GEOLOGY IN ECONOMICS AND EDUCATION. 491 



ancient ore miners and ore mining schools of Germany 

 and Britain which originally laid the foundations of 

 practical geology itself. But the advance of geological 

 science and mining engineering during the last fifty years 

 has opened out an enormous series of ore-hearing deposits, 

 unknown and unthought of by the ore miners of a century 

 ago. Such, for example, are all the bedded iron ores of 

 our English secondary deposits — those of the Lias and the 

 Oolite — which indeed at the present day afford two-thirds 

 of our total iron supply. Whole districts like those of 

 Cleveland, in Yorkshire, and Central Northamptonshire, 

 and towns like Middlesbrough, Wellingborough, and 

 Kettering, have rapidly sprung into great wealth and 

 importance in consequence. It was the stratigraphical 

 geologist who first made known the exact places of these 

 rich deposits in the stratified rocks, following them from 

 point to point, and putting them down on his maps, so 

 that the miner and the mine-owner might know where to 

 seek them, and how to work them to the best advantage 

 and the greatest profit. 



But the utility of a knowledge of geology is almost, as 

 great to the architect and engineer as it is to the mining 

 man. The discoveries of British geologists have placed it 

 beyond question that almost; every kind of stone used in 

 building construction has its own place in the scale of 

 British formations, and its fixed range across country can 

 be determined by the working geologist. The freestones 

 of Portland, Bath, the famous building stone of Barnack, 

 York, Nottingham, the millstone grits, the carboniferous 

 limestone 'beds so largely employed in the North of 

 England, have had their geological places determined years 

 ago, and it is part of the training of a geological student 

 and a practical geologist to know where they are and how to 

 seek for them whenever he is consulted upon the subject. 



