figure on the Stanford campus, easily identifiable by his luxuriant beard.
Connections
On March 4, 1882, Bailey Willis married Altona Holstein Grinnell, by whom he had two children: Marion (who died in infancy) and Hope.
After the death of his first wife in 1896, he remarried Margaret Delight Baker on April 21, 1898. The couple had three children.
