GEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS IN MINNESOTA. 707 



with, and who reluctantly relinquishes from time to time some 

 line of research, or some unsettled problem, in order to devote 

 his energy to the passing events of the general work, will be 

 willing to employ the word finish in any other sense than that 

 his time and resources are exhausted, and he must hasten to put 

 in order such data as he may have gathered, ere they be lost by 

 the limitations of human life. Every such survey constitutes a 

 stepping-stone, and only a stepping-stone, to the finishing of the 

 geology of the area surveyed, but the end is in the far future, 

 and perhaps in the infinite future. The future stepping-stones 

 toward that end may not be in the manner of formal surveys ; 

 but in many ways now unknown, largely through the activity of 

 the professors in the various state institutions who will wrestle 

 with the problems now left unsolved, the intricacies of the geol- 

 ogy of the state will be explained more fully. More enlightened 

 public sentiment will furnish multiplied ways and means for 

 more minute work, and the increase of exact knowledge, com- 

 bined with greater demand for scientific data, will yet carry the 

 geology of the state to a degree of exactness of which we at 

 present can have but a faint conception. 



N. H. WlNCHELL. 



