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but enduring facts. The members of this society were to abandon the quest of 
scientific chimeras; they were to leave to later generations the attempt to solve 
the universe as a whole. 
The Geological Society has owed its influence to its bold, original purpose. It 
was not founded as a drifting social union of men, with a common interest in 
a single science. Its object was to apply to Geology one particular mode ot 
research. It adopted as its motto this fine passage from Bacon :— 
‘If any man makes it his delight and care—not so much to cling to and use 
past discoveries, as to penetrate to what is beyond them—not to conquer Nature 
by talk, but by toil—in short, not to have elegant and plausible theories, but to 
gain sure and demonstrable knowledge; let such men (if it shall seem to them 
right), as true children of knowledge, unite themselves with us.’ 
The methods of the society were as practical as its ideals. London, with 
characteristic unconventionality and originality, has used its scientific societies as 
its university for post-graduate teaching. Informally the Geological Society 
enrolled every British master of Geology on its staff of unpaid professors, then 
set each of them to teach the branch of Geology which he knew best. And 
these professors were no carpet knights; they were knights errant who derived 
their knowledge, not from books alone, but from their wanderings over hills and 
dales, in mines and quarries, by ice-polished rocks and water-worn valleys. At its 
meetings the leaders of the society announced what they had discovered, gave 
sure and demonstrable proofs of their discoveries, and showed in what direction 
the geological forces should be directed for the conquest of Nature. The goodly 
fellowship of the Geological Society has always encamped on the ever-advancing 
frontier of geological knowledge, where the well-surveyed tracks pass out into the 
bright, alluring realms of the unknown. 
The actual founders of the Geological Society were apparently men of less 
showy intellect than the great Werner, whose teaching had intoxicated many of 
the most gifted of his enthusiastic pupils. They were men, like Greenough and 
Phillips, who had a practical insight that enabled them to give a permanent 
help to the progress of science. They had that supreme gift, the power to see 
things as they are. It would not be fair to claim for them that they were the 
originators of accurate methods in Geology ; such methods had been used before 
ther day—by William Smith in England, by Lehman in Germany, and by 
Desmarest in France. But these men, acting singly, had not been able to save 
Geology from the eighteenth-century spirit of adventurous speculation, nor had they 
lifted from Geology the burden of those quaint theories, that made this science the 
butt of Voltaire’s luminous ridicule. 
The great achievement of the Geological Society has been this: as a corporate 
body it has been able to spread its influence very widely ; its clear-sighted pursuit 
of a practical ideal has been adopted in other countries; its resolute rejection of 
the temptation to wander in dreamland has affected geological students all over 
the world. In this way has been laid a broad foundation of positive knowledge 
upon which modern Geology has been built. 
The fine self-restraint, which induced the founders of the Geological Society to 
restrict its work for awhile to observing the surface of the earth, has had its 
reward. The methods this society was founded to employ have been so widely 
used, that we now have geological maps of a wider area than was known to 
geographers of a century ago. The general distribution of all the rocks on the 
earth’s surface has been discovered ; most settled countries have been surveyed in 
some detail; the main outlines of the history of life on the earth have been 
written and carried back almost as far as paleontologists are likely to go. There 
are doubtless fossiliferous areas still undiscovered in the ‘back blocks’ of the 
world; but, though negative predictions are proverbially reckless, it seems 
probable that Palzontology will not carry geological history materially farther 
back, Fossils have been discovered in the pra-Cambrian rocks ; the best known 
is the fauna described by Walcot from Montana; but his Beltina, the oldest 
well-characterised fossil, is still of Paleozoic type. It may be that the poverty 
