510 Dr. J. W. Evans — Presidential Address. 



many more examples could be instanced of the services to geological 

 science by those whose principal life task lay in other directions. 



Such workers are unfortunately all too few — fewer, I fancj r , now 

 than they were before the pursuit of sport, and especially of golf, 

 had taken such a hold upon the middle classes and occupied so 

 considerable a portion of their leisure hours and thoughts. One 

 might hope that the extended hours now assured to the working 

 classes for recreation would lead to a general increase of interest in 

 science among them, if it were not that the students of that 

 admirable organization, the "Workers' Educational Association, seem 

 almost invariably to prefer economic or political subjects to the 

 study of nature, a choice in defence of which they could no doubt 

 advance most cogent arguments. In a large county in which I am 

 interested the number of those in every condition of life who are 

 able and willing to take part in geological research might be told 

 almost on the fingers of one hand, and so far as I am aware there 

 has not been a single recruit in recent years from the ranks of the 

 younger men or women. 



It seems strange that there are so few of our fellow-countrymen or 

 countrywomen who feel a call to scientific research, especially in 

 a subject which, like geology, makes a strong appeal to the imagina- 

 tion, telling us of the strange vicissitudes through which our world 

 and its inhabitants passed before they assumed the guise and 

 characters with which we are familiar. How few are there who 

 realize that the prolific vegetation to which we owe our wealth of 

 coal was succeeded after the lapse of incalculable years by far- 

 stretching deserts, and these, after continuing for a period still 

 longer in duration, were submerged beneath wide inland semi- 

 tropical seas, under whose waters were accumulate'd the sediments 

 of sand and mud and calcareous debris out of which the fertile 

 valleys of Central England have been carved ; or that the conditions 

 under which we now live were only reached through the portals of 

 bleak, desolate ages of excessive cold, the reasons for which we are 

 still at a loss to understand. 



Even if the appeal to the imagination were not a sufficient 

 incentive to the cultivation of geology, one would have thought its 

 economic importance would have been effective. Its intimate 

 bearing on the problems of agriculture, engineering, water supply, 

 and hygiene is too obvious to need emphasis here, and it is scarcely 

 more necessary to point out that all our fundamental manufacturing 

 activities, without exception, are dependent on adequate supplies of 

 materials of mineral origin, so that we need not be surprised that 

 one of the earliest administrative acts of the Imperial Conference 

 was the constitution of an Imperial Mineral Resources Bureau to 

 secure that the whole mineral resources of the Empire should be 

 made available for the successful development of its industries. 



It might be suggested that the prevailing indifference to the 

 attraction of geological research was due to a conviction that after 

 eighty years of work by the Geological Survey, as well as by 

 University teachers and amateurs, there was little left to be done, 

 and that all the information that could be desired was to be found in 



