Editorial Comment. 309 
EDITORIAL COMMENT. 
CONSOLIDATION OF THE GEOLOGIST WITH ECONOMIC GEOL- 
OGY. 
It is announced among the advertisements of this issue 
of the American Geologist that the Geologist will be con- 
solidated, after January 1, 1906, with the new journal, 
Economic Geology and the facts of interest to subscribers 
are there treated. It remains to make further comment from 
the editor's standpoint. 
When the American Geologist was started( 1888) there 
was no distinctively geological journal in America, and the 
Geological Society of America had not yet been organized. 
The United States Geological Survey was in a transitional 
stage. Geology in America was represented in the Interna- 
tional Congress of Geologists by a number of delegates from 
the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 
If American geology found any means of expressing itself 
its voice was likely to be muffled by passing through non- 
sympathetic agencies. 
These things have changed. The science is not only 
more independent and urgent in the presentation of its in- 
terests, but has come into recognition more and more as an 
(dement in modern civilization which needs to be cared fot, 
as well as a producer and safe-guard of a large share of the 
wealth and comfort of the nation. 
The aspect of American geology, as expressed in the 
purposes' and publications of the various geological surveys, 
has changed within the past 18 years. Time was when the 
director of the United States Geological Survey, in its ex- 
tensi< m 1 iver the older states of the Unit in, defined the sphere 
of that survey to be the study and publication of paleonto- 
logical and structural problems, united with the mapping of 
the nation's domain, leaving for the various state surveys 
the investigation of economic subjects. Within a few years. 
however, the economic features of the United States Survey 
have expanded enormously- The efficienc) of the survey 
and the judiciousness of its expenditures have won from 
Congress larger and larger sum- of money, and have led to 
the extension of it-, activities over wider and wider fields of 
