College

	Charles Palache. Undated photo. Courtesy of Judith Palache Gregory.

I entered the University of California without, as I now remember it, any great enthusiasm. My only interest was natural science. There was no course offered in it and all courses had rigidly prescribed studies for all four years. There had been some talk between Father and John Hayes Hammond, then at the beginning of his fame as a mining engineer and known to Father since Sunday School days, about my taking a mining course, as he could help me to a job later. I did take the mining course, attracted to it because in its prescriptions there was more natural science then in any other course. There was a great deal of mathematics required and I mastered it all easily, but never understood what it was all about—largely the fault of Prof. Stringham, who taught most of it. Chemistry I liked, with Rising and O'Neal. Physics was made repellent by the senility of John LeConte, who gave the lectures, and the harsh severity of Prof. Slate, who directed the laboratory work.

Prof. Joe LeConte's lectures on Evolution and Geology came later in the course and were delightful. But LeConte was not a field man in any sense of the word. We were never referred to the field to see Geology—only to books end diagrams and the subject did not grip us. Even on the trip with him in the Sierra, while he gave us a talk now end then about geological topics, we never really saw in the rocks about us the lessons that were there to read had we known how to see and work them out. Prof. Christy, who taught mining, was a good lecturer as to material but he had a most unfortunate manner. Never did he look the class in the eye, but talked to his notes or over our heeds. Only one man in the class was enthused by the subject. Charlie Merrill took to it at once and made a fortune based on what he learned there. I remember we made one field trip with Christy to the foothills north of Berkeley and I found some quite rich cinnabar samples in a knob of rock out about where Anson Blake's house is now. Christy was much excited over the find and my good assays and he tried to get hold of the land, but found it belonged to the Southern Pacific Railroad and as he could not divulge why he wanted to purchase a small plot of it, nothing was done about it. Someone is living now in Berkeley over what is probably a fairly rich mercury deposit.

Mineralogy was a third year course given by A. Wendell Jackson. He had been trained at the Freiberg Mining School and had the Prussian military manner in his teaching. Nothing living about the subject—only models and formulae and drudgery. I had looked forward to the course and was intensely disappointed by it.

I have already mentioned Bradley's teaching in Freshman English. Anything I gained in expression I surely owe to his wise training.

I did not make many intimate friends in college— have not all my life. I joined Beta Theta Pi and Bentley and Olney became dear friends, but none of my scientific classmates entered that Fraternity—and my school friendship with Joe LeConte remained my chief one. Living at home as I did, I really saw little of college life and probably lost something of the flavor of college years thereby.

The great event of my college years was the horse back trip to the High Sierra with Professor LeConte at the end of my 2nd college year. My diary of this trip is still extant and tells the story as I lived it from day to day. Reading it now I can hardly understand how I could have been so young and inexperienced at that age. Joe LeConte, Charlie Merrill, Ross Morgan and I, with old Professor Joe, made up the party. I certainly came back from it well experienced in roughing it and taking care of myself in the open. And I learned much about the trees of the Sierra and their distribution through the various zones of elevation. Of geology I learned next to nothing, despite the wonderful opportunity spread before me. Of course I had not then had even the first course in it and did not know how to use my eyes.

	Charles Palache (center). "'91 Mechanics class, Spring of 1890." Courtesy of Judith Palache Gregory.

The summer of 1890 I spent in seeing something of the gold mines from Crass Valley to Jackson, along the Mother Lode. Charlie Merrill and I went around with letters which gave us access to the mines. Had I gone in as a miner and got used to underground life, it would have been much more profitable. As it was I was always ill at ease underground, never knew my way around, disliked the living conditions about the mines and generally realized how unfitted I was to take a job in the line of work for which my course at college was preparing me. Mining Geology was then unknown as a profession. All I could hope for at first was a job as assayer with a dreary routine of work in uncongenial surroundings.

	Charles Palache (left). "Class of '91 scientifics". Undated photo. Courtesy of Judith Palache Gregory.

