THE PROGRESS OF GEOLOGY DURING THE PERIOD 
1891-19151 
Frank Carney 
In every line of science some very important event may have 
culminated on a particular day. On the other hand, a twenty-five 
year interval may pass without recording a contribution of note, 
even though it were always possible to discern the highest merit; 
epoch making discoveries may not be recognized at once. Thus, as 
we members of the Ohio Academy of Science pass the first twenty- 
five year period of our history, and ask what has been accomplished 
in our individual fields of work, the answer may be sedately prosaic. 
Pseudo-geologists. There was a time when one man knew as 
much as any other man about earth science, and home made geology 
was the only kind available. The output of this type of revelation 
has decreased relatively with the increase in the number of trained 
students, or of men with aptness for interpreting what they see. 
Nevertheless the last twenty-five years have recorded some extremely 
interesting specimens of pseudo-geology. The avenues of publica- 
tion, which embrace a whole gamut of documents from the privately 
printed book to the widely read Sunday edition, give publicity to 
matter which finds no place in the documents of learned societies. 
Possibly we will always have the naive expounders of geological 
phenomena, men and women whose names may appear ''often in 
paragraphs, seldom in monographs.'' 
Pioneers in Geology. It has been the privilege of many of us to 
know a very few of these survivors from the early days of American 
geology, the versatile Patriarchs of a frontier stage. This type of 
teacher knew something of all sides of his study: as a chemist, he 
interpreted minerals from that point of view; he was a zoologist to 
the extent of knowing fossil forms as analogies or prototypes of living 
animals; he was a physiographer in recognizing the salient relation- 
ships between rock texture and structure and land forms; he was a 
geomorphologist because expected to account for the grosser anatomy 
1 Reprinted, with slight alterations, from the Proceedings, Ohio Academy of 
Science, vol. VI, part 5, 1916, pp. 299-308, an address read at the Quarter Cen- 
tennial Anniversary of the Academy. 
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