V DIELGORAE 
The opinion is gaining some currency in geological circles that 
the official geological surveys, national and state, are likely to become, 
at no distant day, little more than economic bureaus administered 
for their immediate serviceability to industrial enterprises. It is 
even apprehended that they may drift so far in this direction that 
they will fall short of being, in the highest, broadest, and truest 
sense, economic, since this involves the development of the deeper 
scientific values which are the foundation of the sounder economics. 
Running as the mate to this forecast is the complementary proph- 
ecy that the evolution of geological science and of its educational 
economics will be relegated essentially to the universities. 
It must be acknowledged that there is some ground in current 
drift for these twin forecasts. If it were possible to find an abso- 
lutely impartial and thoroughly competent jury to pass upon the 
work of the past decade, its verdict would possibly be that the 
larger and more far-reaching contributions to the science of geology 
have come from the universities, and that their relative productive- 
ness in this field has been markedly increasing. It might even be 
decided that the most valuable contributions to the working methods 
of the science, especially those of the more searching and refined 
class, have also come from the universities. At the same time it 
would doubtless be decided that the economic efficiency of the gov- 
ernmental surveys has been notably increased and the adaptability 
of their results to immediate commercial demands has been markedly 
enhanced. Very likely a perfectly impartial judge, surveying criti- 
cally the appropriate function of the official surveys, on the one hand, 
and of the universities, on the other, would give his approval to some 
notable divergence of effort along the lines that have thus been 
realized in recent practice, if it were controlled by appropriate limita- 
tions. At the same time he would doubtless recognize that no 
small restraint upon excessive tendencies in either direction is quite 
essential to the permanent success of the surveys, if not also of the 
70 
