204 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



not only of the value and necessity of dead-work, but of the scarcity 

 of those who depend upon it as a preparatory stage of theorizing. 

 And, moreover, not theories only, but simple statements of fact be- 

 lieved and disbelieved, that is, finally accepted or finally rejected, ex- 

 hibit the like numerical disproportion, and betray a general careless- 

 ness or laziness of observers ; at all events, their manifest lack of ap- 

 preciation of the value and necessity of the dead-work part of obser- 

 vation, which imperatively must precede any clear mental perception 

 of the simplest phenomenon, before the attempt is made to establish 

 its natural relationships, and present it for acceptance as a part of 

 science. 



A geologist travels far to collect fossils at a particularly good 

 locality, stops there a day or two, fills his valise, and returns to pub- 

 lish a paper on it. What is his paper worth ? Were he first to spend 

 a week in making himself acquainted with the whole vicinity, a second 

 week in making measured sections of all the cognate outcrops in the 

 neighborhood, a third week in carefully differentiating the specific 

 horizons, and a fourth week in verifying their reliability, and in cor- 

 recting his first mistakes, then, surely, whatever labor he should after- 

 ward expend upon his collection of life-forms would have its full value, 

 and any paper he might write would be an important contribution to 

 his branch of science. 



I have known men settle to their own satisfaction some of the 

 greatest problems in geology by a flying reconnaissance ; triumphantly 

 overturning a mass of accumulated science slowly brought to demon- 

 stration by many years of conscientious dead-work, which they did not 

 seem to think it worth their while to verify. I have known men re- 

 classify the elements of a geological system by a few sections, not a 

 single one of which was properly measured by them, or could be prop- 

 erly put on paper in a graphic form for precise comparison. I have 

 known men make what they called a geological map, without having 

 run a single instrumental line themselves ; with every outcrop inaccu- 

 rately placed ; with only here and there an accidental note of strike 

 and dip, and even this not oriented with a close ajiproximation to pre- 

 cision ; covering a region requiring the study of many months with a 

 few weeks of what they fondly called field-work, and basing on such a 

 map generalizations of the first rank, for which they expected the world 

 of science to give them credit — which in the long run it certainly will, 

 but not the kind of credit they anticipate. 



Now, the experience of a long and active life of science has trained 

 me to regard all such work as careless work, lazy work. Not that 

 such workers are lazy men in the common meaning of the word ; on 

 the contrary, they are busy, bustling, active, energetic, indefatigable 

 men ; in fact, too much so. In science there is a laziness of quite an- 

 other definition — namely, a chronic dislike, a deep-seated disability, 

 for the dead-work which first disciplines to accuracy, then makes 