Early in the spring of 1891 Jackson resigned and in his place came A. C. Lawson. I can recall the very scene of our first meeting. We had been told of his coming and Ransome, Louderback and I, with a few others who were taking mineralogy, were gathered on the top floor of South Hall one beautiful spring morning when he came in. He had just come from the wintry blasts of Canada north of the Great Lakes, and he exclaimed over the mild weather. Looking out from the eastern window he pointed to the Hills and said something like, "Well, that looks fine for Geology! What's up there?" We looked at one another stupidly enough and could find no answer, for no one had even suggested our going up there and seeing the rocks. We told him so. "Well, have you any maps?" No, there were no maps. "Well, we'll have to go and see and have some maps made." And so we did under his inspiring leadership. That winter there was a corps of topographers from the U. S. G. S. stationed in Berkeley mapping, first the Berkeley Hills and then the San Francisco Peninsula—the first accurate maps to be made of those regions. We were out day after day with maps in hand and began to see how one traced structure in the field and brought in rocks and minerals to determine for ourselves.

Lawson's first move was to get money for a teaching fellowship in Mineralogy, and when he offered it to me as the first holder, just after I graduated (1891), I seemed to feel a new prospect for life opening before me, as indeed it was.

Strangely enough it was not until a few years ago that I perceived how the particular timing of Lawsons's coming to Berkeley had directed my whole life, and it came to me in a curious way. One morning the headlines of the Boston paper told of a brutal murder by payroll gangsters. The aged proprietor of the Viscol factory in East Cambridge, Adolf Sommers, had been shot down outside the factory. These names, Viscol and Sommers, started a train of memory. Sommers was in my time at Berkeley a poor assistant in the organic chemical laboratory. He discovered the leather dressing compound Viscol, but had no money to manufacture it. However, he persuaded Professor Jackson, who was well-to-do, to resign his place and help him put it on the market. They went East and Sommers made a fortune. Lawson was called in in mid-term. Now, if that resignation and its results had been delayed but a few months I would never have come under Lawson's influence. When he came I would, in all probability, have been off in some mining camp beginning a mining career. The whole picture flashed into my mind in this new relation as I read that paper and I realized for the first time that my pathway had been fixed by a chain of events over no one of which had I had the least control.

Lawson had taken his doctor's degree at Johns Hopkins, working under G. H. Williams, and brought to Berkeley ideals of research and new tools for it in the microscopic study of rocks. Our rooms were crowded and inadequate. The best rooms were filled with a big series of storage and exhibition cases. These were removed to the empty hallway and my first job was to rearrange the collections in the new space, and so I got my first real knowledge of minerals, by handling and arranging specimens from many localities, although the collection was a very limited one.

Lawson gave the lectures in Mineralogy and I had charge of the laboratory—chiefly blowpipe analysis. He also lectured on Petrography and I began enthusiastically to use the microscope and made my own thin sections. They were poor enough and I never did learn to make good ones, but they opened the way to the study of the rocks I brought in. By the summer of '92 the map of the Peninsula was ready and Lawson and I started the geological mapping. Nothing really was known of the nature of Coast Range Geology. Becker, who had written a survey monograph on the Quicksilver Deposits of California had declared that the Coast Ranges had been so shattered and metamorphosed that no structure remained to decipher. Lawson said that was nonsense and that no one had ever tried with help of a good map to find structure. Becker was nominally in charge of the work. At first I worked from San Francisco, later we went into Camp along the ocean shore near Cape San Pedro. My hardest job was to trace along the slopes of the big ridge that ran parallel to Lake San Andreas, the course of a narrow band of limestone which Lawson had at once seized upon as the key to the structure. The slope was covered from top to bottom with ten-foot chaparral and my only way to get through was to start at the top and slide down the hill under the brush looking for the outcrop of that band of limestone, which was almost the only rock that did outcrop. With my barometer I determined my altitude and so put the outcrops on the map. Out at the bottom, hot and dusty and scratched by manzanita and wild lilac brush, I hiked back again to the top and so down another spur. I hate to think how many times I did this hateful dirty trip, but I did do it enough times to prove that the band of rock ran with perfect regularity along that whole ridge, and ultimately those sections were the key to the whole stratigraphy of the Peninsula.

	Charles Palache (center). Class of '91 baseball team. Undated photo. Courtesy of Judith Palache Gregory.

