GOLDEN AGE IN GEOLOGY 
83 
our age golden if they but stood for verity and intellectual pro¬ 
gress. 
Long before their authors realize that they are actual fancy and 
long before they reach crucial test these figments of the imagina¬ 
tion, most brilliant thoughts of a century’s travail perhaps, array 
themselves with Goethe’s poetic conceit of coalescing and distort¬ 
ing vertebrae merging themselves into sheep skull. Golden con¬ 
cepts of the ages though they be they pass as irridescent soap-bub¬ 
bles into nothingness when brought out under sky and are subjected 
to quantitative analysis and specific evaluation. From such mate¬ 
rials are dreams made. A Golden Age of Science should be 
composed of sterner stuff. The Golden Age of Poesy may be the 
Augustan Time which immediately precedes the relapse of a na¬ 
tion into barbarism; but in Science it should not prestige its fall. 
The Golden Age acclaimed for Geology is a curious and unique 
conceit. It could only emanate from the thick atmosphere of some 
political capital where only the applaudits of the unthinking mul¬ 
titudes seem worth while. None other than some ardent devotee 
of Federal bureau of that now distant day, who, taking the nar¬ 
row life about him all too seriously, followed too closely the rather 
unscientific Powellian policy of geological saisissement and passed 
on too joyously a soldier’s proneness for dramatic effect into 
scientific realms where it has no place, could miss the inherent 
weakness of such sensationalism. 
One naturally expects the Golden Age of a science to be the 
flowering time, a season when great truths finding flight sing new 
advances in knowledge, and a period when are laid the solid 
foundations for a structure which shall endure forever more. 
But the edifice which is claimed to mark a golden age for our 
science is already badly shattered. It begins to totter even before 
the workers can remove their tools. A Golden Age, like the dou¬ 
ble florescence among plants may be a decadent phenomenon, but 
in the epoch to which reference is here made its chosen actors 
are not ending their family lineage in a blaze of glory. 
Geology’s Golden Age is not exclusively American. It is not 
the sole creation of any dingy Governmental bureau. No irre¬ 
sponsible coterie delimits its place in time, or space, or its com¬ 
position. Nay, the Golden Age of Geology is not passed. It still 
lies before us. 
