Western Society of Naturalists. 989 
ot the development of science in this region, the easy things have 
in great part been done. The glittering sands have been largely 
passed through the cradle of the pioneer miner; the easily worked 
ores have been more or less thoroughly extracted, and we are fast 
approaching, if we have not already reached, the period when 
accumulated capital, powerful and complicated machinery, and the 
expert skill of the mining. engineer are indispensable to the further 
development of our natural wealth, When a morning walk along 
the banks of the Wabash would give a Say new objects enough to 
keep him happily busy for weeks; when the moderately careful 
search of a single orchard or garden would yield to Fitch or Walsh, 
or the boyish Riley, material enough for an elaborate report; when 
the virgin soil of natural science only needed to be tickled with a 
hoe to laugh with a harvest, the question of methods and apparatus 
was one of quite subordinate importance. Little method and less 
machinery were needed to make a man useful and even eminent. 
And as for the educational problems with which we now have to deal, 
they gave the least imaginable concern, because they were practically 
non-existent. Until the movement for an industrial education based 
on science began, like a great ground swell, to heave the quiet sur- 
face, and until the tidal wave of popular interest and personal 
enthusiasm, set in motion by the elder Agassiz at Cambridge, swept 
across the West, the question of methods of instruction in natural 
history in school or college stood scarcely higher in the general 
estimation than that of the study of the language of the inhabit- 
ants of Mars. No one troubled himself about either. But since 
then, progress has been positive and really rapid, as those can best 
believe who have felt the full lift of the surge—has come with a 
speed accelerated, in fact, by the coincidence of three great move- 
ments, 
First, the onward movement of the natural sciences themselves— 
a growth which is the continual astonishment of every intelligent 
observer, and the despair of all but the ablest and most active 
students, 
Second, the movement of growth and development in this 
nterior region, relatively new, and newest of all in matters of 
Science—this again a movement phenomenal in the history of the 
world. 
