436 Professor W. W. Watts— 



to feel and appreciate these proportions and relationships so well as 

 if he had studied and collected in the field and gained a personal 

 interest in them. Besides this the conclusions drawn in the field 

 are the crystalline and washed residuum, so to speak, left on the 

 mind after the handling of dozens of specimens, weathered and 

 un weathered, and the seeing them in a host of different lights and 

 aspects. The rock is hammered and puzzled over and its relations 

 studied, until some conclusion is arrived at which bears the test of 

 application to all the facts observed in the field. 



Again, once a paleeontologist is divorced from the field he loses 

 the significance of minute time variations, the proportion of aberrant 

 to normal forms, and the value of naked-eye characteristics which 

 can be ' spotted ' in the field. Huxley once asked for a palaeon- 

 tologist who was no geologist ; I venture to think we have now had 

 enough of them. What we want above all at the present time is 

 the recognition of such characters as have enabled our field 

 palajontologists to zone by means of the graptolites, the ammonites, 

 and the echinids, so that every rock system we possess may be 

 subdivided with the same minuteness and reliability as the 

 Ordovician, Silurian, and Jurassic systems, and the Chalk. 



If this is once done the biological results will take care of 

 themselves, and we may feel perfect confidence that new laws of 

 biological succession and evolution will result from such work, as 

 indeed they are now doing — laws which could never be reached 

 from first principles, but could only come out in the hands of those 

 to whom time and place were the factors by which they were most 

 impressed. It is only by field-work that we shall ever get rid of the 

 confusion which has been inevitable from the supposed existence of 

 such so-called species as OrtJiis caltgramma, Atrypa reticularis, and 

 Productus giganteus. 



As for the geological results, it is only necessary to read the 

 excellent and workmanlike Address delivered to this Section at 

 Liverpool in 1896 by Mr. Marr to realise how many problems of 

 succession and structure, of distribution and causation, of ancient 

 geography and modern landscape, are still awaiting solution by the 

 application of minute and exact zonal researches. 



On the other hand it goes without saying that the more a field 

 geologist knows of his rocks and fossils the better will his strati- 

 graphical work become ; but this is too obvious to require more than 

 stating. 



Geology, again, is of value as a recreative science, one which can 

 be enjoyed when cycling, walking, or climbing, even when sailing or 

 travelling by rail. Indeed, it is difficult to find a place in which to 

 treat the confirmed geologist if you wish to make him a ' total 

 abstainer.' There are others than those who must make use of 

 their science in their professions, those in need of a hobby, those 

 interested in natural scenery, veterans who have seen much and 

 now have leisure and means to see more, and those fortunate ones 

 who have not to earn their bread by the sweat of their brain or 



