1929. 8vo, pp. xii, 156; with one folding table, seven half-tone plates on four leaves, and one large folding engraved coloured map in pocket at rear (plate 1), with further illustrations, diagrams and tables within text; lightly browned and foxed with occasional dust-soiling, minor edge wear to final leaf; stapled as issued, in the original printed blue wrappers, spine and extremities a little sunned, some minor edge wear; a good copy. One of a number of collaborative publications by two former Bryn Mawr students of Florence Bascom (1862-1945), Eleanora Bliss Knopf (1883-1974) and Anna Isabel Jonas (later Stose, 1881-1974). Bascom is considered to be the first woman geologist in America, being one of the first to earn a Ph.D. in the subject, and the first woman to work for the United States Geological Survey. She established a pre-eminent geology department at Bryn Mawr, and was to teach and train a generation of young women who subsequently went on to have successful geological careers. In 1937, 8 out of 11 of the women who were Fellows of the Geological Society of America were graduates of Bascom's course, and her graduate programme was considered to be one of the most rigourous in the country, with a strong focus on both lab and fieldwork.
Under Bascom’s direction, Bliss and Jonas undertook a challenging dissertation on the geology of the Doe-Run-Avondale district, just west of Bryn Mawr. The two women followed similar career paths, both working as demonstrators in the Bryn Mawr geological laboratories, and later working for the United States Geological Survey, collaborating on a number of projects as here.
Bliss married fellow geologist Adolph Knopf, and moved with him to Yale, where she taught privately, and continued to take USGS assignments. Jonas too, married a fellow geologist whom she had met through the USGS, George Stose. Knopf was one of the first geologists to use stereotypically viewed airplane photographs for field mapping and to help her interpret geologic faults and folds, and is remembered for translating the work of foreign scientists and introducing new approaches in the United States’ (Profitt p. 295).
Jonas and Knopf eventually broke with Bascom ‘over the dating of the Wissahickon formation. In two major papers, they indicated that what Bascom and E. B. Mathews had referred to as Paleozoic were actually Precambrian. At that time, Anna Jonas began to collaborate with George Stose, who was very direct in his letters of disagreement with Bascom. The break with her students was complete’ (Ogilvie, II, p. 1243).