REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I916 95 



I would not seem to profane my high office by stating in this 

 presence the elemental conceptions of the science, but it is most 

 imperative that I here, and you elsewhere, shall be lucid, exact and 

 comprehensive in setting forth its claims, namely and briefly: that 

 there is no substantial conception of property apart from the prod- 

 ucts of the rocks, the soils, the mines, the water, the air — and 

 these in all their functions are geological factors ; that there is no 

 correct understanding of the meaning of human life, individually 

 or in its complex community relations, if we stand with our backs to 

 the great panorama of events which have builded the earth and the 

 trains of life which have moved over it from the dawn of its history. 

 It is most essential that every state should above all things com- 

 prehend these facts. 



The current of my thoughts is toward the well-established prin- 

 ciples of geology which have constituted the state; not the state as 

 a geographical section of the earth, and not just now those prin- 

 ciples 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 un- 

 avoidably I turn to those principles which illumine the trail of 

 humanity 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 cer- 

 tainly 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 passing, we have stopped only to 

 see the march of life and play our small part in the tremendous and 

 endless pageant, happy indeed if, endowed with powers of divina- 

 tion, the rays of truth have dawned upon us from out of the past, to 

 light the imagination 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 guidance? This 

 inquiry sets plainly before us, first, the paramount question as to 

 the oft-alleged and too often magnified imperfections of the record 

 of life upon the earth. 



