Modern scientists are taught to write introductions that lay out a general topic of the paper, and hopefully to state a hypothesis to be tested. One is not supposed to relate one's personal history with regard to the topic. However, that hasn't always been the case. Here's the beginning of a paper by the famous paleontologist Charles Schuchert, published in the American Journal of Science (Fifth series, Volume XIV, No. 83, Novermber 1927, beginning on page 26.)
Two images are provided to spark your imagination. You'll have to supply the bright sunlight of the desert, the sound of the wheels of a Pullman car on the rails of the Southern Pacific's tracks, and the gentle sway of the car as Schuchert gazes admiringly out one of its windows.
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SYSTEMS OF WESTERN TEXAS by Charles Schuchert
It was in 1841 that R.I. Murchison announced the discovery of fossils in the Urals of Russia that were intermediate in evolution between those of the Coal Measures and the Triassic, and was led thereby to propose the term Permian for the rocks that contained these fossils in the district of Perm. Seventeen years later, F. Hawn's finding of related but older fossils in Kansas led F.B. Meek and G.C. Swallow to say for the first time that the Permian system was present in Kansas. The year before (1857) G.G. Shumard collected fossils in the Guadalupian Mountains of Texas . . . . . |
While the writer was familiar with the works above mentioned, their far reaching importance in American stratigraphy did not fully dawn on him until the afternoon of January 11, 1924, while on the westbound Sunset Limited en route to the University of Arizona. At Tesnus, Texas, he began to note the rising out of the ground of the steeply tilted Pennsylvanian series, peneplained across and without a trace of Permian strata, above which lay a very thick series of the Comanchian, which was arched at the close of the Cretaceous into the Marathon dome. All this was grandly visible in the bright sunlight of the desert. Soon the train was on the widely extended Marathon bolson, lying at an elevation of over 4,000 feet and floored by the later Paleozoic formations; while to the northwest loomed the intrusive plug known as Iron Mountain, and back of it stepped the Glass Mountains composed of more than 6,000 feet of Permian strata. It was a wonderful sight, and he then and there concluded to see more of this widely extending angular unconformity, and, above all, of the Permian sequence of faunas. On the evening of March 15, 1924, the writer was back again at Marathon, and during the next five days . . . [and so on]. |
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