This work, which was published in quarto form and illustrated, as Part I (Chapters I to IX) of the original volume of "Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and its Tributaries, explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872, under the Direction of the Smithsonian Institution" (1875), consists of the personal narrative, from Professor Powell's diary, of the celebrated voyage down the unexplored river.
2. "On the Physical Features of the Colorado Valley." This forms Part II of the same work.
3. "Geology of the Uintah Mountains, with Atlas" (1876).
4. "Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages, with Words, Phrases, and Sentences to be collected" (1877).
5. "Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, etc., with Maps" (1879). This is a highly important public document, and one with the contents of which the country generally should be familiar. Though containing able chapters by Mr. G. K. Gilbert, Captain C. E. Dutton, Professor A. H. Thompson, and Mr. Willis Drummond, Jr., it is, in its general plan and in the chief part of its matter, the work of Professor Powell.
6. "Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages, etc. Second edition—with Charts" (1880). We enter this work as distinct from the first edition, published in 1877 under the same title, because, with the exception of the schedules, notes to collectors, and remarks on the alphabet, its matter is wholly new. Though small, it is one of the most important of Professor Powell's contributions to science.
Professor Powell is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and presided over the Biological Section of the latter in 1879. He has been the President of the Anthropological Society of Washington since its organization, and his annual addresses before it are published in its "Transactions."
Personally, he is of most agreeable manners, frank, genial, and cordial under all circumstances, and possessed of great individual magnetism. Though social by nature, he has a strong preference for persons of culture, and especially of independence of thought, as his friends, and seems to possess the tact of securing such without giving offense to others. It is a favorite theory of his that, to observe well, one must also think deeply, and that observation without theory is necessarily sterile; and these ideas he carries into practical affairs in the selection of his assistants in all branches of his service. His mind is in the highest degree realistic, and he looks upon all classes of phenomena from the objective point of view. In anthropology he belongs to the strictly scientific school, represented by Mr. Lewis H. Morgan, which rejects the imaginative and poetical accounts of the lower races. He accepts the doctrine of evolution, but has not failed to perceive inadequacies in the systematic developments which some of its disciples have sought to make of certain of its minor details.
