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Show GEOLOGICAL SURVEY LUCKY Fierce Fire Robbed of Their Prey Through Recent Removal of 500,000 Document. Washington 1). C. Juno 2 The savage sav-age fire which broke out in the basement base-ment of the Geological Survey building build-ing on Sunday, May 18, whllo In a sen do disastrous, did In fact far less damage than was at first supposed. The bulk of the damage was In the large document room containing Survey Sur-vey reports and geologic folios and a smaller number of topographic maps. Fortunately over 90 per cent of the Survey bulletins, water supply papers monographs and other reports had been transferred last winter to tho government printing of lice and work had but Just begun on the transfer In to the resulting space, from the adjoin ins "Annex" of tho three and a half million, topographic maps constituting the survey stock. Thug had the fire occurred earlier the loss In documents would huve been many times greater while If It had occurred n little later than It'dld after the transfer of the maps, the logs would havo again been several hundred thousand dollars. As It Is about a quarter of a million top' ographlc maps were slightly damaged and the stock of geologic folios was more or less damaged by fire and water wat-er but from 80 to 90 per cent of tho folios are believed to bo usablo. All these folios, the regular price of which Is 25 qr 60 cents a copy, are now offered of-fered to the public at 5 cents each, with no further reduction for wholesale whole-sale orders. The reserve stock of the Survey publications is lagely a raasB of ashes nnd charred papers. Manv of these reports, from 20 to 30 years old aro now rare books and this los perhaps constitutes the most serious damage. A careful estlmato of tho damage caused by tho fire corrobo rates the orlgnal statement af n los of 875,000. |