Professor Charles Lapivorth, LL.D., F.li.S. 299 



curve, and the fold-shape is regarded as recognizable in all three 

 dimensions and in all gradations of size. When we hear the 

 applications of this theory employed by Lapworth to account for 

 the land and water hemispheres of the globe, the shapes and trends 

 of all crust movements, and hosts of other geological phenomena, we 

 are fascinated with the manner in which the countless facts fall into 

 apparent order and relationship, and for the time are almost willing 

 to accept his sanguine view that '* this twisted plate unlocks the 

 whole treasure - house of the new geology." But we confess, all 

 the same, to a feeling of profound satisfaction when its employer 

 asserts that it must be regarded in the meantime as a working 

 hypothesis, a symbolical expression of facts, rather as a means of 

 grouping than of explaining phenomena, until such time as its 

 assumptions and illustrations have been more fully identified with 

 the every-day results and conclusions of the physicist. 



How interesting and stimulating is Lapworth's habit of employing 

 some striking theory and stringing upon it crowds of associated 

 facts, those who attended the Shropshire excursion in 1894 will 

 remember, who heard him describe the effects of the rolling in of 

 the Caledonian crust-creep from the north-west upon the Ordovician 

 region, already folded to the north and south, and how the location 

 of the laccolites and other igneous injections in particular parts of 

 the wrinkles was thus determined ; or those who joined the long 

 excursion to Birmingham in 1898, and heard the physiography of 

 the middle valley of the Severn explained as the result of the 

 enforced irruption of the original upper Dee in early Glacial times, 

 or the relations of the Triassic and Palaeozoic rock of the Midlands 

 pictured as those of a rugged mountain region slowly buried under 

 a sea of desert -sand and marl. In the same way his advanced 

 students are led to store up and correlate countless facts in theii' 

 memory by their natural harmony with some all-embracing theory, 

 such, for example, as the explanation of the tectonics, lithology, and 

 paleeontology of the Palaeozoic rocks on the theory of the develop- 

 mental history of an ancient festoon island region like that of 

 Eastern Asia, or the explanation of the phenomena of the 

 Carboniferous rocks by the struggle for supremacy between the 

 Caledonian and the Armorican crust-creeps. But these theories 

 are always regarded as servants and not masters, merely provisional 

 approximations to the truth. 



3. Teaching WorJc. 



For twenty years Lapworth has been sending into the world 

 a stream of geologists, many of them equipped, not only with know- 

 ledge of their subject, but with enthusiasm and capacity for original 

 work in it. He has watched the Mason Science College grow into 

 the Mason University College, and that again into the University of 

 Birmingham, and has taken an active part in each step of the 

 advance. While he does not disdain to drill his students and drum 

 into them by question and answer the points he wishes them to get 

 hold of, he is rarely content in his lectures with the mere imparting 



