494 SCIENCES OF THE EARTH 



time. After ages of neglect, they have become the centres of great 

 populations: and, now that our princes of industry have through 

 countless difficulties touched and awakened them to life, we find 

 a new meaning in the old fairy-story of the Sleeping Beauty. 



Even those broader considerations that we meet in philosophy and 

 religion have developed new phases as the schemes of earlier times 

 have been modified in view of the geological record: the place of 

 work in the world, not a curse, but a duty; the date of the golden age, 

 not behind us, but ahead; the view of death, not a punishment, but a 

 natural element in the progress of life; even the conception of immor- 

 tality has come to be with some directed less to speculations 

 about a continued life elsewhere than to the study of the continuity 

 of life here. 



Religious ideas themselves - - at least, when we examine them ob- 

 jectively in the beliefs of others than our own people - - are seen as if 

 in a mirror held to nature: and the very gods of the lower religions 

 are but reflections of the powers of the earth. 



It is only when we consider these broad phases of earth-science that 

 we gain our share of profit from the revolution that replaces the tele- 

 ological philosophy of the first half of the nineteenth century by the 

 evolutionary philosophy of the last half. Our conception of the earth 

 as well as of its inhabitants has been profoundly modified by this revo- 

 lution, and much of our progress has been conditioned on the full 

 acceptance of the newer view. 



Now if apology is needed for introducing the preceding considera- 

 tions, which some might call irrelevant, let me urge that, whatever 

 share they may make of other sciences, they are also so closely grafted 

 into one or another branch of earth-science that we, as geologists or 

 geographers, cannot afford to neglect them. In so far as they are 

 related to elements of our science as consequences are to causes, as 

 responses are to environment, we must take at least some account of 

 them, even if their study in other relations is left to specialists in other 

 subjects. In doing so, we are only carrying out our work to its legiti- 

 mate conclusion. It is without question our responsibility to study 

 the ancient inorganic conditions that determined the location and the 

 migration, the development and the extinction, of ancient faunas, 

 for these conditions were at least in part geological factors of one kind 

 or another; it is equally our responsibility to study the modern condi- 

 tions that determine the location of cities and the routes of trade, for 

 these conditions are largely geographical factors; but the examples 

 of organic response here adduced are merely a few of many, and all 

 the rest stand on an equal footing with them, whether they are com- 

 monly classed with biology or history, with economics or religion. We 

 long ago saw that the more simple, immediate, and manifest examples 

 of organic, especially of human responses, belonged in the realm of 



