42 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and pre-geological speculations are taught as geology, as if to 

 mystify the minds of students ! 



I well remember a young man who went from one of our great 

 universities a few years ago with particular mention upon his 

 diploma that he had attained special excellence in geology ; in later 

 years he found himself face to face with some of the greater prob- 

 lems of earth-structure, and slowly it dawned upon him that he 

 had no conception of what the study really was. He knew the 

 names of many fossils and minerals, could enumerate the histori- 

 cal sequence of the geologic time-epochs, but when required to 

 report upon a new and strange region he found himself ignorant 

 of the four necessary geologic rudiments— determination, defini- 

 tion, distribution, and delineation. 



There is hardly a college in the land in which the study of the 

 structure of the earth is not made subservient to the study of its 

 history and composition, and in which the student does not learn 

 to consider the extraordinary instead of the ordinary, by being 

 taught to begin away back in Archaean time, and thence to trace 

 the history of life-epochs. But the working geologist regards 

 time-nomenclature as a secondary consideration, and the word 

 Archeean means to him only a common dumping-ground for all 

 older terrenes whose structure has not been differentiated. 



Geology is not a science of the past, but a grand study of the 

 present structure of the earth, its contour, composition, and read- 

 justments. Geology has nothing to do with the origin or begin- 

 ning of the globe— a field of inquiry purely astronomical— but 

 takes the earth where astronomy leaves it, a completed mass of 

 matter, and investigates its changes. Although Hutton a hun- 

 dred years ago presented this thought in his saying that in the 

 economy of Nature there is no trace of a beginning or evidence 

 of an ending, still much of our geologic instruction is wasted on 

 these subjects. 



The cultural aspects of civilization are due to geologic struct- 

 ure, but in how many of our institutions are students taught to 

 appreciate the topography or configuration of the earth's surface 

 and its relation to structure, or to observe with inquirmg eye the 

 forms and contours of the landscape ? The student usually learns 

 the chemistry of certain nicely arranged hand specmiens of hard 

 rocks, and memorizes the names of leading fossils or the crystal- 

 lography of minerals under the guise of economic geology. As a 

 result, the study is supposed to be merely the study of hard rocks 

 and curious fossils. Although the student knows these by sight, 

 he can not trace a rock-sheet above the ground or below it, or see 

 the great soft terrenes void of fossils and rocks which make up 

 the larger area of our country, and can not appreciate the broader 

 relations of structure to agriculture, hygiene, climate, and civih- 



