DUTY OF THE (JEOLOCIST TO THE STATE 237 



A State geologist is the official adviser of his government in this matter 

 of development of potentialities for good in the wealth of the rocks, but 

 every geologist, official or personal, should so far keep the public welfare 

 in his eye as to be ready for initiation and cooperation in a service of st> 

 high a quality. 



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 concep- 

 tion of property apart from the products 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 onr 

 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, 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 geograph- 

 ical section of the earth, and not just now those principles which liave 

 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 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 tran- 

 scendent 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 

 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 divination, the rays of truth have dawned on us from out 

 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 in- 



