Geology in Education and Practical Life. 437 



brow. Many of these have done and are doing good work for us, 

 and many more would find real pleasure in doing so if only they 

 had been inoculated in those early days when impressions sink deep. 

 Mr. A. S. Keid, who has had much and fruitful experience in 

 teaching, tells me that he has often seen seed planted irT barren 

 ground at school spring up and grow and blossom as a country 

 holiday recreation after schooldays, or bear the good fruit of solid 

 research after lying dormant for many years. 



We may next look upon geology as an educational medium from 

 quite a different point of view. If more than half the work of the 

 man of science is the collection of fact, and of actual fact as opposed 

 to the result of the personal equation, geology is perhaps the very 

 best training-ground. There are such hosts of facts to be still 

 recorded, so many erroneous observations to be corrected, and so 

 much hope of extending observations on already recorded facts, that 

 there is plenty of work even for the man who can snatch but limited 

 leisure from other pursuits and the one who is a collector of fact and 

 nothing else, as well as those 



" Under whose command 

 Is earth and earth's, and in their hand 

 Is Nature hke an open book." 



But in the collection of facts a wise and careful selection is 

 constantly necessary in order to pick out from the multitude those 

 which are of exceptional value and importance in the construction 

 of hypotheses. Nature, it is true, cannot lie ; she is a perfectly 

 honest but expert witness, and it takes an astonishing amount of 

 acute cross-examination to elicit the truth, the whole truth, and 

 nothing but the truth. 



There is no science which needs such a variety of observations as 

 field geology. When we remember that Sedgwick and Darwin 

 visited Cwm Grlas and carried away no recollection of the features 

 which now shout ' glaciation ' to everyone who enters the Cwm, 

 it is easy to see how alert must be the eyes and how agile the mind 

 of the man who has to carry a dozen problems in his mind at, once, 

 and must be on the look-out for evidence with regard to all of them 

 if he would work out the structure of a difficult country; and who 

 is not only looking out for facts to test his own hypothesis, but 

 wishes to observe so accurately that if his hypothesis gives way 

 even at the eleventh hour his facts are ready to suggest and test its 

 successor. There is no class of men so well up in what may be 

 called observational natural history generally as the practised field 

 geologist, because he never knows at what moment some chance 

 observation — a mound, a spring, a flower, a feature, even a rabbit- 

 hole or a shadow — may be of service to him. Not only should he 

 know his country in its every feature and every aspect, but he must 

 have, and in most cases soon acquires, that remarkable instinct 

 which can only be denoted as an ' eye for a country,' with which 

 generally goes a naturalist's knowledge of its plants and of its birds, 

 beasts, and fishes. 



