Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/53

Rh. Hence the great unfossiliferous terrenes are unknown; for example, the non-mountainous regions of the West and South, over which in places one may travel from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico without finding a fossil, a crystal, or a building-stone.

There is but one geological laboratory, and that is the great out-of-doors; and no student should learn a fossil or a mineral until he has first studied the landscape and is able to distinguish one stratum with its topographic form from another as strata, and not as fossil beds or chemical compounds. A field-glass and a quiet seat upon a commanding eminence, where the local surroundings can be studied, are worth to the beginner miles of traveling about with hammer and specimen-bag; and a thorough curiosity aroused as to why one hill is flat, another round, or one stream broad and sluggish while another is narrow and rapid, is more valuable than a cabinet of curios. An inquiry as to the origin of sediment in a river, whence it came, and what will become of it, will lead to a grander conception of earth-stripping and formation-making than the memorizing of all the specimens in a laboratory.

It is not my wish to discourage the study of paleontology or petrography, but is it not a serious error to teach these first and geology later? They are to geology as trigonometry is to mathematics, something that follows the fundamental arithmetic and algebra.

Some one has said that geology begins and ends with the rain-drop. If not literally true, the saying is worthy of consideration; and if the teacher begins with it, his students will soon be familiar with the grand facts of the erosion and distribution of earth-matter, and the origin of the rock-sheets that make the whole, and the life-history of our earth's great cycles can be read.

When we lay by our icthyosauriaus and useless crystals for advanced study, and teach the ordinary and not the extraordinary features of the earth, geology will be appreciated, and every farmer, every builder of homes, every drinker of water, will learn that upon a knowledge of its simple laws his success depends.

To the high-school student a knowledge of the structure of the earth is as important as chemistry or foreign languages; but, until some simple text-book is written dealing with the subject on these lines, it is not to be expected that geology will be generally taught.

principal achievement recorded in Dr. Hugo Zoller's recent explorations in New Guinea consists in the ascent of the Finisterre Mountains to a height of 8,700 feet, and the discovery of a still loftier range inland, which appeared to be covered with snow. Comparative vocabularies are given of forty-four languages, most of which were collected by the author himself or under his supervision.