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Oregon Geology: A Revision of "the Two Islands" (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Oregon Geology: A Revision of "the Two Islan...)
Excerpt from Oregon Geology: A Revision of "the Two Islands"
States he will find the Wasatch Mountains as part of the eastern boundary of Idaho, and if he is familiar with the mammalian life of the Eocene period, he will remember that Professor Marsh and others have described a wonderful and varied fauna of large mammals which lived on the borders of an old lake east of the Wasatch Mountains. In fact the mountains themselves formed the lofty western shore line of that Eocene lake. But of all this abundant life, not one well identified fossil mammal has been found in Oregon belonging to that Eocene epoch. The author of The Two Islands reasoned that the Oregon land must have been cut ofi' from the Wasatch land by an inter vening body of water.
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Thomas Condon was an Irish-born American clergyman, geologist, and paleontologist. He served as the first State Geologist for Oregon and professor of geology and natural history in the Pacific University of Forest Grove and in the University of Oregon.
Background
Thomas Condon was born on March 03, 1822 at Ballinafana, near Fermoy, Ireland, the son of John and Mary (Roach) Condon. His father was a stone-cutter. When Thomas was eleven years old, the Condons emigrated to the United States, settling first in New York City and later on a farm in Michigan.
Education
Thomas attended Cazenovia Seminary, taught school at Camillus and at Skaneateles, made a collection of paleozoic fossils, and in 1849 entered Auburn Theological Seminary. He helped support himself in Auburn by teaching inmates of the state penitentiary. Owing to his Irish origin he was unable to secure a call to a congregation. He graduated from Seminary in 1852.
Career
In 1852 Condon offered himself therefore to the Home Mission Board of the Congregational Church and was assigned to Oregon Territory. On Oct. 31, 1852, he married Cornelia J. Holt of Colden, Erie County, and that same autumn he and his bride sailed from New York on the clipper Trade Wind. In spite of storms and a fire in the hold the Trade Wind carried them safely round Cape Horn and north again to San Francisco, whence they proceeded by steamer to Portland. The rest of their lives was spent in Oregon. Condon was ordained immediately and entered on twenty years of missionary and pastoral labor: at St. Helen’s 1853-1854, Forest Grove 1854-1857, Albany 1857-1862, and The Dalles 1862-1873.
Gentle, earnest, simple, resourceful, friendly, he won the regard of every one, even of the gamblers and saloon-keepers of The Dalles, and his wife proved an able helper in his work. Meanwhile, however, a Bible was no more essential to his kit than a geologist’s hammer. Accompanying parties of soldiers, he made excursions into the Indian country and succeeded in recording, though not with complete accuracy, the geology of a large part of eastern Oregon.
He was made professor of geology and natural history in Pacific University of Forest Grove in 1873 and in the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1876. He was a beloved and influential teacher. At first he was obliged to give instruction in a variety of subjects, but as the University grew he was able to devote himself more and more to his favorite subject of paleontology. His first important discovery was made in 1867, when a well-digger brought him a fossil bone which he recognized as the distal end of the humerus of a horse; his last was in 1906, when he found a fossil sea-lion which he named desmatophoca oregonensis.
To railroad builders, landowners, the state legislature, and visiting geologists he gave freely of his time and knowledge, never expecting compensation and seldom getting it. Several well-known scientists importuned him for fossils, failed to return specimens that had been entrusted to them as loans, and even neglected in their publications to give him proper credit for his discoveries. Condon, on the other hand, was unfailingly generous to them and either ignored or never noticed their attempt to deprive him of his due. Apparently he found it an effort to write: he contributed a few articles to the Overland Monthly and to the Portland Morning Oregonian, as state geologist presented a Preliminary Report to the Legislative' Assembly, and gathered these few writings into his one book, The Two Islands and What Came of Them. In him the scientist, the teacher, and the lover of men were blended. What he learned through patient and minute study of the rocks, he taught with an enthusiasm and sweep of general knowledge that kindled the minds of his students. But the wider public, he believed, also had claims upon him. He delivered lectures up and down the coast, in which the new scientific knowledge centering in the doctrine of evolution was winningly presented to audiences that dreaded the effect of such theories upon established beliefs.