XC PEOCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May I903, 



phenomena as can be brought before the notice of the youthful 

 pupil so as to direct his attention to external nature in general. 

 At the other extreme are those to whom this dwelling upon facts 

 and phenomena appears to be repugnant, if we may judge from 

 the following extract which I take from a recently-published book- 

 catalogue : — ' To those who are striving to make Nature Study more 

 vital and attractive by revealing a vast realm of Nature outside the 

 realm of science, and a world of ideas above and beyond the world 

 of facts, the pages following, giving the titles of books dealing with 

 Nature and Nature-Studies, are dedicated.' As geologists, however, 

 we should presume, I take it, that education in Nature-Study is, in 

 the words of Huxley, ' education in that diligent, patient, loving 

 study of all the aspects of Nature, the results of which constitute 

 exact knowledge, or Science.' 



Education in Earth-Knowledge. — However that may be, this 

 at all events is clear : the branch of Nature-Knowledge with which 

 Geology and geologists have to do is that which Huxley terms 

 * Erdkunde, or Earth-Knowledge, or Geology in its etymological 

 sense.' So impressed was Huxley with the general need for in- 

 struction in this kind of Earth-Knowledge, that he practically 

 founded for its study the educational subject which he named 

 Physiography. Yet Physiography has come to embrace much that 

 truly belongs to Astronomy ; and, indeed, a very large proportion 

 of the subject of Physiography, as taught in many schools and 

 colleges in Britain at the present day, is essentially astronomical. 

 But here we have to bear in mind that of the two great divisions of 

 Nature, that of the outside universe which is proper to Astronomy 

 concerns individual men but indirectly. The other half of Nature, 

 if we may call it so — the world upon which we live and amidst 

 whose phenomena we move and have our being, — is always with us 

 and around us ; and its conscious systematic study, which we call 

 1 earth-knowledge,' is in truth only a methodizing and an extension 

 of the unconscious and unsystematic study that we call ' experience,' 

 which we are always making from the earliest dawn of our con- 

 sciousness to the final darkness of old age. This is the kind of 

 Nature-Knowledge — namely, Earth-Knowledge proper, or in other 

 words ' Geonomy ' as contrasted with ' Astronomy ' — of which our 

 youth has the greatest need ; and it is instruction in this which it 

 is one of the missions of Geology to claim for the rising generation. 



The day has not yet arrived when it will be possible to define 



