86 THE JOURNAL OF GEOLOGY. 



meet it; for it is the function of universities, in the larger modern 

 view, not only to rehearse science, nor merely even to educate 

 young geologists, important as that is, but to develop science for 

 science's own sake, and for its own inherent and permanent 

 utilities as distinguished from its immediate applicabilities. To 

 fulfill this function they must not only realize and appreciate it, 

 but they must be equipped for field and experimental work, as 

 well as library and laboratory study. Ideal correlations and 

 academic systematizing are as apt to be hindrances as helps to 

 the progress of science. While a few of the great universities 

 of this country and Europe have made notable advances in these 

 directions, the universities are, on the whole, far behind the 

 great surveys in the performance of the work which properly 

 falls to them. This is due not so much to a lack of appreciation 

 of the function as to the lack of facilities. 



With the development of this higher function of the univer- 

 sities there goes a coordinate function for a university journal 

 of geology, a journal whose special efforts shall be devoted to 

 promoting the growth of systematic, philosophical, and funda- 

 mental geology, and to the education of professional geologists. 

 No part of the wide domain can wisely be neglected by any 

 journal, but there seems to be an open field for a periodical 

 which specially invites the discussion of systematic and funda- 

 mental themes, and of international and intercontinental rela- 

 tions, and which in particular seeks to promote the study of 

 geographic and continental evolution, orographic movements, 

 volcanic coordinations and consanguinities, biological develop- 

 ments and migrations, climatic changes, and similar questions of 

 wide and fundamental interest. This field is not likely to be 

 successfully cultivated except by a systematic endeavor, pursued 

 through a period of years, to bring together the latest and best 

 summations of the results attained in the several national fields 

 in a common medium, where they can be compared and dis- 

 cussed, and where tentative correlations will suggest themselves, 

 out of which, in turn, working hypotheses will naturally spring, 

 leading on to such direct investigations as the nature of each 



