Bretz, J Harlen. Papers, Box 7, Folder 3, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago
Segment from a 1922 field book.
I’ve been reading Bretz’s handwritten materials (letters, notes, journals, lists, etc.) for almost two years, and have become fairly adept at deciphering his strong and generally “honest” handwriting. Unlike many well-educated people from that period, Bretz never mastered the calligraphic approach to his script, thank god. There is only the slightest forward slant to any of it, rarely a flourish, and most letters are well-formed, most of the time. As a result I tend to read more or less “naturally” when I study his materials.
The sentence above did not create serious parsing issues. I was able to read it “normally;” but I had never before stumbled across the word “Lular” in any of his other writings.
His lower case “u” and “o” are sometimes difficult to separate, and in this case I wasn’t sure if the word was “Lolar” or “Lular.” Accordingly, I went looking for both. A quick check of every geological glossary I have on hand, plus any I could find online failed to turn up anything like a decent clue. I even sent the photo to a geologist friend at the DNR. His response:
“….’lolar’, nor ‘lalar’, ‘lular’, or ‘lelar”…none of these terms showed up in my copy of the glossary of geology.”
Given that the word was capitalized, I took it to be a proper noun and went digging for a person, place, or thing that might fit the geological context. Nothing even close.
I stepped away from the problem for a few hours, then came back and started again from scratch – only this time I placed the word “Lular” in brackets, in order to study the sentence as a kind of math problem. Here’s what it looked like:
The big (X) or sub-(X) boulders…
Something about the math context triggered the answer even before I finished writing it all down. The symbol which I took to be a capitol “L” was actually the geometrical symbol for “angle.” Bretz had merely coined his own word for “angular.”
In some ways, boulders are merely big rocks, and rocks are often categorized as being angular, sub-angular, sub-round, or round in shape. When the Lular abbreviation is written out in full, the sentence reads as Bretz intended:
"The big angular and sub-angular boulders in the Pantops pit…"
As I said, I’ve become very familiar with his handwriting, and should have recognized immediately that the “letter” I had identified as a capitol “L” wasn’t a letter at all. Bretz typically wrote in cursive, and even when he printed the letters, “L” never looked like that.
The fact that I missed such an obvious sign – along with the way in which I missed it – possibly sheds light on why so many of Bretz’s contemporaries were unable to recognize, in the landforms of the scablands, the same information that he was able to see.
Maybe more on that idea in the book?