284 Geology in the High School. — Alderson. 
fore, who can bring the prerequisites of endless patience and unflag- 
ging industry, who can bear alike the remorseless discipline of repeat- 
ed failure and the prosperity of partial success, the field is as wide 
and as inviting as it ever was to a Newton or Laplace. 
GEOLOGY IN THE HIGH SCHOOL. 
By Victor Clifton Alderson. 
To arrange the work in a single study in a high school so 
that it shall satisfy the demands of the college professor, who 
looks upon the high school as a fitting school for college, and 
the great mass of the community that thinks the girls must 
be prepared for teaching or clerkships, the boys for business, 
and a small minority for college, is no easy task. The follow- 
ing outline of work, freed from the limits of any single text 
book, and having as its field the subject of geology in its 
broadest sense, will serve to show the attempted solution of 
the problem as it is in operation in the Englewood (Chicago) 
high school, and may serve in some measure as a suggestion 
to other workers in other places. It may also show the spec- 
ialist how the simplest facts, so patent to him, may be adapted 
to the needs of the young. 
The first main object is to understand the home geology in 
whatever form that may be presented. With us, as long as 
the weather remains fine in the fall and after the frost is out of 
the ground in the spring, one or more excursions are made 
each week in the field. The first excursion is generally to the 
shore of lake Michigan. Hitherto the pupils' minds have 
been closed to a full realization of the forces of nature in oper- 
ation. That sand is made by the wearing away of pebbles, 
that pebbles have a life history, that sand dunes are made by 
the sand blown up from the beach, are wonderful revelations 
to them. These facts they can see, realize, and believe, and 
come home thinking that geology is the grandest study they 
ever pursued. Their enthusiasm might seem remarkable but 
the solution is clear. The field of their other studies has been 
the class room ; now they study the world and their class 
room becomes nature itself. On other excursions, they 
observe in the excavations for cellars and at the road cut- 
tings into the surrounding ridges, the stratified sand and 
gravel. These facts lead them to understand the proofs for 
the higher level of lake Michigan in past times. At Stony 
sland, ten miles south of Chicago, they find an anticlinal, 
