GOLDEN AGE IN GEOLOGY 
81 
EDITORIAL 
Golden Age in Geology 
At the very moment when that prince of Latin poets, Publius 
Virgilius, was putting the finishing touches upon his great and 
melodious Fourth Eclogue, in which he had extolled the Golden 
Age of Rome and had recorded lavish prophesy of everlasting 
peace, order and justice within the commonwealth, there took 
place not far away those terrible Perugian massacres whereby a 
ruling and intellectual aristocracy first foresaw its extinguish¬ 
ment and a venerable State began to shatter to its nethermost 
foundations. 
In somewhat lesser degree to be sure, but by similar irony of 
Fate, a prince of earth students, one of our Government experts, 
in a moment of poetic ecstacy, also announces a Golden Age for 
his science, a brief period which covered a time when he saw all 
and a part of which he was, at the very time when the cherished 
and brilliant structures to which he so religiously alludes as es¬ 
pecially characterizing a glorious epoch crumbles to pieces at his 
feet. 
His complacent pride is that galaxy of large, albeit fantastic, 
generalizations which glow over western deserts. No prospect 
in all the world or in all history since Geology became a science, 
so fires the imagination of man as the environs of the Great Basin 
of Occident America. But the picturesque fancies concerning its 
facial expression prove to be forced translations of concepts estab¬ 
lished under exotic environment, and sad misinterpretations of re¬ 
corded observation. Were they but real entities the span of their 
youth might be conceitedly set apart as a distinctive epoch of a 
science. Under such realization it is perhaps pardonable when 
one becomes so rapturous over the inviting retrospect as does soul 
of eccentric scientist as its bursts forth seriously proclaiming for 
