September 13, 1900] 



NA TURE 



481 



A student taking, say, a three years' course for the degree of 

 Bichelor of Science might be required to keep very careful notes 

 of all the practical work which he does during this course, and 

 in order to avoid fraud his notebook could from time to time be 

 initialled by the professor or demonstrator in charge of the 

 laboratory. An inspection of these notebooks could then be 

 made at suitable times by the examiners for the degree, by which 

 means a very good idea would be obtained of the scope of the 

 work which the student had been engaged in, and if thought 

 necessary a few questions could easily be asked in regard to the 

 work so presented. Should the examiners wish to further test 

 <he candidate by giving him an examination, I submit that it 

 would be much better to set him some exercise of the nature of 

 a simple original investigation, and to allow him two or three 

 weeks to carry this out, than to depend on the hurried work of 

 two or three days. 



The object which I had in view in writing this Address was 

 to call attention to the fact that our present system of training in 

 chemistry does not appear to develop in the student the power 

 of conducting original research, and at the same time to 

 endeavour to suggest some means by which a more satisfactory 

 state of things might be brought about. I have not been able, 

 within the limits of this Address, to consider the conditions of 

 study during the third year of the student's career at college, or 

 to discuss the increasing necessity for extending that course and 

 insisting on the student carrying out an adequate original investi- 

 gation before granting him a degree, but I hope on some future 

 occasion to have the opportunity of returning to this very impor- 

 tant part of the subject. If any of the suggestions I have made 

 should prove to be of practical value, and should lead to the 

 production of more original research by our students, I shall feel 

 that a useful purpose has been served by bringing this matter 

 before this Section. In concluding I wish to thank Prof. H. B. 

 Dixon, Prof. F, S. Kipping and others, for many valuable 

 suggestions, and my thanks are especially due to Dr. Bevan 

 Lean for much information which he gave me in connection 

 with that part of this Address which deals with the teaching of 

 chemistry in schools. 



SECTION C. 



Opening Address by Prok. W. J. Solt.as, D.Sc, LL.D., 

 F.R.S., President of the Section. 



Evolutional Geology. 

 The close of one century, the dawn of another, may naturally 

 suggest some brief retrospective glance over the path along 

 which our science has advanced, and some general survey of its 

 present position from which we may gather hope of its future 

 progress ; but other connection with geology the beginnings and 

 endings of centuries have none. The great periods of move- 

 ment have hitherto begun, as it were, in the early twilight hours, 

 long before the dawn. Thus the first step forward, since which 

 there has been no retreat, was taken by Steno in the year 1669 ; 

 more than a century elapsed before James Hutton (1785) gave 

 fresh energy and better direction to the faltering steps of the 

 young science; while it was less than a century later (1863) 

 when Lord Kelvin brought to its aid the powers of the higher 

 mathematics and instructed it in the teachings of modern physics. 

 From Steno onward the spirit of geology was catastrophic ; from 

 Hutton onward it grew increasingly uniformitarian ; from the 

 time of Darwin and Kelvin it has become evolutional. The 

 ambiguity of the word " uniformitarian " has led to a good deal 

 of fruitless logomachy, against which it may be as well at once 

 to guard by indicating the sense in which it is used here. In 

 one way we are all uniformitarians, i.e. we accept the doctrine 

 of the " uniform action of natural causes," but, as applied to 

 geology, uniformity means more than this. Defined in the 

 briefest fashion it is the geology of Lyell. Hutton had given us 

 a "Theory of the Earth," in its main outlines still faithful and 

 true ; and this Lyell spent his life in illustrating and advocating : 

 but as so commonly happens the zeal of the disciple outran the 

 wisdom of the master, and mere opinions were insisted on as 

 necessary dogma. What did it matter if Hutton as a result of 

 his inquiries into terrestrial history had declared that he found 

 no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end ? It would have 

 been marvellous if he had ! Consider that when Hutton's 



NO. 161 I, VOL. 62] 



'• Theory " was published William Smith's famou.s discovery had 

 not been made, and that nothing was then known of the orderly 

 succession of forms of life, which it is one of the triumphs of 

 geology to have revealed ; consider, too, the existing state of 

 physics at the time, and that the modern theories of energy had 

 still to be formulated ; consider also that spectroscopy had not 

 yet lent its aid to astronomy and the consequent ignorance of the 

 nature of nebulne ; and then, if you will, cast a stone at Hutton. 

