EARTH SCIENCES IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 685 



The adoption' of some such term as "ontography" would tend to 

 correct the false idea that geography is concerned only with the ele- 

 mentary and manifest examples of organic responses; it would pro- 

 mote thoroughness of study, and thus more fully continue the progress 

 that we have thus far made. The adoption of the term would, 

 moreover, emphasize the principle of continuity through time — of 

 the geographical stratification of geology, which is of so great impor- 

 tance in the scientific development of our subject; for ontography, in 

 which persistent physiographic influences make themselves felt through 

 inheritance, is then seen to be only the modern member of a great 

 series with whose earlier members we have long been familiar in 

 paleontology. The recognition of the continuity, the essential 

 unity of these two subjects — one dealing with the living forms of 

 today, the other with the dead forms of the past — dignifies the first 

 and vivifies the second; and adds yet another argument in favor of 

 an objective rather than a subjective classification of the sciences of 

 the earth. The beginning of the cultivation of ontography, already 

 made more or less consciously, strongly suggests a larger development 

 for the future. We are thus assured that as the details of organic 

 responses are worked out and the importance of physiographic 

 details is recognized, the difference between physiography as the 

 study of environment, and geochemistry and geophysics as the 

 study of the earth for itself, will diminish. Today no one can say 

 how far the details of these semi-independent sciences may not be 

 found essential in physiography. 



Let me now amuse you for a moment with a scheme of terminology 

 that might have a little value if some of its terms were not already 

 appropriated in other meanings. The scheme does not represent 

 the historical development of earth science, but sets forth its several 

 parts in the relations that our progress up to date shows them to 

 stand. 



Suppose we should use the ending -ology to denote the conception 

 of sequence in time, and -ography to denote the conception of tempo- 

 rary distribution. We should then have our whole subject, geology, 

 in which time sequence is the dominant idea, made up, like an endless 

 prism of mica, of an indefinite number of momentary sheets of geog- 

 raphy that cleave across the time axis. Biography would then lose its 



