GEOLOGY IN SERVICE OF MAN WATTS 283 



of keeping him along rigid lines to an assured and preobtained 

 solution, will give him a choice of approach and accustom him to 

 frame and test hypotheses which to him at any rate will be new 

 and his own. Further, they will do much to teach him his own 

 shortcomings and give him a keen incentive to acquire the very 

 sciences which in themselves may be dull or even repulsive until he 

 has convinced himself of their utility and necessity to his own work. 



While acknowledging indebtedness to those sciences which have 

 so generously contributed their results to geology, we feel that we 

 have some ground for complaint that at times their votaries have 

 not resisted the temptation to drop bombs which have exploded in 

 our midst and produced a certain amount of trepidation and some- 

 times legitimate indignation. We consider that it is up to those 

 who feel compelled to do this to acquire some knowledge of geological 

 principles and of the lines of reasoning on which they are founded. 

 They should recognize that a pyramid is difficult to upset, because 

 in the process of building it the materials and structure have been 

 carefully selected and tested by the builders. To be told after 

 a century's search and reasoning that we must take our time bill 

 and " sit down quickly and write '' oif 80, or it may be 90, per cent 

 of it, ought not to have disturbed us as much as it did, not more 

 indeed than now does the permission of the representatives of the 

 same science to multiply our original time bill, if we like, by 10 

 or 20, or even more, so far as their present state of knowledge 

 extends. Our answer is that we have not done the one and have 

 no desire to do the other, so far as the sedimentary rocks at present 

 known to us are concerned. 



The geologist, however, should be, and is, the last to deprecate 

 the application of the liighest and newest conclusions of physical 

 and chemical science to his own problems and to the criticism of 

 his solutions of them, for it is certain that this will always result 

 in doing much to reduce many of the barriers which retard his 

 advance. For this reason we must welcome even so fantastic a 

 hypothesis as that of Wegener, for the problem of the overthrust 

 " nappes " of mountain regions is one of our greatest difficulties, 

 and all explanations hitherto proposed are so hopelessly inadequate 

 that we have sometimes felt compelled to doubt whether the facts 

 really are as stated. 



But the phenomena have now been observed so carefully and in so 

 many different districts that any real doubt as to the facts is out of 

 the question, and we must still look for some adequate method by 

 which the overthrusting could have been brought about. And if 

 dozens of square miles of ground have been shifted over their founda- 

 tions and away from their roots for many linear miles in the course 



