Abstract
THE author was the well-known professor of agriculture in the Sheffield Science School of Yale, and sometime president of the National Academy of Sciences. In I860, as a young man, he joined J. D. Whitney as principal assistant in the new Geological Survey of California, which it was hoped would advise as to the future development of the mining industry, then in dire distress. A second part of the work was to report on the plants and animals, and to Brewer was assigned the former. Whitney, with a love of thoroughness, made it primarily into a topographical survey, upon which the geology could be charted. His action here undoubtedly trained the men and set the standard on which the whole United States was mapped. Brewer led the first field party, and his letters now published show him directing and carrying out every class of work, except botany. This he continued to do until 1865, the survey being continued to 1873, dying itself but giving birth to the Federal Geological Survey Department in 1879.
Up and Down in California in 1860–1864: the Journal of William H. Brewer, Professor of Agriculture, in the Sheffield Scientific School from 1864 to 1903.
Francis P. Farquhar. (Published on the Foundation established in Memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894 Yale College.) Pp. xxx + 601 + 32 plates. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1930.) 27s. net.
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Our Bookshelf. Nature 127, 968 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/127968a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/127968a0