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Show 53. his hand over a particularly fine sheet of glacially polished rock. King would stand by, tense jawed, growing impatient, waiting to proceed with their serious geological investigations. Muir might well laugh when short legged and stocky Clarence had trouble walking through the talus. But King would try to get the last word. For him, anyone like Muir who had not narrowed his attention was an amateur. King hoped that "the ambitious amateur himself may divert his evident enthusiastic love of nature into a channel, if there is one, in which his attainments would save him from hopeless floundering." Well, King was more charitable than Whitney, who simply dismissed Muir as a sheepherder. Muir in turn contrasted his own leisurely method of study with the businesslike methods used by the men of the Whitney Survey, when they went to the mountains. "I had remained winter and summer for two years," he said. "I did not go to them for a Saturday, or a Sunday, or a stingy week, but with unmeasured time, and independent of companions or scientific associations." He took his studies seriously, but had a difficult time putting a name on his occupation. Later, when he called himself a "self-styled poetico-trampo-geologist-bot. and ornith-natural, etc.!!!" he was looking back with humor on a serious personal problem in the early seventies. His independence might have begun as a matter of necessity, but later when he could have become involved in either academic or "dollar geology," he refused both, thus never establishing himself as a "professional scientist." |