40 NATURAL SCIENCE [January 



imagination, while others have speculated and continue to speculate 

 upon the stupendous problems involved in the moulding of the 

 surface of the earth and its internal skeleton with no more know- 

 ledge of dynamics than can be gathered from the " Boys' Own Book.'* 

 And it is sometimes thought strange that geology is treated as a 

 pariah by the sister sciences in which knowledge, precision, and 

 method are deemed essential qualities of fruitful investigation. 



This is especially noteworthy among official geologists on both 

 sides of the Atlantic. It is quite shocking to think how remarkably 

 few of them know even the elementary things necessary to their 

 proper equipment, if they are to go beyond the province of recording 

 facts, and to venture into that of speculations involving training in 

 mathematics and physics. Again, what is the use of writing on 

 science in these days, unless we know what others have written 

 upon it ? What is the use of publishing observations which have 

 been made, and which have been published over and over again ? 

 A man who does not master the literature of his subject, and 

 ventures to write on it as if he was the first person to face the 

 problem, is, in my view, a scientific criminal. He ought to be 

 absolutely tabooed. He is doing everybody a very bad service. 

 Nay, he is dishonest. He is seated in another man's chair. Yet how 

 many official geologists in England, and especially in America, can 

 read any language but their own ? How many of them know the 

 absolutely essential languages — Latin, German, and French ? How 

 many of them have had any training in mathematics, and physics, and 

 chemistry ? And yet we have shelves and shelves of books paid for 

 out of the public purse, and dealing with tremendous problems, 

 such as the so-called glacial period, and written by men who 

 are as guileless of equipment for such a task as children in the 

 nursery are. These books impose upon the great mass of men, 

 because it is thought that every official is, in a sense, an inspired 

 person, and every book with an official binding must contain the 

 secretions of wisdom. I know it will be said that all this is un- 

 mitigated impudence. So it is; but I know of no methods but 

 those of impudence which can penetrate the self-satisfied assurance 

 of a dominant school of thought, in which mutual admiration is 

 perpetual, in which discipline requires that every man should 

 subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles prescribed by his chiefs, and 

 in which the testing of premises is deemed as unnecessary as the 

 reading up the literature of science before venturing to write upon 

 it. Those who care for geology as an inductive science, and who 

 were taught its lessons by those who were inductive geologists, are 

 disheartened beyond measure by the condition of things now pre- 

 vailing in England and America, and by the elementary trifling in 

 which so many of the dominant school, who say ' cuckoo ' to each 



