14 GERMANY IN SCIENCE 



the first to circumnavigate the globe, she did not discover the 

 route to China by way of the Cape of Good Hope, she did not 

 discover either the North or the South Pole. She has sent out 

 a great many travellers, who have wandered hither and thith- 

 er, and reported their observations, men like Humboldt, and 

 Earth, and Schweinfurth, who have botanized, and collected 

 bugs, and described the aspects of nature in the lands they 

 have visited, but whose additions to real geographical science 

 have been for the most part rather negligible. 



In geology the work of Germans is not much more im- 

 portant than it has been in geography. Again her professors 

 have compiled most excellent text-books, and have laborious- 

 ly constructed many charts and maps, which are useful in high- 

 schools, but outside of her own little Middle- European domain 

 German geologists have done nothing which deserves mention 

 as epoch-making. Werner of Freiburg, who died in 1817, has 

 been styled by Germans ' 'the founder of scientific geology, " 

 and it is true that his influence as a teacher led not a few to 

 address themselves to the study of the science, but his views 

 embodied in the so-called "Neptunian Theory " have long ago 

 been discarded as rubbish. My dear old friend, Dr. Suess of 

 Vienna, who died a few years ago, has given us in his great 

 work, "Das Antlitz der Erde" a fine resume'of what is known 

 by geologists, and it has recently been translated into French 

 by another friend of mine, Emmanuel de Margerie, but it is 

 the result of reading and reflection, rather than of original 

 research. 



Geology is so young a science, and the most important 

 advances in it have been made so recently, that to mention 

 the names which bulk largest in it would compell me to speak 

 of many of my contemporaries, and raise distinctions, which 

 might seem invidious. I therefore content myself with speak- 

 ing of only a few of the great men of the past, and remind you 

 that Germany, has few names to be compared with those of 

 Lyell, Murchison, Geikie, Elie de Beaumont, Charpentier, 

 Louis Agassiz, Dawson, LeConte, Hayden, Powell and Tscher- 

 nychev. The greatest geologists are living men, and some 