A pleasanter job was to trace out the areas of serpentine that covered considerable tracts, beginning at Fort Point and including the Potrero and much of the Mission Hills. Almost my first job at research had been to study this serpentine and prove by microscope and analysis that it was an altered igneous rock, not, as Becker had declared, a metamorphosed sandstone. This paper was one of the first to be printed in the Department of Geology Bulletin which Lawson started and which soon became one of the important geological serials of the country. Serpentine soil is poor and supports almost no vegetation, so these areas were easier to find and map. Of course, to me the interpretation of the map as we colored in the geological units was all a mystery at first. But as order began to appear it became an exciting and intriguing study and I soon began to see how to use my imagination to read into the depths what we found at the surface.

Back of Colma, which lay just outside the southern city limits of San Francisco, were vast fields of cabbage which were cultivated right up to the edge of the bluff overlooking the ocean. As I searched these deeply soil-covered slopes for outcrops of rock, I found some curious little ponds high up the slope and in places that seemed most unlikely for ponds to exist. They were long and narrow and had neither outlets nor streams feeding them. There were several of them strung along the ridge, hardly showing on the map so small were they, mostly in cow yards where the cattle drank. I was puzzled by them, but saw no special significance in their form and location. Of course I told Lawson about them and he went up to see them. He became excited at once. He showed me where the soil slopes near some of the ponds showed abrupt breaks indicating that a recent movement of some sort had broken the surface. That meant recent faulting of the underlying rocks. The ponds themselves were the result of less recent and more extensive movements of the same sort. Placed on the map and connected, these ponds lined up with the sharp longitudinal valley within which lay the artificial reservoirs of San Andreas and San Mateo Lakes. A major fault of profound importance was thus located. This was my first real lesson in the vital study of physiography, or the reading from surface features the past history of the rocks, a study which I found when I got to Harvard in an advanced stage of development by W. M. Davis, its real founder.

There was a curious aftermath of this discovery of mine, which Prof. Davis was always fond of recalling. I happened to be in Washington in April, 1906. As I approached the survey building one morning I met Boutwell, a former Harvard student, who excitedly asked me if I had heard the great news from California. I had not seen the paper so did not know of the earthquake. He told me how San Francisco was destroyed. "Well," said I, "I am not surprised. Come in and get but Lawson's map of the Peninsula end I will show you where it happened." He was as staggered by my certainty as he had been by the news. But it was true that a new movement on that old fault line had caused the earthquake, and the "Rift" became famous in geological history.

In 1892 and '93, all the time I could spare from my teaching was given to the mapping of the rocks of Grizzly Peak and the hills about it, which I had selected as a subject for my thesis. I used my mountain horse, El Capitan, in this work. It was a petrographic study, but the foundation of it was field work. Lawson was always working with me, elucidating the field relations which were puzzling and complex.

I think it was in the spring of '95 that Lawson took the whole group of his enthusiastic students on a field trip to Monterey in the spring vacation. We tramped over the sand hills to Carmel and found the wonderful exposure of conglomerate at the base of Point Lobos. Then down to an odd little coal field that was being developed back from the coast a mile or so and between Carmel and Point Sur. Returning, Lawson and I stayed for a few days at a wretched Portuguese farm house near Point Lobos and mapped the lavas of Carmel Bay. It was a lovely region then—a few farms and the half-ruined Mission the only habitations. He wrote a paper on the Carmel Bay geology and I studied the lavas for him—a new type named by him Carmeloite.

My thesis approached completion during the winter of 1895. What a time I had trying to put it together and, with my wholly inadequate training, trying to make a decent map! It was completed under tremendous pressure due to a new plan that opened out wonderful vistas of opportunity for my work. Lizzie had gone to Dresden the preceding Fall with members of the Garber family, and had there fallen ill. At last it seemed imperative that Mother should go to her side and I was to go over with her. Father consulted with LeConte and Lawson and they both advised him how much I could profit by a period of study in Germany. How little I realized how Father must have strained his resources to finance this new burden added to the many he was carrying!

We were to start in April. I rushed my thesis to completion and it was approved. I had my examination in which, strung to breaking point by all the various excitements, I know I must have made a lamentable exhibition.  Had I not been the first candidate for the degree in the department so that there were no precedents by which to judge me, I feel sure I would not have been passed. My own experience then has always made it hard for me to judge harshly of nervous candidates that have come before me as examiner in later years. My thesis was never published as such, but was incorporated, almost in its entirety, in a long paper on the Geology of the Berkeley Hills, which Lawson prepared and which filled a thick brochure of the Department Bulletin under our joint names.