TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C, 643 



Immense amount of useful work being done and to be done in these institutions 

 alone. But what I think I do right to insist upon is that all work in the laboratory 

 and museum must be mainly preparatory to the field-work which is to follow"; 

 every type of geological student must be sent into the field sooner or later, and in 

 most cases the sooner the better. I have generally found that students in the 

 eai'ly stages have a great repugnance to the grind of working through countless 

 varieties of minerals, rocks, and fossils; but once they have gone into the field, 

 collected with their own hands, and seen the importance of these things, and the 

 inferences to be drawn from them, for themselves — once indeed they have trot 

 keen — they come back willingly, even eagerly, to any amount of hard indoor work. 



But it is when they leave ordinary excursion work and start upon regular 

 field training that one really feels them spurt forward. As soon as they begin to 

 realise that surface- features are only the reflex of rock-structure and can be 

 utilised for mapping, that to check their lines and initiate new ones they must 

 search for and find new exposures, and that each observation while settlin"- 

 perhaps one disputed point may originate a host of new ones, when above all they 

 can be trusted with a certain amount of individual responsibility and given 

 a definite point to seltle for themselves, it is then that their progress is most rapid, 

 and is bounded only by their powers of endurance. 



I have often watched my students through the various stages of their field 

 training with tlie deepest interest as a study of the development of character. At 

 iirst they look upon it merely as a relief from the tedium of the classroom and 

 laboratory, and as a pleasant country excursion. But gradually the fascination of 

 research comes over them, and as they feel their capacity increasing and their grip 

 and insight into the structure of the country deepening, one can see them growing 

 up under one's eyes. They come into the field a rabble of larky boys ; they begin 

 to develop into men before they leave it. 



And what is true of students is more than ever true of the working geologist. 

 I hold that every geologist, whatever his special branch may be, should spend a 

 portion of every year in the field. Though a petrologist may have specimens sent 

 to him from every variety, even the common ones, in a rock mass, and have their 

 relations and proportions properly explained to him, it is quite impossible for him 

 to feel and appreciate these proportions and relationships so well as if he had 

 studied and collected in the field and gained a personal interest in them. Besides 

 this the conclusions drawn in the field are the crystalline and washed residuum, so 

 to speak, left on the mind after the handling of dozens of specimens, weathered 

 and unweathered, and the seeing them in a host of difierent lights and aspects. 

 The rock is hammered and puzzled over and its relations studied until some con- 

 clusion is arrived at which bears the test of application to all the facts observed in 

 the field. 



Again, once a paleontologist is divorced from the field he loses the significance 

 of minute time variations, tlie proportion of aberrant to normal forms, and the 

 value of naked-eye chai'acteristics which can be ' spotted ' in the field. Huxley 

 once asked for a palreontologist who was no geologist ; I venture to think we 

 have now had enough of them. What we want above all at the present time is 

 the recognition of such characters as have enabled our field palaeontologists to 

 zone by means of the graptolites, the ammonites, and the echinids, so that 

 every rock system we possess may be subdivided with the same minuteness and 

 exactitude as the Ordovician, Silurian, and Jurassic systems, and the Chalk. 



If this is once done the biological results will take care of themselves, and we 

 may feel perfect confidence that new laws of biological succession and evolution 

 will result from such work, as indeed they are now doing — laws which could never 

 be reached from first principles, but could only come out in the hands of those to 

 whom time and place were the factors by which they were most impressed. It is 

 only by field work that we shall ever get rid of the confusion which has been 

 inevitable from the supposed existence of such so-called species as Ort/iis cali- 

 (/ramma, Atrypa reticiclaris, aiid Froducfus f/yjanteus. 



As for the geological results, it is only necessary to read the excellent and 

 workmanlike Address delivered to this Section at Liverpool in 1896 by Mr. Marr 



2 T T 



