The Training of a Geologist. — Branner. 153 
from his facts, while his knowledge of affairs will render his 
judgment upon economic questions of the greatest value. 
But it is not my purpose to confine my remarks to the 
technical training of the geologist, but to refer also to certain 
general and ethical features of his work which call for a train- 
ing or fitness to which educators give too little attention. I 
hardly know whether any instructor ever troubles himself to 
impress his students with the ordinary requirements of pro- 
fessional etiquette; I don't remember ever having heard the 
subject mentioned in a class-room. We seem to have 
depended upon men's instincts as gentlemen for shaping their 
professional conduct. 
To be a successful geologist one must be a geologist very 
largely because he can't help it — because he can't keep out of 
it. I mean, of course, that the science must so fill the 
demands of his mind, his temperament, and his health, that 
in any other occupation he feels that he is not where he can 
make the most of hiniself and of his energies. Such men will 
have that professional pride without which everyone is doomed 
to a fatal mediocrity. The man who goes into geology because 
there is money in it, will, in nine cases out often, make a total 
failure of it. To be sure a living must be had, but he who has 
the right training, and the right interest in his work, will 
never lack for lucrative employment for any considerable 
length of time. It may sometimes happen, however, that a 
geologist is without such employment for a while, but it 
should be distinctly understood that such times are not to be 
given over to demoralizing idleness. The world is too full of 
problems of scientific interest for any man having a scientific 
spirit to stand idle for a single day or a single hour, and no 
one having such a spirit will stand idle. 
In the balancing of the essentials and the non-essentials in 
the training of a geologist certain economic considerations 
have, almost without exception, to be faced. Those of us 
who devote ourselves to pure science are constantly being 
wearied with that most tiresome of all questions about the 
practical value of what a man reads about, thinks about, or 
does. So long as the young see around them examples of 
men Avho have become wealthy by the successful application 
of some law in science, by the invention or discovery of some- 
thing that people are willing to pay handsomely for, just so 
