884 THE EELATIONS OF GEOLOGY. 



pag-e.s following, giving- the titles of books dealing with nature and 

 nature studies, are dedicated." As geologists, however, we should 

 presume, I take it, that education in nature study is, in the words of 

 Huxley, ''education in that diligent, patient, loving study of all the 

 aspects of nature the results of which constitute exact knowledge or 

 science.'' 



EDUCATION IN EARTH KNOWLEDGE. 



However that may be, this at all events is clear: The branch of 

 nature knowledge with which geology and geologists have to do is that 

 which Huxley terms "erdkunde, or earth knowledge, or geology in 

 its etymological sense." So impressed was Huxley with the general 

 need for instruction in this kind of earth knowledge that he practi- 

 cally founded for its study the educational subject, which he named 

 ""phj'siograph}'." Yet ph3^siogTaph\" has come to embrace much that 

 truly belongs to astronom}' ; and, indeed, a very large proportion of 

 the subject of physiography, as taught in many schools and colleges 

 in Britain at the present day, is essentially astronomical. But here we 

 have to bear in mind that of the two great divisions of nature that 

 of the outside universe which is proper to astronomy concerns indi- 

 vidual men but indirectly. The other half of nature, if we may call 

 it so — the world upon which we live and amidst whose phenomena we 

 move and have our being — is always with us and around us, and its 

 conscious systematic stud}', Avhich we call '"earth knowledge," is, in 

 truth, only a methodizing and an extension of the unconscious and 

 unsvstematic study that we call '"experience," which we are always 

 making from the earliest dawn of our consciousness to the final dark- 

 ness of old age. This is the kind of nature knowledge — namely, earth 

 knowledge proper, or, in other worGs, "geonomy " as contrasted vvith 

 "astronomy'' — of which our youth has the greatest need, and it is 

 instruction in this which it is one of the missions of geology to claim 

 for the rising generation. 



The da}' has not yet arrived when it will be possible to define pre- 

 cisely what should l)e taught under the head of this earth knowledge. 

 But what 1 would understand by it is that it should embrace instruc- 

 tion which would direct the attention of the scholar not only to the 

 natui'al phenomena of the world at large, but also to those particular 

 phenomena of the world immediately around him. In its general inter- 

 pretation its central plane would be the surface of the earth, and from 

 this it would pass upward ))y pi'opei; stages to consider the distribution 

 of all the phenomena, organic and inorganic, above that surface; out- 

 ward to the stud}' of the meaning and interaction of these phenomena; 

 downward to the study of their history, and onward to the study of 

 their evolution. 



The teaching of this earth knowledge could begin in the elementary 

 classes of schools, l>e contiiuied in risitio- urades through the hijjfher 



