Editorial 



With the death of Dr. Joseph Le Conte there has passed 

 away perhaps the last distinguished American representative of 

 the general geologist as typified during the past century. This 

 passing type of the general geologist was a distinctive outgrowth 

 and representative of a transitional stage of intellectual pro- 

 cedure — a passage from the former mode in which the general- 

 izing and philosophical factors held precedence and the toilsome 

 modes of scientific verification followed as their servitors, to the 

 present or at least the coming method in which scientific deter- 

 minations are the basal factors to which generalizations and 

 philosophies are but dependent accessories. We owe much of 

 the transition itself to Dana and Le Conte, the two noblest 

 American representatives of the passing type, for while they 

 grew up under the influence of the older intellectual attitude, 

 they grew out of it in spirit while they steadied and guided the 

 transition. They were distinctively students of geology in the 

 special sense in which that term implies the organized doctrine 

 of the earth, rather than students of what might be termed^^zV^', 

 the immediate study of the earth itself in the field and the labora- 

 tory. They were preeminently students of the accumulated 

 data and of the literature of the science, with generalization and 

 philosophic inference as their dominant inspiration. Neither 

 Dana nor Le Conte were eminently field students; much less 

 were they specialists in a chosen field of the broad geological 

 domain. Their point of view was that of the organizer and of 

 the philosopher, and the contribution they made in their chosen 

 sphere was indispensable and immeasurably valuable. How this 

 necessary function is to be met in the future, with the increasing 

 complexities and profundities into which every branch is rapidly 

 growing, it is difficult to foresee, further than that it must in 

 some way be intimately associated with extensive personal 

 researches in the field and the laboratory, and must be guided 



439 



