848 STUDIES FOR STUDENTS 
verbal expression and there arises a disinclination to make the 
attempt. Furthermore the impossibility of expressing the 
mental operation in words leads to their disuse in the silent pro- 
cesses of thought and hence words and thoughts lose that close 
association which they are accustomed to maintain with those 
whose silent as well as spoken thoughts predominantly run in 
linear verbal courses. There is therefore a certain predisposition 
on the part of the practitioner of this method to taciturnity. 
The remedy obviously lies in codrdinate literary work. 
An infelicity also seems to attend the use of the method 
with young students. It is far easier, and apparently in general 
more interesting, for those of limited training and maturity to 
accept a simple interpretation or a single theory and to give it 
wide application, than to recognize several concurrent factors 
and to evaluate these as the true elucidation often requires. 
Recalling again for illustration the problem of the Great Lake 
basins, it is more to the immature taste to be taught that these 
were scooped out by the mighty power of the great glaciers than 
to be urged to conceive of three or more great agencies working 
successively in part and simultaneously in part and to endeavor 
to estimate the fraction of the total results which was accom- 
plished by each of these agencies. The complex and the quan- 
titative do not fascinate the young student as they do the veteran 
investigator. 
The studies of the geologist are peculiarly complex. It is 
rare that his problem is a simple unitary phenomenon explicable 
by a single simple cause. Even when it happens to be so in a 
given instance, or at a given stage of work, the subject is quite 
sure, if pursued broadly, to grade into some complication or 
undergo some transition. He must therefore ever be on the alert 
_ for mutations and for the insidious entrance of new factors. If 
therefore there are any advantages in any field in being armed 
with a full panoply of working hypotheses and in habitually 
employing them, it is doubtless the field of the geologist. 
T. C. CHAMBERLIN. 
