EDITORIAL 71 
universities. If the surveys become narrowly economic and concern 
themselves chiefly with conventional descriptions and mappings, 
interpreted along inherited lines, without the inspiration and regen- 
erative influence of profound investigation, it is not difficult to foresee 
that in a very short period their products would fall so far below 
those of the progressive geologists who are engaged in advancing the 
science that discredit would be brought upon the surveys and their 
overthrow or reorganization invited. The ultimate good standing 
of official work is intimately dependent upon a constant revision of 
basal ideas and a persistent improvement of methods founded upon 
an ever-increasing command of the fundamental principles that 
underlie the science, and stimulated by a perpetual search for more 
complete knowledge. This is as true of the economic phases of the 
science as of any other. Besides this, it is impossible to foresee 
accurately what may and what may not come to have economic value. 
It may be predicted with much confidence that not a few new aspects 
of the science whose economic relations are as yet wholly unrecognized 
will prove to be among the most valuable contributions to the broader 
and deeper economics of the future. 
If the universities were supplied with the requisite means, they 
might be disposed to accept complacently the foreshadowed alter- 
native assigned them. To come into an essential monopoly of the 
immeasurable riches that lie scarcely concealed beneath the surface 
of existing geological science might well be regarded by them, from 
the narrow point of view, as a boon to be welcomed with ardor. 
To be thus -left free to rework the relatively raw results of surveys 
made for immediate industrial ends, and to bring forth from them 
by supplementary inquiry their true scientific riches, might, speaking 
again narrowly, be a source of great seeming advantage to the uni- 
versities. The universities, however, are not now supplied with 
adequate means for cultivating this great field. They are gaining 
these rapidly, and might doubtless attain them at an early day, if 
so inviting a field is to be thus measurably vacated for them. 
But, from the higher point of view, it seems clear that any sharp 
differentiation of the kind foreshadowed, if it were permitted to go 
beyond the most moderate and restrained limits, would be injurious 
to the sum-total of results, and to the larger interests of both univer- 
