216 ProfessovE.* Forbes' >i Lecture on th^ Udations^ 



which a knowledge of palseontology of- practical value to the mining 

 student can be acquired. i 



In conducting the business of this class:, I look forward to the 

 holding of field-excursions, regarding them to be quite as essential 

 as lectures for the instruction of the student, who, to benefit by his 

 studies, must become a practical fossilist, and learn to observe care- 

 fully fossils in situ, and appreciate on the spot the evidence afforded 

 by their associations. During the progress of our winter courses this 

 can be done effectually in the neighbourhood of London, or by means 

 of the facilities of transport afforded by lines of railroad. I trust that 

 before the end of this session a compact band of undaunted investi- 

 gators, belted, strapped, and bag-bearing, armed with stout hammers 

 and shai'p chisels, under the veteran generalship of our director- in- 

 chief, and officered by my mineral and geological colleagues and my- 

 self, will make the rocks shake, and yield up their treasures, for many 

 a mile around the great metropolis. 



In teaching the natural history of organic remains, we shall en- 

 force the practice of the observation of them mainly through British 

 examples. The principles of the study shall receive a wider range 

 of illustration. But to learn details surely, we must acquire our 

 knowledge through that which is most precisely known. We have 

 abundant materials in this Museum for the minute investigation of 

 the fossils of an area, in a geological sense, probably the most impor- 

 tant and typical of provinces on the earth's surface. The value of 

 the collection does not depend merely on the number of species or 

 beauty of specimens, though in these respects we have much to boast 

 of; it is due to the minute information preserved in our records 

 respecting the history of individual specimens. Every fossil collected 

 during the operations of the Geological Survey has a value far beyond 

 any accident of fineness or rarity. It has been selected especially 

 and precisely in elucidation of a geological fact. It is a lasting and 

 ever-consultable memorandum of a geological observation. Its locality, 

 its associates, the abundance or scarcity of individuals of the species 

 at the spot and in the stratum where it was found, the mineral cha- 

 racter of the rock itself, the condition of the specimen — whether in- 

 dicative of entombment when alive, or of death before becoming im- 

 bedded, or of transport before reaching the spot where, invested with 

 sediment, it became immortalised in stone, — all these points, essential 

 to an accurate, to a scientific knowledge of the fossil, have been care- 

 fully noted and recorded ; and the specimens incorporated with the 

 Survey collections are worthy associates c^them. We know who 

 collected them, and how they were collected ; and before they find a 

 place in our cabinets, their history has been traced and certified^ 



Such materials give confidence to the student. He feels that 

 through them he may acquire information calculated to assure him 

 in his after -researches ; he imagines for himself a safe type, a standard 

 of comparison by which to test less perfect data. If his fate should 



