Excerpt from Contributions to Economic Geology, 1908, Vol. 2: Part II. Mineral Fuels

The first or dominant factor was the determination of the character and the valuation of the public land. These determinations were made wholly for the use of the Government itself in disposing of its mineral land. The second or general investigation of the mineral resources of the country was made for the benefit of the public at large and the results of this work are embraced in the series of reports of which this volume is one. The order in which the fields are exam ined depends entirely on the needs of the Government in disposing of its land now on the market, but in general the more important fields in the public-land States have been examined first.

The work has been done under the general direction of the writer, who has been most ably assisted in the coal work by Cassius A. Fisher and all the men engaged in the work. It is impossible to enumerate the services performed by each man, but the success of the work has been due to the individual efforts of every member of the force and also to the hearty cooperative or team work without which it would have been impossible to carry on the work successfully. Although economic questions had to be given prominence, the writer wishes to congratulate each geologist on the amount of scientific data which have been accumulated and on the permanent value of the results and their bearing on the vexed question of the stratig raphy of the American Mesozoic and Tertiary rocks. The writer desires particularly to acknowledge his indebtedness to T. W. Stanton and F. H. Knowlton, who have so ably assisted in field and office in collecting and interpreting the fossils associated with the coal beds. This work has been invaluable, for without it the tangled problems of correlation and stratigraphy could not have been solved.

For forty years the age of the coal-bearing rocks of the Rocky Mountain States has been in dispute, and while it can not be claimed that the question is settled, still the Survey's systematic examination of the coal fields during the last three years, in connection with the classification of the lands, has gradually brought order out of chaos. Now the end seems to be nearly in sight, and it is confidently believed that a few years' work will completely solve this perplexing problem.

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