244 Fourth Conference 



features of a rock-specimen that can be held in the 

 hand with its larger features as a portion of some 

 modern landscape. Photographs and lantern-slides 

 are now obtainable to illustrate regions outside that 

 which lies immediately near the school. And surely 

 such pictures, when their meaning is made clear, and 

 their connection with our world of action is revealed, 

 stimulate the imagination and control the reason as 

 fully as the tales of ancient kings and heroes. 



Take, for example, a scratched block of northern 

 chalk from the boulder-clay of Finchley, and look 

 back on all that it means, on all the processes that 

 moulded it in a period not so very far removed from 

 our own human times. We see again the highlands 

 to the north rising snow-capped, a second Norway, 

 above a shallow and fluctuating sea. We view the 

 great ice-streams coalescing, and trace them back as 

 local glaciers into the barren recesses of the hills. 

 We see the crevasses in the glaciers, and the huge 

 erratic blocks carried on their backs. The gravel 

 of our northern slopes is no longer a desolate affair, 

 to be occasionally turned up in drainage-operations, 

 and again concealed by the speculative builder; but 

 it holds for us its own stories, and reconstructs for us 

 the sunlit snows over which the mammoth marched 

 on London. The very soil, sohtm patrice, contributes 

 its romantic chapters to the history of a romantic 

 land. 



And is it not easy to interest our pupils in fossils, 

 and to show how different levels of the rocks contain 

 differently-organized remains? Here we touch on the 

 great chains of life, reaching away to Cambrian times. 

 The extinct monsters of the past have a charm for 



