lxXXVi PKOCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May I903, 



applications of Geology from the side of Economics. Yet for all 

 that, every one of us is well aware that Geology is bound up 

 body and soul with the development of the mineral wealth of 

 our land — that mineral wealth by means of which the enter- 

 prise of our people has placed our country at the head of the 

 manufacturing and commercial powers of the world. Our science 

 has not only the charge of the working out of all the detailed 

 phenomena, subterranean and superficial, of the great coalfields 

 and iron-ore fields which lie at the foundation of our commercial 

 supremacy as a nation, but it works out the characters and fixes 

 the places of all the stony materials of which our cities and towns 

 are built, our humblest dwellings are constructed, and all our 

 roads and railways are made. It deals with the sources and the 

 quantities and characters of our water-supplies, whether deep-seated 

 or superficial, the nature and distribution of our soils, and indeed 

 with everything which we derive directly from the ground upon 

 which we tread. Thus a knowledge of the principles and applica- 

 tions of Geology is indispensable to the education of the miner, 

 the mine-owner, the prospector, the land-agent, the landowner, the 

 agriculturalist, the civil engineer, and the military engineer. 



Geology and Man. — It is as true now, as it was in the days when 

 Werner first drew his far-reaching inferences before his charmed 

 listeners, that in the characteristic phenomena and varying distri- 

 bution of the grand mineral masses of the rock-formations, almost 

 all that concerns the relative habitability of a land depends. Where 

 the hard, intractable rock-formations rise boldly out, we have our 

 mountain- regions — our Uplands and Highlands — wild areas of 

 pasture and scanty populations it is true, but the lands of refuge 

 and of freedom in the past, and of health and holiday in the 

 present. Where the soft, easily-weathered rock-formations spread 

 out in gentle slopes or broad undulations, we have the wide plains 

 of our great agricultural districts — the lands it may be of peace 

 and plenty, but where life is so easy-going and so monotonous that 

 there is little incentive or opportunity to vary the established order 

 of things, and the local country-life remains much the same gene- 

 ration after generation. Between these two extremes lie the areas 

 floored by the gently-inclined rocks of our great coalfields, the 

 theatres of an incessant and fierce industrial struggle — a struggle 

 that has its reflection and its effects in the restless energy and the 

 determined advance of their inhabitants. 



