surprising, even to those more or less familiar with the situation, to find how widely mineral questions ramified through government departments. For instance, the Department of Agriculture had men specially engaged in relation to mineral fertilizers and arsenic. Sulphur and other mineral supplies were occupying the attention of the War Department. Mica and other minerals received special attention from the Navy Department. The Tariff Board, the Federal Trade Commission, the Commerce Department, even the Department of State, had men who were specializing on certain mineral questions. All these departments had delegates on the Joint Mineral Information Board, in which connection they met weekly to exchange information for the purpose of getting better coördination and less duplication.
The National Academy of Sciences established a geologic committee, with representatives from the U. S. Geological Survey, the state geological surveys, the Geological Society of America, and other organizations. This committee did useful work in correlating geological activities, mainly outside of Washington, and in coöperation with the War Department kept in touch with the geologic work being done at the front.
While the activities of geologists for government, state, and private organizations were for the most part in relation to mineral resource questions, this was by no means the total contribution. The U. S. Geological Survey and other organizations, in coöperation with the War Department, did a large amount of topographic and geologic mapping of the eastern areas for coast-defense purposes. This work involved consideration of the topography for strategic purposes, as well as the stock-taking of mineral resources—including road materials and water supplies. The revision of Geological Survey folios, with these requirements in mind, brought results which should be of practical use in peace time. Studies were likewise made of cantonment areas, with reference to water supplies and to surface and sub-surface conditions.
Many geologists were engaged in the military camps at home and abroad, and in connection with the Student Army Training Corps at the universities, in teaching the elements of map making, map interpretation, water supply, rock and soil conditions in relation to trenching, and other phases of geology in their relation to military operations. The textbook on Military Geology,2 prepared in coöperation by a dozen or more geologists for use in the courses of the Student Army Training Corps, is an admirable text on several phases of applied geology. The name of the book is perhaps now unfortunate, because most of it is quite as well adapted to peace conditions as to those of war. There is no textbook of applied geology which covers certain phases of the work in a more effective and modern way. The topics treated in this book are rocks, rock weathering, streams, lakes and swamps, water supply, land forms, map reading and map interpretation, and economic relations and economic uses of minerals. Another book,3 on land forms in France, prepared from a physiographic standpoint, was a highly useful general survey of topographic features and was widely used by officers and others.
GEOLOGY AT THE FRONT
Perhaps the most spectacular and the best known use of geology in the war was at and near the front. This use reached its earliest and highest development in the German army, but later was applied effectively by the British and British Colonial armies, and by the American Expeditionary Force.
One of the first intimations to the American public of the use of geology at the front appeared in the publication of German censorship rules in 1918,—when, among the prohibitions, there was one forbidding public reference to the use of earth sciences in military operations. A leading American paper noted this item and speculated at some length editorially as to what it meant.