Doodle bug (doo d 1 -bug) n. Any unscientific device with which it is claimed that minerals may be located.

geophysics (je 0 fiz iks) n. Geol. The physics of the earth, or the science treating of the agencies which modify the earth. --ge'o-phys'i-cal Ci-kal), adj. ge'o- phys'i-cist (-sist) n.

Had you lived on the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana in the mid-Twenties and been reasonably observant, you would have seen the birth, in this country, of a tool for the discovery of oil. The methods -- there were two, originally-- expanded from a modest and often-inaccurate beginning into a vast and complex art known as Exploration Geophysics, or loosely -- Doodlebugging.

We are not, let me hasten to proclaim, gathered here to look at formulae or to discuss the case histories of oil fields discovered by any of the several techniques, but to look at the people and the things which made up the field crews which practiced the most spectacular technique, reflection seismology. This is a crafty dodge by which a man-made earthquake is subverted to map deep geologic features by what is essentially echo-sounding. And we would do well to look quickly, because the trade is fast becoming very dignified and the geophysicist is coming to resent, in his dignity, the sobriquet:

There will, one presumes, be fewer of the weird occurrences and slapstickery which somehow attached themselves to the seismograph crews.

Perhaps the underlying cause of the change may be found in the gradual evolution of the field party from a small, closely-knit group of men who, if given sometimes to slightly odd definitions of recreation, were almost exclusively from the professional class, to much larger units composed almost entirely of nonprofessionals. This evolution is the result of several factors, the most important of which is probably financial; data processing procedures, as they become more automated, demand larger quantities of raw data. A natural result of this demand is the loss of a great deal of the romance at the expense of mass-produced information. Less and less of the basic responsibility resides at the crew level, supervision is less effective, and little of the creative artistry involved in turning out the finished subsurface map is performed these days in the field.

The advent of magnetic recording techniques made it possible to permanently store the information obtained from bouncing a dynamite-generated seismic wave back to the surface from rock layers thousands of feet deep. The tapes can be fed into almost-completely automated computing machines which print out accurate cross-sections of the Earth's crust.

Thus, Science, as some wag has said, marches on. The result of this progress can only be better, cheaper, more exact maps of the rock layers which make up the skin of the planet and which either contain, or form reservoirs for, the minerals which make our civilization possible. This is all to the good, but it has already made extinct a small but very interesting sub-species... the Doodlebugger.

That consummate artist and magician, the Party Chief of the seismic field parties of the Thirties, the forties, and the early fifties, who could take a stack of photographic strips and reduce them to a surprisingly-correct contour map of a limestone bed ten thousand feet below the surface, is doomed. The people who made up the closely-knit teams which provided the photographic strips as an end product from dynamite, sweat, and often incredible feats of sheer technical competence have walked away before boredom into other paths of endeavor, or become oil company executives or gone into carnival work.

Soon there won't be any people left on the seismic field crew at all except for an indifferent tractor driver who tools a complicated data-gathering Goldbergian device along a row of stakes set by some other machine.

Very well. Amen, and so be it.