i64 PROCEEDINGS COTTESWOLD CLUB 191 3 



in the meanwhile discovered, he improves that explanation, 

 making it more suitable to the new facts, and uses that as a 

 tool until he again finds it necessary to make a further improve- 

 ment, and so on. 



Of course some geologists, familiar with the old explana- 

 tions, give up their use with great reluctance, and not until 

 the new array of facts forces them to do so. On the other 

 hand, some may be tempted to make too great a change and, 

 as it were, overshoot the mark. 



But between these two extremes geology advances year 

 by year — some tools get superseded by others because they 

 no longer fit the facts, and some never come into use at all 

 because the facts will not fit them. 



The outsider, however, generally accepts the prevalent 

 geological theory of the moment as if it were the be-all and 

 end-all of everything, both opinion and discovery, and when 

 the science advances to a newer and higher stage, he soon 

 develops what he thinks to be a common-sense horror of 

 all theories, and a contempt for all scientists, especially geo- 

 logists, who seem to him to be for ever altering their points 

 of view. It is a consummation that pleases him, because it 

 gives him a comforting feeling of superiority, and it pleases 

 the geologist, because the apparent neglect allows of his doing 

 his work in his own quiet time and in his own quiet way. 



And what great advances in geological theory have been 

 made within the last hundred years, even in theories con- 

 nected with boulders like these which we are examining to- 

 day. 



I doubt whether the memory of the oldest of us goes 

 back to the time when the dispersion of such boulders was 

 confidently assigned to Noah's Flood, or even to the later 

 time when that view became superseded by the theory of 

 mighty local floods of water of some mysterious and unknown 

 origin. But we can most of us remember how even as late as 

 1886, the date of the last meeting of the British Association 

 in Birmingham, many geologists still held firmly to the theory 



