BASELEVEL, GRADE AND PENEPLAIN 89 
should endeavor to escape the criticism of Scylla, by making up 
a new technical term in order to avoid the technical use of a 
common word in a new meaning, we should be met by the 
objections of Charybdis, who maintains that ‘‘every new tech- 
nical term is a positive detriment to science.”’ The objections 
to ‘‘grade’”’ seems to me far outweighed by the many points in 
its favor, which may now be reviewed. 
In favor of the term, it may be noted first that ‘‘ grade,” 
like ‘‘baselevel,” is of a convenient form, ready for use as noun, 
adjective, and verb, after the handy fashion of the English 
language in many other cases. In the second place, the sense 
of the verb “‘ grade,” as employed by engineers (to prepare, by 
cutting and filling, a smooth bed of gentle slope for a railroad or 
other line of transportation), is closely analogous to the meaning 
here advocated for the verb ‘‘grade”’ as used by geologists and 
geographers: a river grades its course by a process of cutting 
and filling, until an equable slope is developed along which the 
transportation of its load is most effectively accomplished. In 
the third place, ‘‘grade”’ lends itself admirably to the formation 
Of such) terms) as “ degrade,. ““agerade, “and ““eradation; ’ 
“degrade,” in the sense of to wear down, has been in use for some 
time by geologists; ‘‘aggrade”’ is an excellent addition to our 
terminology, proposed by Salisbury (1893, 103) in the sense of 
building up; while ‘“‘gradation”’ is Powell’s term for the general 
process of wearing down elevations and filling up depressions, 
in the production of lowland plains (1895, 30). Finally, the 
word has already made a beginning towards acquiring a useful 
place in scientific writings. 
The use of ‘‘ grade,” in the sense here advocated, was almost 
reached by Gilbert in his description of hills of planation, 
covered with stream gravels: ‘‘ The slope of the hill depends on 
the grade of the ancient stream, and is independent of the hard- 
ness and dip of the strata” (1877, 130); and again in his account 
of how a river “tends to establish a single, uniform grade,” and 
‘an equilibrium of action” (1876, 100). It was in consequence 
of a suggestion from this philosophical writer that I introduced 
