RELATION OF BIOLOGY TO GEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION. 365 



If it were practicable to obtain from these fossils at sight all the infor- 

 mation which they are capable of conveying, and if the judgment of 

 every collector were so infallible that no cooperation by other observers 

 and no final arbitration by the scientific public were necessary, it 

 would not be essential to the successful prosecution of held work that 

 fossils should be collected and preserved. But this is only a negative 

 method of stating the imperative necessity of making full collections of 

 fossils in the prosecution of investigations in structural geology and of 

 preserving them for future reference. 



Fossils thus collected and the facts concerning them recorded become 

 invested with a value which differs materially from that which is pos- 

 sessed by ordinary property, and the claims of science upon them and 

 upon the investigator with relation to them at once begin. These 

 claims, as just intimated, require that a careful descriptive record be 

 made of the stratigraphies! conditions under which the'fossils are found, 

 including a directive record of the locality and designation of the 

 stratum from which they were obtained. They also require that these 

 records should be inviolably preserved and made inseparable from every 

 specimen by indices that shall be as intelligible to other investigators 

 as to the original observer. 



Aside from the claims of science such precaution is necessary, because 

 reliance upon memory alone is always unsafe in the most favorable 

 cases, and it can at best give rise only to such oral traditions as are 

 out of place in scientific work. The immediate preparation of the 

 records and indices just mentioned is also necessary, because, while 

 every specimen is at all times competent to impart to an investigator all 

 obtainable knowledge of its own character, it can of itself convey no 

 information as to its original locality and stratigraphic position. With 

 this information secured for a collection of fossils they maybe made at 

 all times available as aids to scientific research not only by the collector, 

 but by all other investigators. 



The claims of science also require that immediately upon the com- 

 pletion of the original study of fossils thus collected and recorded 

 they shall be placed where they will be freely accessible to the scien- 

 tific public, and that reference to their place of deposit shall be made 

 in connection with their publication. It is needless to say that the 

 only suitable places for such deposit are public museums. It is only 

 when this indispensable evidence is thus made accessible that the public 

 can exercise that arbitration over the accumulated results of the labors 

 of investigators which has been shown to be imperative. 



The preparation and publication of complete records concerning the 

 locality and strata from which fossil remains are obtained are necessary 

 even from a biological point of view alone, especially when those remains 

 are studied with reference to the range of organic forms in time, and 

 without such records fossil remains are comparatively worthless as aids 

 in geological investigation. It is unfortunately true that a not uuimpor- 



