150 
phyry and syenite —which make the wall charts of Hall 
and D’Orbigny look now so old-fashioned, and which, in fact, 
the study of the Laurentian regions of the north, as well as 
the calculations of physicists, have proved to be mere myths 
and fables of an olden day. What is to replace them, we 
know not yet, nor how to do without them in our Structural 
Geology. The situation of the geological world, just now, is 
not unlike that of the theological, with its Schenkels and its 
Colensos, its Ecce Homos and its Leben Jesus. But this 
is certain, — the empire of truth is of perpetual divine right, 
and cannot be shaken, its motto being, Fiat justitia, ruat 
celum. What cannot be demonstrated, is fictitious; what 
has been disproved, is not useful. Better get our first con- 
glomerates from aerolites which we can collect and exhibit 
in our cabinets than from an aboriginal granite floor which 
no eye has ever seen, no hammer struck, no foot-rule meas- 
ured. Better redraw all the anticlinals and synclinals of 
our cross sections, than gabble about the plications of a crust | 
which seems to be a demonstrated mathematical absurdity. 
But the fine life-history of him whose eulogy we read to-night 
tells us a better way. Facts take time. It is not hard for 
honest folks to wait. All harvests are not for this genera- 
tion of sowers and reapers. It would be well for all of us, 
could our enthusiasm, like his, be tempered with conserva- 
tism, and our conservatism be fired by an equal expectation 
of better things to come. 
Here, gentlemen of the Academy, I must most unwillingly 
stop. I cannot give you, as I should like to do, a description 
of the geological survey of Massachusetts which occupied 
Dr. Hitchcock from 1830, when he was appointed to it, to 
1841, when he published his final report; and again from 
: 1852 almost until his death; nor of the geological survey 
acme which he reorganized i in 1856, and aati 
