8 
Records of Ihe Geological Survey of India. 
[VOL. vtii. 
During tire past year there have been four apprentices attached to the Geological Survey 
and paid out of the funds granted for that survey. Of these four, one has now been attached 
to the survey for nearly two years. During the present season he has been sent to the field 
with one of the assistants (Mr. Ball), who reports that up to date he has been attentive and 
willing to learn, but that his progress is very small and very unpromising. Further 
experience will be necessary before anything definite can he said as to the future prospect of 
this student. The other three, although nominated at the beginning of the year and receiving 
pay as apprentices, have been doing nothing in connection with the Geological Museum or 
Survey, having been, under the sanction of Government, attending courses of lectures and 
instructions at the Presidency College. Undoubtedly these lessons will enable them to 
appreciate better than they could otherwise have done the more technical knowledge which 
they are expected to acquire here. But the necessity for their devoting considerable time to 
this acquisition of what must he considered purely preliminary and collateral knowledge pre¬ 
paratory to any study of geology or its hearings, will also undoubtedly prolong the time 
during which they must be merely learning. It may, I think, well he doubted how far the 
system of paying young men for learning what they ought to be able to prove their acquaint¬ 
ance with, before their appointment, can be very successful. Certainly the system of giving 
appointments in order to induce the holders of those appointments to make themselves ac¬ 
quainted with their duties has, in every other scientific pursuit, proved a failure. These student 
apprentices will be subjected to examination at the end of the season, when their general 
progress can be tested. 
As customary, a small map of India is annexed, showing the present rate and general 
progress of the survey. 
Since the commencement of this survey it has ever been my anxious desire and aim to 
complete a general sketch map of the Geology of India. The conviction has grown stronger 
each successive year, that until this can be done, nothing really useful can be attempted in 
the direction of very detailed geology, and that our progress must, necessarily be slow and 
irregular, until we shall have been able to fix even roughly the boundaries between the known 
and the unknown. I still hope that I shall be able to complete such a map. But I deeply 
regret to say that during the last few years, very little advance has been made towards the 
accomplishment of this end. There have been for some years so many and such urgent 
claims on the time of the officers of the survey for work of various kinds, often not 
geological, and the staff of the survey has been so reduced by illness and absence, as well as 
by actual diminution of numbers, that very little progress has been possible in that which 
has always been recommended to be, and which has indeed been more than once ordered to 
be considered the first and main object of the survey, namely, the systematic and continuous 
survey of the count , /. I am fully aware of the value of the results often obtained from 
enquiries in isolated areas, and at detached and separate points. Striking instances of this 
might be given from last year’s work. Yet I am also compelled to think that these isolated 
enquiries are rarely of such immediate and urgent importance as to counterbalance the great 
and heavy disadvantage resulting from this very fact of their isolation. Each becomes a 
separate individual case, which it is impossible to colligate into a whole simply because we 
have no knowledge of the connecting links in the chain. Indeed many cases might be 
given where it seems more than doubtful whether anything is really gained even in time 
from such necessarily imperfect and unfinished results. A lew years of devotion of the 
greater portion of the staff of the survey to this one object would enable such a general 
preliminary map to be published, subject of course to additions or corrections as the more 
detailed work progressed in future years. 
A glance at the little map which accompanies this report will at once show what large 
areas there are regarding which the Geological Survey of India as yet knows nothing of 
