46 



The Ottawa Naturalist 



[Vol. XXXII. 



ring in the rocks which they will study. Those 

 geologists who do wait to become paleontologists 

 stand in the same relation to the geologist that 

 the student of ancient history who can read its 

 picturesque language does to the student of ancient 

 history who can not. 



Paleontologists are forced by the broadness of the 

 subject, however, to specialize and usually confine 

 themselves to certain groups of animals or certam 

 groups of rocks, the usual unit of animals being some 

 such group as snails, crabs and crablike animals, 

 corals, or sponges, or even lesser groups. The usual 

 unit in rocks is one covering a period of several 

 million years, a unit which is perhaps best described 

 as a tenth, roughly speaking, of the time since life 

 began to leave its traces in the rock. 



If the story of the changes which have taken place 

 in the life on our earth is complicated, so is the 

 story of the changes through which our earth has 

 passed, and the one could not be read without the 

 other. But having observed the older in which the 

 rocks were laid down in favorably located places 

 we are able to study life as it has existed from age 

 to age, and we arrive at evolution, or the idea of a 

 progressive change in life forms as we go from the 

 earlier to the later. Knowing the history of these 

 life changes on our earth and being able to recognize 

 their different stages in the fossils which fill so many 

 of our rocks we are able to trace rock horizons 

 from place to place in unfavorable places, across 

 lakes or seas and underground. 



Most of our mineral deposits: coal, iron, oil, salt, 

 etc., etc., occur in such rock horizons, layers whose 

 position in the general order is known, layers which 

 either have fossils peculiar to themselves or lie be- 

 tween layers which do. For example, and space 

 will permit us to give only one: Sands in a certain 

 section of California are found to contain oil. 

 Similar sands show at the surface in many other 

 places, are mapped by the geologists, and wells are 

 bored wherever the sands occur in the hope of 

 striking other oil wells. The sands are thick and 

 boring is expensive, roughly $10,000 for every well 

 sunk, yet the return on the few which reach oil is 

 sufficient to induce private capital to go ahead. A 

 paleontologist is sent out to the field by the official 

 survey and finds that the supposed sand horizon is 

 rot one but two, that these are separate and distinct, 

 each with its own particular group of fossils, that 



they are thousands of feet apart vertically, one being 

 much older than the other, and that only one of them 

 carries oil. He visits the various sand showings, or 

 outcrops as they are called, and maps the distribution 

 of the oil-bearing sand. He is thus able to cut 

 down the absolutely useless drilling, or "wildcatting" 

 as it is called, by one half. If the sand is the oil- 

 carrying one conditions of internal or external 

 structure will affect the location of oil pools but 

 drilling has a chance of success; if it is not the 

 time and money used in drilling are absolutely 

 wasted. A man on a nominal salary, as a part of 

 his regular work, saves the expense cf drilling 

 hundreds of useless wells, any one of which would 

 have cost four or five times his salary for a year. 

 The error which private industry is somewhat prone 

 to fall into is the hiring of poorly trained geologists, 

 or men who merely call themselves such, a poor 

 policy in spite of the fact that almost any geologist 

 or pseudo-geologist is better than none. The 

 paleontologist mentioned, for example, and his case 

 is not unusually exceptional, was worth ten times 

 his government salary to any one of the oil compan- 

 ies in California and of course his real value to the 

 country at large, or to the government which 

 employed him, could be measured by the same 

 amount. 



For the reader who should question the dispatch 

 of a government geologist for the saving of large 

 sums of money for private industry we shall have to 

 say that the present development of our mineral 

 resources depends in large part upon the far-sighted- 

 ness and public-spiritedness of private industry; that 

 every dollar which they take out of the ground adds 

 to the sum total of the wealth which we all share, 

 to however small a degree ; and that every dollar 

 which they are kept from wasting is left in that 

 same sum total. If they pay it out uselessly it might 

 better be thrown away, because the drilling of the 

 useless well wastes also the time of labor which 

 might have been engaged in productive work. This 

 is elementary economics, not paleontology, but 

 fossils have a dollars and cents value which is some- 

 times lost sight of. To place it before you in a 

 general statement: Geologists and paleontologists 

 take from mining, second only to agriculture as the 

 leadmg industry of North America, a large part of 

 its luck or chance, and give it an element of cer- 

 tainty which is of inestimable value to it and to the 

 country at large. 



