GEOLOGY IN ECONOMICS AND EDUCATION. 497 



the past history of our planet from the dawn of existence 

 down to the present day, written in characters that every 

 trained geologist can interpret and every conscientious 

 student of nature must accept as true. It has destroyed 

 the old and cramping notions that for man's behoof the 

 earth and its living tenants have been created and that 

 without him it would have neither use nor meaning. It 

 has replaced this vain-glorious conception, by the wider 

 knowledge and more ennobling view of the present day, 

 that this earth of ours reaches back through an immensity 

 of time transcending all human conception and that it 

 has been for an infinitude of generations the home of 

 animated beings all bound together in one great family, 

 one great chain of progress, by a mutual kinship and a 

 common experience of birth, joy and suffering, life and 

 death. 



At the present day no man can be called a well-educated 

 man who does not recognise how much this historical 

 branch of our science has done to increase our knowledge 

 of nature and to broaden the outlook of human philo- 

 sophy. And so vital do I take this knowledge to be to 

 the biologist, the political man, the student of mankind, 

 the teacher, the theologian, the practical man, and even 

 the ordinary man of the world, that I would urge upon 

 each and all of them the necessity of making themselves 

 acquainted with at least the principles, the methods, and 

 the results of geological science. 



The third stage in the development of our science of 

 geology might be described as its geographical stage. 

 The initiation of this stage we owe to the great ITutton 

 and his apologist Playfair, who were the first to discover 

 or to suggest that all the geological phenomena of the 

 great rock formations could be interpreted in the light of 

 the physical geology of the present. But this branch 



