Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/274

262 and thirty-nine subagents and assistants; instructed my subagents in such elementary principles of geology as were necessary to the performance of the duties required of them; supplied them with simple mineralogical tests, with the application of which they were made acquainted; organized twenty-four working corps, furnished each with skeleton maps of the townships assigned to them for examination, and placed the whole at the points where their labors commenced, all along the line of the western half of the territory to be examined. Thence the expedition proceeded northward, each corps required, on the average, to overrun and examine thirty quarter sections daily, and to report to myself on fixed days at regularly appointed stations: to receive which reports and to examine the country in person, I crossed the district under examination, in an oblique direction, eleven times in the course of the survey."

It was in the spring of 1840 that William Maclure died. As administrator of his estate, his brother Alexander engaged Dr. Owen to assort the very extensive collection of minerals and fossils which Mr. Maclure had made in the course of his geological exploration of the United States and his travels in this country, Europe, and the West Indies. Specific suites were to be distributed to certain schools and colleges, and the remainder was to be retained by Dr. Owen as the nucleus of a museum. These directions were duly carried out. With regard to the portion remaining in Dr. Owen's hands The American Geologist states: "To this latter Dr. Owen subsequently added largely, by purchase from Dr. Krantz, of Germany, illustrative fossils of every period; among others an ichthyosaurus, from the Lias of Würtemberg, larger than the one in the British Museum. Another interesting and valuable specimen was a nearly complete skeleton of a gigantic megatheroid animal (the Megalonyx) which he exhumed near Henderson, Ky. The entire collection some years after Dr. Owen's death was purchased by the Indiana University, and unfortunately nearly all consumed by fire, when the new university building, including the museum, laboratory, and library, was destroyed."

Dr. Owen was again called into the service of the Government in 1847, being appointed United States Geologist and directed to make a survey of the Chippewa land district. His Preliminary Report, made in the following year to the Hon. R. M. Young, then Commissioner of the Land Office, was a document of one hundred and thirty-four octavo pages, and was accompanied by three hundred and twenty-three lithographs from his own sketches, and numerous maps, diagrams, etc.