78 The Necessity for the Amateur Spirit in Scientific Worli. 



the amateur g'eolog'isl with those of the official surveyor. The 

 amateur can ^o straiijht to the open sections or to the most 

 favourable localities where the materials for the special purpose 

 that he may have in view are most accessible — to the sea-clifFs, 

 quarries, or crag-gy mountain-sides that are best likely to repay 

 every moment spent upon them and there he is free to concen- 

 trate his whole attention upon his pre-determined object. The 

 geological surveyor, from whom a wider range of general 

 information is rightly demanded, has no such free hand, but 

 must go laboriously over the whole country-side alike -over 

 the soil-covered cultivated lands, the grassy slopes, and the 

 artificially obscured town-sites — with all kinds of objects in 

 mind that have an equal claim upon his attention ; and conse- 

 quently the greater part of his time is spent, not on the 

 favourable exposures, where usually for the very reason that 

 the information is adequate his duty is quickly done, but in 

 searching the obscurer ground for scraps of evidence that the 

 amateur would scarcely deign to consider. The comparison 

 comes forcefully to mind whenever I re-visit Speeton and recall 

 the methods of my earlier work there. I am compelled to 

 recognize that any such method of prolonged concentration upon 

 a single section could never be possible to the geological 

 surveyor. I refer to this work merely as a ready example of 

 the kind of research in geology that can only be carried out 

 either by the amateur, or by the professional man who is ready 

 to adopt the amateur spirit and method, for he who goes beyond 

 the bounds of allotted duty in pursuing with his whole energies 

 a congenial task thereby proves himself to be essentially and 

 truly an amateur. 



Of course, in considering this aspect of the matter, we must 

 not lose sight of the fact that there is a vast amount of irksome 

 toil necessary to the further advance of science, which, like 

 most of the field-work of the geological surveyor, would never 

 be undertaken by the voluntary worker, and will require the 

 employment of labourers of all grades. Also in the future 

 even to a greater degree than in the past, the high task of 

 co-ordinating and interweaving the freshly-gathered materials 

 into a serviceable fabric will be rarely possible except to the 

 man who can devote himself entirely to the duty. And just as 

 the geological surveyors' map supplies the basis from which the 

 amateur geologist usually starts his advance, so in other branches 

 of science the amateur makes the best progress on his chosen 

 ground wlicn he finds tlic roulc thereto already cleared for him. 



Naturalist, 



