768 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Buckland, Sedgwick and Woodward, Bonney, Blake, Crosskey, 

 Fisher and Renard, Haughton and Hitchcock, many valuable 

 chapters would be missing from her literature. Instead of re- 

 gretting that a theological professor should be found in the geo- 

 logical field, it would be more seemly to wish that there were 

 more such men. Instead of showing apparent jealousy, all help- 

 ers should be made welcome. Official reserve and exclusiveness 

 are out of place in science. The field is the world, the harvest is 

 plenteous, and the laborers are all too few. 



Especially inappropriate is the above objection when it comes 

 from men whose time is largely occupied with the labors of ad- 

 ministrative office, leaving only the spare hours for the study of 

 geology. We freely admit that men whose lives are wholly given 

 to geology should produce the greatest results. They have ad- 

 vantages possessed by no others. Concentration of thought and 

 energy, command of funds, access to books, and assistance of 

 many needed kinds, all these things are theirs. But the fact re- 

 mains that the great bulk of the work always has been and still 

 is done by volunteers, working for the most part at their own ex- 

 pense of time and money. The amateur is too often looked down 

 upon by the professional, but it has happened over and over again 

 that the professional has been glad to borrow the results of the 

 amateur, and more than once has the amateur come out the vic- 

 tor in a contest. It was an amateur, Nicol, who maintained that 

 the gneissic rocks of the west of Scotland were of Archaean age 

 and not metamorphosed Silurian strata, and, though for fifty 

 years the authority of Murchison and the British Geological Sur- 

 vey was arrayed against him and his single voice was drowned 

 by their official shoutings, yet time has justified him, and the 

 " Secret of the Highlands," lately wrung from the unwilling rocks, 

 has been proclaimed by Nature in tones so loud that no combi- 

 nation or concert could prevent its being heard. It is folly, we 

 assert, to attempt by any other means than fair and open argu- 

 ment to put down the amateur in science. He possesses a tenacity 

 of life and purpose equal or superior to that of officials or pro- 

 fessionals. Many of the brightest names on her roll are the 

 names of amateurs, from those of Hugh Miller, the Scottish stone- 

 mason, and William Smith, " the father of English geology," to 

 others in the present day, too numerous and too well known to be 

 named here. 



The chapter of Prof. Wright's book which has specially aroused 

 the ire of the critics is on Relics of Man in the Glacial Period, 

 where the author has collected all the instances from America 

 that possess any importance in which traces of man have been 

 reported from strata of probable or known glacial date. The 

 evidence of each is set forth concisely yet clearly. Positive con- 



