352 J. F. KEMP STRUCTURAL AND PETROGRAPHIC GEOLOGY 



tion to him. Nor did the latter concern himself with his new pupil all 

 that day, nor the next, nor for a full week. 



Shaler rose to the occasion, understood the game, and buckled down 

 to know that fish as he had never known anything before. On the sev- 

 enth day the Professor came over and said, "Well?" Whereupon the 

 student unburdened himself for an hour, receiving, however, in reply, the 

 laconic sentence, "That is not right." Thereupon another week, ten 

 hours a day, was spent in the study of the fish, with results which sur- 

 prised even the student and satisfied the master. There came, however, 

 no word of praise or approval, but the fish was replaced with half a peck 

 of disjointed fish bones, which the student discovered because the six 

 pairs of jaws represented a half dozen skeletons. The reassembling of 

 the parts occupied the youthful Shaler for two months, and in the end 

 gave him a sense of mastery and power, with which he passed on to more 

 extended reading and more varied work. 



The method of instruction just outlined is severe and furnishes a 

 novitiate under which Shalers, Hyatts, Putnams, Verrills, and Morses 

 will stand up. It makes a wonderful appeal to initiative and independ- 

 ence, but of course we realize that it would not do for general classes. 

 I was once in a position to observe a professor who was teaching zoj^logy 

 keep a class of college juniors the entire winter term studying drawing, 

 dissecting, and sectioning the common hard clam. The months passed 

 and these future lawyers, teachers, doctors, business men, and clergymen 

 surely knew, with great detail and accuracy, the mantle, the sinus, the 

 big liver, the beaks, the cardinal processes, the hinge-line, etcetera, of 

 Ve7ius mercenaria; but of protozoans, coelenterates, arthropods, reptiles, 

 birds, mammals; of evolution, development, ancestry, and all the great 

 questions regarding life on the earth, they heard nothing. Their horizon 

 was bounded by a quohog, and a rebellious and disgusted group of young 

 people shook the dust of zoology off their feet, never to return to it. 



TEE MODERN METEOD 



We owe our classes a review and general survey of our subject at the 

 outset. A lecture course, rightly given, is a short cut to the experience 

 of generations. Of course, fundamentals must be learned. No one can 

 read who does not know his letters. Technique must be taught and good 

 methods of observing and recording. No young man should start in 

 today's stage of geology as if he were the first geologist who ever worked. 

 In 1884, in trying to study microscopic petrography by myself, I recall 

 spending weeks floundering around with interference figures and tests 

 with the mica plate ; whereas, if I could have appealed to an experienced 



