Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/52

42 and pre-geological speculations are taught as geology, as if to mystify the minds of students!

I well remember a young man who went from one of our great universities a few years ago with particular mention upon his diploma that he had attained special excellence in geology; in later years he found himself face to face with some of the greater problems of earth-structure, and slowly it dawned upon him that he had no conception of what the study really was. He knew the names of many fossils and minerals, could enumerate the historical sequence of the geologic time-epochs, but when required to report upon a new and strange region he found himself ignorant of the four necessary geologic rudiments—determination, definition, distribution, and delineation.

There is hardly a college in the land in which the study of the structure of the earth is not made subservient to the study of its history and composition, and in which the student does not learn to consider the extraordinary instead of the ordinary, by being taught to begin away back in Archæan time, and thence to trace the history of life-epochs. But the working geologist regards time-nomenclature as a secondary consideration, and the word Archæan means to him only a common dumping-ground for all older terrenes whose structure has not been differentiated.

Geology is not a science of the past, but a grand study of the present structure of the earth, its contour, composition, and readjustments. Geology has nothing to do with the origin or beginning of the globe—a field of inquiry purely astronomical—but takes the earth where astronomy leaves it, a completed mass of matter, and investigates its changes. Although Hutton a hundred years ago presented this thought in his saying that in the economy of Nature there is no trace of a beginning or evidence of an ending, still much of our geologic instruction is wasted on these subjects.

The cultural aspects of civilization are due to geologic structure, but in how many of our institutions are students taught to appreciate the topography or configuration of the earth's surface and its relation to structure, or to observe with inquiring eye the forms and contours of the landscape? The student usually learns the chemistry of certain nicely arranged hand specimens of hard rocks, and memorizes the names of leading fossils or the crystallography of minerals under the guise of economic geology. As a result, the study is supposed to be merely the study of hard rocks and curious fossils. Although the student knows these by sight, he can not trace a rock-sheet above the ground or below it, or see the great soft terrenes void of fossils and rocks which make up the larger area of our country, and can not appreciate the broader relations of structure to agriculture, hygiene, climate, and