42 THE JOURNAL OF GEOLOGY. 



learner begins with ideas which every intelligent mind associates 

 with the objects described or named, and by degrees the marks 

 of his knowledge are increased, the relations of things are 

 grasped, and the content of his ideas associated with the lan- 

 guage of his science is enlarged. In the process of -learning 

 the science he has been building up his stock of knowledge of 

 facts and phenomena, but, of more importance than that, he has 

 learned the method of observing and of scientific thinking. He 

 has had training in the methods of reducing the hard facts of 

 nature to the laws of thought and practice, he has seen the 

 method by which theoretical order is made out of the inter- 

 minable confusion and complexity of natural things. 



Beside this primary reason for the use of geology as a disci- 

 plinary science-study, there is a second reason arising from the 

 symbolic nature of a large group of its facts. This aspect of 

 the science is best seen in the historical and stratigraphical parts 

 of geology, in which fossils are the chief data for study. The 

 interpretation of a fossil into a species of organism, having its 

 definite place in the elaborate classification of the zoologist, or 

 as an indicator of the time and place and mode of formation of 

 the strata in which it is buried, is, to be sure, a most intricate 

 and, at first thought it would seem, an unattractive process. But 

 no more so, I would say, than the interpretation of a series of 

 Greek characters. The interpretation of the Greek reveals to 

 us the richest results of human thought and most perfect laws 

 of human speech, and we find therefore in the analysis required 

 the most perfect discipline of the powers of speech and lan- 

 guage. The fossil too holds, ready to be revealed, the story of 

 the history of the world and the laws of the evolution of the 

 organic life of the globe, and records an inexhaustible wealth 

 of information regarding the laws of nature. But as an instru- 

 ment of intellectual discipline its great merit lies in its symbolic 

 nature. It is this symbolic character of the classical languages 

 and of the mathematics which fits them to be universal means 

 of liberal training. The symbolic nature of the fossil fits it to 

 become the exponent of training in the pure science of nature. 



