330 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1907. 
have its fascination for those intellectual hermits—shall I not say 
those saints of science ?—who prefer to work for love of knowledge, 
free from the worrying intrusion of the mixed problems and fickle 
conditions of the industrial world; and the greater the progress of 
applied science the more urgent will be its demands for help from 
pure science, and, as a necessary consequence, the wider will be the 
appreciation and the more generous the endowment of scientific re- 
search. 
Technical education must be as rigorous as that in academic educa- 
tion, and its connection with the fundamental principles must be as 
intimate. When so taught, economic problems provide at least as 
good a mental training as those branches of science which are purely 
theoretical. If the new Imperial College of Science and Technology 
carry on the mission for which the Geological Society was founded a 
century ago, if it inspire its students to have their delight in using 
past discoveries on the open surface of the earth, so that they may 
penetrate to what is within, then they will gain that sure knowledge 
of the formation and distribution of ores which is of ever-growing 
national importance. 