 With Lyell, however, the case was different : in pressing his uni- 

 formitarian creed upon geology 'he omitted to take into account the 

 great advances made by its sister sciences, although he had know- 

 ledge of them, and thus sinned against the light. In the last edition 

 of the famous " Principles " we read : '* It is a favourite dogma 

 of some physicists that not only the earth, but the sun itself, is 

 continually losing a portion of its heat, and that as there is no 

 known source by which it can be restored we can foresee the 

 time when all life will cease to exist on this planet, and on the 

 other hand we can look back to a period when the heat was so 

 intense as to be incompatible with the existence of any organic 

 beings such as are known to us in the living or fossil world. . . . 

 A geologist in search of some renovating power by which the 

 amount of heat may be made to continue unimpaired for 

 millions of years, past and future, in the solid parts of the earth 

 . . . has been compared by an eminent physicist to one who 

 dreams he can discover a source of perpetual motion and invent 

 a clock with a self-winding apparatus. But why should we 

 despair of detecting f roof s of such regenerating and self-sustaining 

 power in the woiks of a Divine Artificer'^" Here we catch the 

 true spirit of uniformity ; it admittedly regards the universe as a 

 self-winding clock, and barely conceals a conviction that the 

 clock was warranted to keep true Greenwich time. The law of 

 the dissipation of energy is not a dogma, but a doctrine drawn 

 from observation, while the uniformity of Lyell is in no sense 

 an induction : it is a dogma in the narrowest sense of the word, 

 unproved, incapable of proof; hence perhaps its power upon the 

 human mind ; hence also the transitoriness of that power. 

 Again, it is only by restricting its inquiries to the stratified rocks 

 of our planet that the dogma of uniformity can be maintained 

 with any pretence of argument. Directly we begin to search 

 the heavens the possibility, nay even the likelihood, of the 

 nebular origin of our system, with all that it involves, is borne 

 in upon us. Lyell therefore consistently refused to extend his 

 gaze beyond the rocks beneath his feet, and was thus led to do 

 a serious injury to our science : he severed it from cosmogony, 

 for which he entertained and expressed the most profound con- 

 tempt, and from the mutilation thus inflicted geology is only at 

 length making a slow and painful recovery. Why do I dwell on 

 these facts ? To depreciate Lyell ? By no means. No one is 

 more conscious than I of the noble service which Lyell rendered 

 to our cause : his reputation is of too robust a kind to suffer 

 from my unskilful handling, and the fame of his solid contribu- 

 tions to science will endure long after these controversies are 

 forgotten. The echoes of the combat are already dying away, 

 and uniformitarians, in the sense already defined, are now no 

 more ; indeed, were I to attempt to exhibit any distinguished 

 living geologist as a still surviving supporter of the narrow 

 Lyellian creed, he would probably feel, if such a one there be, 

 that I was unfairly singling him out for unmerited obloquy. 



Our science has become evolutional, and in the transformation 

 has grown more comprehensive : her petty parochial days are 

 done, she is drawing her provinces closer around her, and is 

 fusing them together into a united and single commonwealth — 

 the science of the earth. 



Not merely the earth's crust, but the whole of earth-know- 

 ledge is the subject of our research. To know all that can be 

 known about our planet, this, and nothing less than this, is its 

 aim and scope From the morphological side geology inquires, 

 not only into the existing form and structure of the earth, but 

 also into the series of successive morphological states through 

 which it has passed in a long and changeful development. Our 

 science inquires also into the distribution of the earth in time 

 and space ; on the physiological side it studies the movements 

 and activities of our planet ; and not content with all this it ex- 

 tends its researches into aetiology and endeavours to arrive at a 

 science of causation. In these pursuits geology calls all the 

 other sciences to her aid. In our commonwealth there are no 

 outlanders ; if an eminent physicist enter our territory we do not 

 begin at once to prepare for war, because the very fact of his 

 undertaking a geological inquiry of itself confers upon him all 

 the duties and privileges of citizenship. A physicist studying 



