1. 1. Archibald Geikie, “American Geological Surveys,” Nature 12 (August 5, 1875): 265-67, and Nature 13 (November 4, 1875): 1-3.
2. 2. Geikie, “American Geological Surveys,” vol. 12, 265.
3. 3. Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954; New York: Penguin Books, 1992); Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962); William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Knopf, 1966). Goetzmann shows that the various apparently unrelated surveys of the West during the second half of the nineteenth century were actually coordinated and funded by the US government with a strategic thinking behind it.
4. 4. Roy Porter, “Gentlemen and geology: The emergence of a scientific career, 1660-1920,” Historical Journal, 21, no. 4 (December), 809-36. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Lyell donated books to help found the Chicago Public Library.
5. 5. See Robert Kaplan, Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World (New York: Random House, 2017).