Geological Survey Professional Paper 669 The Colorado River Region and John Wesley Powell

Despite the loss of the Irrigation Survey, the Survey appropriation that year was so large that the Survey was not seriously crippled. Despite a devastating personal attack on Powell when the long-standing feud be tween paleontologists O. C. Marsh and E. D. Cope was aired in the public press in January 1890, his standing remained high. The following year, however, the Survey appropriation was cut. More serious than the cut itself was the fact that salaries and programs were specified. In 1892 came a more drastic cut. Several of the principal scientists had to be discharged; others continued at reduced salaries or no salary in order to complete the work. Not only the Survey suffered. The Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Fish Commission, the Smithsonian Institution, all were cut. The blow was actually against science generally, and Powell and the Survey as the leading scientist and scientific bureau were treated most severely.

In 1894, as soon as a successor, C. D. Walcott, was ready, Powell resigned as Director. The nerves in the stump of his right arm had regenerated, causing great pain, and he had to undergo surgery for the third time. Thereafter he devoted himself to the Bureau of American Ethnology and to writing. For many years he had planned to write a survey of man's knowledge and philosophy from savagery to the age of enlightenment. It was never finished. He died at Haven, Maine, on September 23, 1902.

At a meeting of the Geological Society of America not too long before he decided to resign, Powell reflected on the work of the Geological Survey. In describing the work of a scientific institution, he said that it is necessary to distinguish two stages in development, a "preliminary, or experimental, or preparatory stage, and the final or effective stage. During the first stage methods are devised, experiments are conducted, scientific apparatus is invented and subjected to trial, and the plan for the work is formulated; during the second stage the methods and apparatus are practically employed and the plans carried out."

The first stage he characterized as research, the second as applied science "and since it is the highest function of systemized knowledge to promote human welfare, the first stage represents the seed-time, the second the harvest-time of science."

John Wesley Powell's own career might be considered in the same terms. During his lifetime, though he was the leading scientist and the director of the leading scientific bureau in Washington, he only achieved the full realization of his ideal of science in the service of man for the brief instant of the Irrigation Survey.

Before Powell died, however, he had the satisfaction of knowing of the passage of the Newlands Act, establishing the Reclamation Service. Its first chief, and the first chief of the Bureau of Reclamation which succeeded it in 1907, was F. H. Newell, one of the first members of the Irrigation Survey. Powell's nephew, Arthur Powell Davis, was one of the first irrigation engineers and later Director of the Bureau of Reclamation. The Geological Survey continued under the able direction of C. D. Walcott in an ever-widening endeavor. The Bureau of American Ethnology continued fundamental studies in anthropology and ethnology as part of the Smithsonian Institution.

The conservation movement, which began with George Perkins Marsh, Carl Schurz, and John Wesley Powell, achieved full status at the time of the White House Conference of 1908, sparked by Gifford Pinchot, of the Forest Service, F. H. Newell, of the Reclamation Service, and W J McGee, whom Pinchot called the brains of the conservation movement. McGee had been one of Powell's closest associates in both the Geological Survey and the Bureau of Ethnology. The Major had a bet with McGee that his brain was larger than McGee's. (According to the autopsies, the Major won.)

G. K. Gilbert, who had joined the Powell Survey in 1874, became one of the world's leading geologists and continued to serve the Geological Survey until his death in 1918. Lester Ward, whose social philosophy was so like Major Powell's that it is difficult to decide who influenced the other, eventually left the Survey to become a professor of sociology. Forgotten for many years, like his friend Major Powell, he is now being recognized as one of the founders of the modern welfare state.

The reform of the land surveys, and the abandonment of the contract system of surveying, for which Powell fought so persistently, finally came about in 1910; but it was not until 1936, after a series of years of drought, that the public domain was finally closed. Then in 1950, the National Science Foundation was established, embodying some of Powell's ideas on a centralized administration of government science.

Major Powell throughout most of his life had a great vision of science as a means of progress for the human race. In one of his more flowery perorations to a talk at the Darwin memorial meeting in Washington in 1882, he said, "Let us not gird science to our loins as the warrior buckles on his sword. Let us raise science aloft as the olive branch of peace and the emblem of hope." It was in that same speech that he characterized the gift of science to man as hope. "Had philosophers discovered that the generations of living beings were degenerating they would have discovered despair. Had they discovered that life moves by steps of generations in endless circles—that what has been is, and what is shall be, and there is no progress, the gift of science to man would have been worthless. The revelation of science is this: Every generation in life is a step in progress to a higher and fuller life, science has discovered hope."

With the students of the Corcoran School of Science at its inauguration in 1884, he left an equally profound thought for our time, that science has enkindled charity. Not eleemosynary charity, as he called it, but philosophic charity. "It has at last been discovered that the world has always been full of error, and we are beginning to appreciate how much man has struggled through the ages from error to error toward the truth. We now know that false opinions are begotten of ignorance, and in the light of universal truth all men are ignorant, and as the scholar discovers how little of the vast realm of knowledge he has conquered he grows in philosophic charity for others. The history of the world is replete with illustrations to the effect that the greater the ignorance, the greater the abomination of unconforming opinion, and the greater the knowledge, the greater the charity for dissenting opinions."