Sept. 28, 1876] 



NATURE 



471 



that the Worshipful Company will not put too narrow a 

 construction on the conditions of their subscription,but that 

 they will have the shrewdness to see that the best possible 

 preparation for a special knowledge of textile industries is 

 a thorough grounding in the sciences on which these are 

 founded. 



Still, notwithstanding all that has been done and pro- 

 mised, the Bristol College must stand still, and therefore 

 fail of its purpose, unless subscriptions and endowments 

 continue to pour in handsomely until it be enabled to 

 offer an education not inferior to that offered by Owens 

 College, Manchester, or the Universities of Edinburgh 

 and Glasgow. We feel confident, however, that once the 

 institution is fairly started and at work, and has had 

 opportunity of showing the vast benefits it is able to 

 confer on the large industrial population with which it 

 is surrounded, and thus indirectly on the general culture 

 and material welfare of England, that some at least of the 

 many rich and liberal-minded men in the country, who 

 only wait for a worthy object on which to exercise their 

 generosity, will see that here is one that deserves and 

 requires their help, by giving which liberally they will not 

 only benefit their country but do lasting honour to them- 

 selves. No similar institution that has been started on a 

 liberal and disinterested basis and has been properly 

 brought before the public has yet proved a failure ; we 

 need only refer again to Owens College, to the Newcastle 

 College, and to the more recent Yorkshire College of 

 Science, which, however, has much to do before it gets 

 beyond the stage of a merely technical school. Soon 

 also will we have an institution in Birmingham, the 

 Josiah Mason College, so liberally endowed by its still 

 living founder. These institutions have all sprung up to 

 supply what was felt as a great want ; and no district in 

 the country has more need of a centre of liberal culture 

 than the south-west_of England, the seat of so many an4 

 so varied industries. We venture to think that all that 

 has been yet obtained is nothing to what the extensive 

 district, containing so many rich landed proprietors, 

 manufacturers, and merchants, can afford. Now that 

 they see the institution actually at work in their midst, 

 and perceive how impossible it is for it to do efficient work 

 on its present basis, we cannot doubt that they will extend 

 their liberality, and, aided by others throughout the country 

 who are able and always ready to help in a noble and deserv- 

 ing cause, establish University College, Bristol, on as solid 

 a pecuniary foundation as any similar institution in the 

 country. 



We need not insist here again, as we have often 

 done already, on the fact that we are in danger of losing 

 our lead among the nations so far as industry is con- 

 cerned, fromt eficient training of those who have the 

 conduct of our commerce and manufactures in their 

 hands. It is a fact which is being ever and anon reiterated 

 on the platform and by the general press. Along with a 

 sound and comprehensive system of elementary educa- 

 tion, it is only by establishing all over the country, in the 

 great centres of industry, institutions where a compre- 

 hensive education can be obtained as the only satisfactory 

 basis on which a special training can be built, that we shall 

 be able to hold our own on the Continent and with America. 

 We have five such centres in England either established 

 or about to be, some of them, however, greatly deficient 



in comprehensiveness. Bristol, we have no doubt, will 

 one day become one of the most efficient in the country. 

 Everything has gone smoothly hitherto. Even the 

 Clifton Association for the Higher Education of Women 

 intend to have no courses of lectures this winter, to see 

 how far women in and around Bristol will avail [them- 

 selves of the College ; for the lectures will be given to 

 both sexes at once, though the class instruction will be 

 separate. We only hope that other important centres 

 will follow the examples already set, and that ere many 

 years no man in England will have to go without a liberal 

 education because it is not within his reach. If Scotland 

 with her four millions of people finds it difficult to meet 

 her wants in this direction with four universities, how 

 much has yet to be done in England with her twenty-four 

 millions ere she is on the footing of even her poor rela- 

 tion of the north. 



FIELD GEOLOGY 

 Field Geology. By W. Henry Penning, F.G.S., Geologist, 

 H.M. Geological Survey of England and Wales. With 

 a Section on Palaeontology, by A. J. Jukes-Browne, B,A. 

 F.G.S., H.M. Geological Survey. (London : Bailli^re, 

 Tyndall, and Cox, 1876.) 



IN the modestly- written preface to this little volume, the 

 author naturally refers to the difficulty which he 

 experienced in determining what subjects ought properly 

 to be treated under the title of "Field Geology." It 

 would have been defensible to have included in such a 

 work as the present useful, if somewhat desultory, sugges- 

 tions upon almost every branch of geological inquiry, and 

 thus to have expanded the convenient manual into a 

 ponderous treatise ; we believe, however, that the author 

 has exercised a very wise discretion in restricting the work 

 within its present limits, and making it of as practical a 

 character as possible ; for everything calculated to 

 increase the size, weight, and price of the book must, 

 perforce, have tended to prevent it from occupying that 

 place for which it is primarily designed — the portmanteau 

 of the working geologist. 



The Geological Survey of the British Islands, the foun- 

 dation of which was laid by the labours of De la Beche 

 and Logan nearly half a century ago, and which is now 

 approaching completion, differs in some important respects 

 from most of the official geological surveys of European 

 and American states. While the latter usually aim at 

 little if anything more than defining the boundaries of the 

 areas occupied by each of the geological formations, the 

 former sets before itself a much more lofty ideal — no less 

 in fact than such a delineation of all the lines of outcrop of 

 the strata, with indicationsof theirflexures and dislocations, 

 as will enable any competent person using the maps and 

 sections to realise the actual geological configuration of the 

 rock-masses to a considerable depth below the surface. 



Of course the execution of such a design as this must 

 necessarily be very unequal. Not to mention differences 

 of individual ability and scientific culture in the members 

 of the staff of the survey — differences, the consequences of 

 which not even the most perfect organisation or rigid 

 supervision can altogether neutraUse — we must remember 

 that the data on which the geological surveyor has to rely 

 n drawing his lines in different areas, are so varied as 

 greatly to affect the value of the results attained. In one 

 sheet of the Geological Survey map, which happens to 



