Februakt 9, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



127 



whiciL have builcled the earth and the trains 

 of life which have moved over it from the 

 davs'n of its history. It is most essential 

 that every state should above all things 

 comprehend these facts. 



The current of my thoughts is toward 

 the well-established principles of geology 

 which have constituted the state; not the 

 state as a geographical section of the earth, 

 and not just now those principles which 

 have laid its material foundations, builded 

 its rocks, formed its veins and beds of ore, 

 made its soil, established the sources of 

 wealth as expressed in terms of human 

 market; but unavoidably I turn to those 

 principles which illumine the trail of hu- 

 manity and have given it direction. My 

 time has been long enough to ripen some of 

 the green fruit of experience and enforce 

 some deep-seated lessons. In the light of 

 this experience and these associations there 

 is no escape from the earnest conviction that 

 the things of supremest value to mankind, 

 the refined essences of the earth, lie in its 

 records of the life which has gone before 

 us. As the emergence of what we call the 

 living, quoting Professor Chamberlin, is 

 the transcendent event in the history of 

 the earth, there is certainly no other fact in 

 the presence of humanity so vital as that 

 and the vast procession of the ages with the 

 key it holds to our present state and future 

 hopes. Need I say to this audience what I 

 would wish to say to a wider : We are pass- 

 ing, we have stopped only to see the march 

 of life and play our small part in the tre- 

 mendous and endless pageant, happy in- 

 deed if, endowed with powers of divina- 

 tion, the rays of truth have dawned upon 

 us from out of the past, to light the imagi- 

 nation on toward better things. 



To what extent, then, are we fortified by 

 the evidence of the past career of life in 

 reading its oracle for our present guid- 

 ance? This inquiry sets plainly before us, 



first, the paramount question as to the oft- 

 alleged and too often magnified imperfec- 

 tions of the record of life upon the earth. 



In many, probably in most, expositions 

 of the science of geology and paleontology, 

 prepared for the use of students and gen- 

 eral readers, the so-called imperfections in 

 the record of past life are brought out with 

 a vivid intensity. These expositions are, I 

 think, in large part due to a more or less 

 unconsciously apologetic attitude on the 

 part of the authors, as though they were in 

 some way, being apostles of the science, 

 likely to be held to account for any over- 

 statement of its claims ; and these attorneys 

 in bankruptcy are not inaptly, to my mind, 

 comparable to buyers of ancient but dam- 

 aged rugs, torn, raveled, worn bare of their 

 patterns: ostentatiously declaring their de- 

 fects while overlooking the beauty, the 

 symbolism, the perfection of the design seen 

 clear through all the ravages made by the 

 wear of time. 



I find myself out of sympathy with such 

 deprecating portraitures. Neither my ex- 

 perience nor my philosophy finds support 

 for pessimistic conceptions of the ultimate 

 hope of completing our tapestries from the 

 patterns we know and the threads we are 

 yet to pick up. For a few years, as we 

 reckon human history, we have scratched 

 with our hammers some surface exposures 

 of the tablets of the law in parts of the 

 earth most easily accessible to us, and the 

 occasional explorer into remoter parts has 

 gathered the life records in haphazard way, 

 here a few pounds ' weight, there a few tons'. 

 Not one fiftieth part of the exposed rocks of 

 the earth has yet been closely scrutinized 

 for these life records, and of the unexposed 

 but known strata, practically none at all 

 in the great total. This State of New York 

 covers 47,000 square miles, two thirds of 

 which are underlaid by life records of the 

 earth. This fossiliferous area is one eight- 



