EDITORIAL 
RESOLVED that the Mississippi Valley Association of State Geologists expresses 
its belief in the desirability of a thorough reconsideration of the principles which 
should govern the nomenclature of geology, and its willingness to co-operate in 
any movement for the bettering of present conditions. - 
AND RESOLVED that copies of this resolution be sent to the secretary of the 
Geological Society of America, be presented to the conference of geologists now 
in session in Washington, and to Director Smith of the U. S. Geological Survey. 
This is an action most heartily to be commended. We note with 
peculiar pleasure that the association desires a thorough reconsidera- 
tion of principles, not a mere temporizing agreement for putting into 
more common and oppressive use current methods, some of which 
are good, some indifferent, and some bad. A special nomenclature 
is a grave burden to a science at best, but when it becomes positively 
bad, the affliction is grievous indeed. Geology does not suffer from 
this so much as the biological and mineralogical sciences, but it neces- 
sarily participates in their afflictions and has some special and quite 
unnecessary ones of its own. It is probably safe to say that 
several times as many people as are now interested in our science 
would be among its enthusiastic promoters, if its great truths had 
been habitually clothed in the plainest available terms in the literature 
of the past century. The history of the earth and of its inhabitants, 
the processes of its evolution, and the facts of its structure are inher- 
ently interesting, and if the story were so told that it could be read 
easily and intelligibly, it would give both pleasure and profit; but the 
current of the reader’s enjoyment is so often needlessly checked by 
unintelligible terms, that he soon becomes weary and lays the annoying 
text aside for something less trammeled by pedantic toggery. This 
is not solely a layman’s affliction. Geological readers of no meaa 
literary and scientific attainments are all too frequently caught and 
held by the briars and brambles of our crudely technicalized literature. 
The fundamental sin is the offspring of the vanity of scholasticism. 
Could anything better characterize the typical scholasticus than our 
practice of using “‘syncline” for bent strata that outcrop divergently, 
817 
