SOME UNSOLVED PROBLEMS IN GEOLOGY. 827 



allowing the fluid fat to drain off at once. When cooked on the 

 greased plate, one Bide is necessarily cooling, and the fat settling down 

 into the fish, while the other is being heated from below. 







SOME UNSOLVED PROBLEMS IN GEOLOGY 



Br Dr. J. W. DAWSON. 



MY predecessor in office remarked, in the opening of his address, 

 that two courses are open to the retiring president of this Asso- 

 ciation in preparing the annual presidential discourse he may either 

 take up some topic relating to his own specialty, or he may deal with 

 various or general matters relating to science and its progress. A 

 geologist, however, is not necessarily tied up to one or the other alter- 

 native. His subject covers the whole history of the earth in time. At 

 the beginning it allies itself with astronomy and physics and celestial 

 chemistry. At the end it runs into human history, and is mixed up 

 with archaeology and anthropology. Throughout its whole course it 

 has to deal with questions of meteorology, geography, and biology. 

 In short, there is no department of physical or biological science with 

 which geology is not allied, or at least on which the geologist may not 

 presume to trespass. When, therefore, I announce as my subject on 

 the present occasion some of the unsolved problems of this universal 

 science, you need not be surprised if I should be somewhat discursive. 

 Perhaps I shall begin at the utmost limits of my subject by re- 

 marking that in matters of natural and physical science we are met at 

 the outset with the scarcely solved question as to our own place in the 

 nature which we study, and the bearing of this on the difficulties we 

 encounter. The organism of man is decidedly a part of nature. We 

 place ourselves, in this aspect, in the sub-kingdom vertebrata, and 

 class mammalia, and recognize the fact that man is the terminal link 

 in a chain of being, extending throughout geological time. But the 

 organism is not all of man ; and, when we regard man as a scientific 

 animal, we raise a new question. If the human mind is a part of na- 

 ture, then it is subject to natural law ; and nature includes mind as 

 well as matter. On the other hand, without being absolute idealists, 

 we may hold that mind is more potent than matter, and nearer to the 

 real essence of things. Our science is in any case necessarily dualistic, 

 being the product of the reaction of mind on nature, and must be 

 largely subjective and anthropomorphic. Hence, no doubt, arise much 

 of the controversy of science and much of the unsolved difficulty. 



* Address of the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Sci- 

 ence, delivered at Minneapolis, August 15, 1883. Reprinted from "Science." 



