VION TU OIRICAIE, 
THE attendance at the Detroit meeting of the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science was notably smaller 
than usual, a result doubtless due in part to the meeting of the 
British Association at Toronto which followed at such an inter- 
val as to invite busy men to select the one at the expense of the 
other. The attendance upon the geological section was also 
adversely affected by the International Congress at St. Peters- 
burg. The papers presented, however, were perhaps even more 
than usually important and interesting. The location of the 
meeting naturally invited an unusual number of papers relative 
to the problems of the Great Lake Basins and these easily 
took precedence. The widest popular interest was undoubtedly 
called forth by Mr. Gilbert’s announcement of a definite tilting 
of the area of the lake basins towards the southwest. His deduc- 
tion that the rate of change amounted to five inches per hundred 
miles per century, and his prophecy that at a specified date the 
drainage would be reversed, Niagara abandoned, and Detroit and 
Chicago flooded, naturally created something akin to a sensation 
in the great cities of the lakes. Incidentally this contribution 
to prophetic geology is having a good effect in removing the too 
wide impression that geology is a science of the ancient earth. 
The present and future belong to it as much as the past. The 
activity of recent years in current geomorphy is helping to 
awaken an appreciation of contemporaneous geology. A few 
decisive predictions will doubtless establish the value of prog- 
nostic geology. 
This is not the first time that Mr. Gilbert has essayed the 
role of geological prophet, but it is, we believe, the first instance 
in which he has given us a definite time factor which holds out 
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