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Dangers of formalizing methods of instruction

geometrical optics, spectroscopy, photography, X-ray crys-
tallography, etc. The advanced student in these fields finds
more elasticity and opportunity for cultivating a special in-
terest in having a large number of limited interest courses
from which to choose than in having such material presented
in a completely organized course covering one or two years
of complete work. Instructors who are specialists have op-
portunity of working up courses in their own fields which
they do more efficiently under this plan. Research begins at
innumerable places along the way, and the senior college
courses so organized are the feeders of all graduate work.
In all of the above discussion it should be clearly re-
membered that no single plan or no one particular method
has the final word or ever will have. As long as a science
is growing and unfinished, points of view will continually
be shifting. We are largely orthodox in our teaching. If
brought up on the laboratory method of instruction it may
seem the best one for us, but others may prefer another way
which they have inherited. Let us appeal, then, for a con-
structive orthodoxy. Let us be as teachers of a subject to
which we are devoted, truly and sincerely open-minded,
quick to recognize and sincere in our efforts to adopt what
is better wherever we meet it: waiting not to meet it,
either, but going out to seek it. From the humblest college
to the greatest university we shall find it here and there.
Not alone in schools but in the legion of human activities
about us on every hand are people who are doing things
more efficiently, more thoroughly, and more skillfully than
we do things. If we would be of the number that lead, we
must be among the first to recognize these facts and profit
by them.

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First, let our work be organized with respect to that of others the high schools; not discounting their labor but having them truly build for us.

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Second, let us be open-minded enough to see that all methods of instruction have their advantages and make such combinations of the best elements in each as best suit our purpose.

Above all things, let us know our subject. Here is a task before which we quail in this generation of vast vistas. But there is no alternative for us. No amount of method will remove the curse of the superficially informed. Let us devote ourselves to smaller fields if we must, but let us not tolerate ignorance among those who bear the burden of passing on, with its flame ever more consuming, the torch of knowledge. HARVEY B. LEMON

University of Chicago

Values of the study of geology diverse

Geology a

study of the process of evolution

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VII

THE TEACHING OF GEOLOGY

O wide is the scope of the science of the earth, so varied is its subject matter, and so diverse are the mental activities called forth in its pursuit, that its function in collegiate training cannot be summed up in an introductory phrase or two. Geology is so composite that it is better fitted to serve a related group of educational purposes than a single one alone. Besides this, these possible services have not yet become so familiar that they can be brought vividly to mind by an apt word or phrase; they need elaboration and exposition to be valued at what they are really worth. Geology is yet a young science and still growing, and as in the case of a growing boy, to know what it was a few years ago is not to know what it is today. Its disciplines take on a realistic phase in the main, but yet in some aspects appeal powerfully to the imagination. Its subject matter forms a constitutional history of our planet and its inhabitants, but yet largely wears a descriptive or a dynamic garb.

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Though basally historical, a large part of the literature of geology is concerned with the description of rocks, structural features, geologic terrains, surface configurations and their modes of formation and means of identification. notable part of the text prepared for college students relates primarily to phenomena and processes, leaving the history of the earth to follow later in a seemingly secondary way. This has its defense in a desire first to make clear the modes of the geologic processes, to the end that the parts played by these processes in the complexities of actions that make up the historical stages may be better realized. This has the effect, however, of giving the impression that geology is primarily a study of rocks and rockforming processes, and this impression is confirmed by the great mass of descriptive literature that has sprung almost

necessarily from the task of delineating such a multitude of formations before trying to interpret their modes of origin or to assign them their places in the history of the earth. The descriptive details are the indispensable data of a sound history, and they have in addition specific values independent of their service as historical data. But into the multiplicity and complexity of the details of structure and of process, the average college student can wisely enter to a limited extent only, except as they form types, or appear in the local fields which he studies, where they serve as concrete examples of world-forming processes.

The study of these structures, formations, configurations, and processes yields each its own special phase of discipline and its own measure of information. The work takes on various chemical, mechanical, and biological aspects. As a means of discipline it calls for keenness and diligence in observation, circumspection in inference, a judicial balancing of factors in interpretation. An active use of the scientific imagination is called forth in following formations to inaccessible depths or beneath areas where they are concealed from view.

While thus the study of structures, formations and configurations constitutes the most obtrusive phase of geologic study and has given trend to pedagogical opinion respecting its place in a college course, such study is not, in the opinion of the writer, the foremost function of the subject in a college curriculum that is designed to be really broad, basal, and free, in contradistinction to one that is tied to a specific vocational purpose.

While we recognize, with full sympathy, that the subject matter of geology enters vitally into certain vocational and prevocational courses, and, in such relations, calls for special selections of material and an appropriate handling, if it is to fulfill these purposes effectively, this seems to us aside from the purpose of this discussion, which centers on typical college training-training which is liberal in the cosmic sense, not merely from the homocentric point of view.

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Knowledge

of geology contributes to a truly

liberal education

Geology embraces all the

great evolutions

To subserve these broader purposes, geology is to be studied comprehensively as the evolution of the earth and its inhabitants. The earth in itself is to be regarded as an organism and as the foster-parent of a great series of organisms that sprang into being and pursued their careers in the contact zones between its rigid body and its fluidal envelopes. These contact zones are, in a special sense, the province of geography in both its physical and its biotic aspects. The evolution of the biotic and the psychic worlds in these horizons is an essential part of the history of the whole, for each factor has reacted powerfully on the others. An appreciative grasp of these great evolutions, and of their relations to one another, is essential to a really broad view of the world of which we are a part; it is scarcely less than an essential factor in a modern liberal education.

Let us agree, then, at the outset, that a true study of the career of the earth is not adequately compassed by a mere tracing of its inorganic history or an elucidation of its physical structure and mineral content, but that it embraces as well all the great evolutions fostered within the earth's mantles in the course of its career.

Greatest among these fostered evolutions, from the homocentric point of view, are the living, the sentient, and the thinking kingdoms that have grown up with the later phases of the physical evolution. It does not militate against this view that each of these kingdoms is, in itself, the subject of special sciences, and that these, in turn, envelop a multitude of sub-sciences, for that is true of every comprehensive unit. Nor is it inconsistent with this larger view of the scope of geology that it is, itself, often given a much narrower definition, as already implied. In its broader sense, geology is an enveloping science, surveying, in a broad historical way, many subjects that call for intensive study under more special sciences, just as human history sweeps comprehensively over a broad field cultivated more intensively by special humanistic sciences. In a comprehensive study of the earth as an organism, it is essential that there be embraced a sufficient consideration

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