PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 173 



that haxl at that time been recognised in the British Isles; and many moi'e 

 examples could be instanced of the services to geological science by those 

 whose principal life task lay in other directions. 



Such workers are unfortunately all too few — fewer, I fancy, now than 

 they were before the pursuit of sport, and especially of golf, had taken such 

 a hold upon the middle classes and occupied so considerable a portion of their 

 leisure hours and thoughts. One might hope that the extended hours now 

 assured to the working classes for recreation would lead to a general increase 

 of interest in science among them, if it were not that the students of that 

 admirable organisation, the Workers' Educational Association, seem almost 

 invariably to prefer economic or political subjects to the study of Nature, a 

 choice in defence of which they could no doubt advance most cogent arguments. 

 In a large county in which I am interested the number of those in every 

 condition of life who are able and willing to take part in geological research 

 might be told almost on the fingers of one hand, and so far as I am aware 

 there has not been a single recruit in recent years from the ranks of the 

 younger men or women. 



It seems strange that there are so few of our fellow-countrymen or country- 

 women who feel a call to scientific research, especially in a subject which, 

 like geology, makes a strong appeal to the imagination, telling us of the 

 strange vicissitudes through which our world and its inhabitants passed before 

 they assumed the guise and characters with which we are familiar. How few- 

 are there who realise that the prolific vegetation to which we owe our wealth 

 of coal was succeeded after the lapse of incalculable years by far-stretching 

 deserts, and these, after continuing for a period still longer in duration, 

 were submerged beneath wide inland semi-tropical seas, nnder whose waters 

 were accumulated the sediments of sand and mud and calcareous debris out 

 of which the fertile valleys of Central England have been carved ; or tliat 

 the conditions under which we now live were only reached through the portals 

 of bleak, desolate ages of excessive cold, the reasons for which we are still 

 at a loss to understand. 



Even if the appeal to the imagination were not a sufficient incentive to 

 the cultivation of geology, one would have thought its economic importance 

 would have been effective. Its intimate bearing on the problems of agricul- 

 ture, engineering, water-supply, and hygiene is too obvious to need emphasis 

 here, and it is scarcely more necessary to point out that all our fundamental 

 manufacturing activities, without exception, are dependent on adequate supplies 

 of materials of mineral origin, so that we need not be surprised that one of 

 the earliest administrative acts of the Imperial Conference was the con- 

 stitution of an Imperial Mineral Resources Bureau to secure that the whole 

 mineral resources of the Elmpire should be made available for the successful 

 development of its industries. 



It might be suggested that the prevailing indifference to the attraction of 

 geological research was due to a conviction that after eighty years of work 

 by the Geological Survey, as well as by University teachers and amateurs, 

 there was little left to be done, and that all the information that could be 

 desired was to be found in the Survey publications. Such a belief can 

 hardly be very widespread, for, as a matter of fact, comparatively few of the 

 general public realise the value of the work of the Geological Survey, and still 

 fewer make use of its publications. Municipal libraries, other than those of 

 our largest provincial centres, are rarely provided with the official maps and 

 memoirs relating to the surrounding areas, and in the absence of any demand 

 the local booksellers do not stock them. This cannot be attributed to the 

 cost, for, though most of the older maps are hand-coloured and therefore 

 expensive, the later maps — at least those on the smaller scales* — are remark- 

 ably cheap, and the memoirs are also issued at low prices. 



The true explanation appears to be that a geological map conveys very 

 little information to the average man of fair education who has received 

 no geological instruction. This is certainly not the fault of the Survey maps, 

 which compare very favourablj^ with those of other countries, and have been 



* 1 inch to the mile, 1 : 63,360 ; -j inch to the mile, 1 : 253,440 : and 1 inch to 

 25 miles, 1 : 1,584,000. 



