3 Introductory. 
geology, and of the utility of a knowledge of its methods and 
results. In all the colleges of the country, which deserve the 
name, nay, in many of the high-schools and academies as well 
as in schools of lower grade, will now be found frequently a 
curriculum of study which specially provides for the teaching 
of geology in some form or another. Even in the primary 
schools, the pupil is told to bring pebbles from the roadside to 
the school-room to serve as texts for object lessons by the 
teacher. At the same time there is a demand for a knoAvledge 
of the ways and means of geological information. Qualified 
teachers and enthusiastic professors of natural science are not 
the only necessity. There should be a reservoir of observations 
and of information contributed by the expert workers of the 
world from which teachers may draw new facts and new ways 
of combining them. The ways and means of scientific instruc- 
tion need to be made known to ten-thousand earnest teachers 
who have only the recollection of their own college training to 
guide them, if indeed they have had any training at all, and 
who are shut off from access to the technical publications of the 
specialist. 
More than all a thoroughly non-partisan publication is needed 
which shall be open to the properly worded opinions of all from 
the most powerf id to the most obscure, and w^hich is distinc- 
tively committed to no theory whether of construction or of ob- 
struction. It will be the aim of this journal to reflect the faint- 
est whispers as well as the loudest thunder of American geolo- 
gical thought. 
The promoters of The American Geologist have been 
satisfied for several years past that the interests of the science of 
geology in America have been jeopardized, and sometimes have 
suffered, because of the lack of cooperation among American 
geologists, and of a ready means of expression through a sym- 
pathetic medium of communication. 
Many of them have had serious misgivings as to the result of the 
influence of the national geological survey in extending its opera- 
tions into the settled states of the Union, and especially into states 
in which official geological surveys are in progress, fearing that 
by the concentration of all authority and control at the national 
capital, and by the extensive accumulation at one centre of all 
