792 REPORT—1890. 
keenness of eye it is unrivalled, for it demands both microscopic accuracy and 
comprehensive vision. Its calls upon the chastened imagination are no less urgent, 
for imagination alone is competent to devise a scheme which shall link together the 
mass of isolated observations which field work supplies; and if, as often happens, 
the fertile brain devises several possible schemes, it is only where the imaginative 
faculty has been kept in check by logic that the one scheme that best fits each case 
will be selected for final adoption. But, above all, geology has its home, not in the 
laboratory or study, but sub Jove, beneath the open sky; and its pursuit is in- 
separably bound up with a love of Nature, and the healthy tone which that love 
brings alike to body and mind. 
And what does the great prophet of Nature tell us about this love P 
The boy beholds the light and whence it flows ; 
The man perceives it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day. 
Will it not then be kind to encourage the boy to follow a pursuit which will 
keep alive in him a joy which years are too apt to deaden; and will not the 
teaching of geology in schools conduce to thisend? Geology certainly should be 
taught in schools, and for more prosaic reasons, of which the. two following are 
perhaps the most important. Geography is essentially a school subject, and the 
basis of all geographical teaching is physical geography. This cannot be under- 
stood without constant reference to certain branches of geology. Again how 
many are the points of contact between the history of nations, the distribution and 
migrations of peoples, and the geological structures of the lands they have dwelt in 
or marched over. 
But geology is not an easy subject to teach in schools. The geology of the 
ordinary text-book does not commend itself to the boy-mind. The most neatly- 
drawn sections, nay, even the most graphic representations of gigantic and uncouth 
extinct animals, come home to the boy but little, because they are pictures and not 
things. He wants something that he can handle and pull about; he does not 
refuse to use his head, but he likes to have also something that will employ his 
hands at the same time. 
The kind of geology that boys would take to is outdoor work ; and, of course, 
where it can be had, nothing better could be given them. A difficulty is that 
field work takes time and filches away a good deal of the intervais that are 
devoted to games. Still cross-country rambles and scrambling about quarries and 
cliffs are not so very different from a paper-chase; and if the teacher will only 
infuse into the work enough of the fun and heartiness which come so naturally in 
the open air, he need not despair of luring even the most high-spirited boy, every 
now and then, away from cricket and football. 
But there are localities not a few—the Fen country, for instance—where it is 
scarcely possible to find within manageable distance of the school the kind of 
field-geolory which is within the grasp of a beginner. But even here the teaching 
need not be wholly from books. The best that can be done in such cases is to 
make object-lessons indoors its basis. For instance, give a lad a lump of coarsish 
sandstone; let him pound it and separate by elutriation the sand grains from the 
clay ; boil both in acid, and dissolve off the rusty coating that colours them ; 
ascertain by the microscope that the sand grains are chips and not roundea 
pellets, and soon. All such points he will delight to worry out for himself; and, 
when he has done that, an explanation of the way in which the rock was formed 
will really come home to him. Or it is easy to rig up contrivances innumerable 
for illustrating the work of denudation. A heap of mixed sand and powdered 
clay does for the rock denuded; a watering-can supplies rain; a trough, deeper at 
one end than the other, stands for the basin that receives sediment. By such 
rough apparatus many of the results of denudation and deposition may be closely 
imitated, and the process is near enough to the making of mud-pies to command 
the admiration of every boy. It is by means like these that even indoor teaching 
of geolozy may be made lifelike. 
I need not dwell upon the great facts of physical geolory which have so 
