ses, 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.

=Disciplinary worth of study of geology=

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.

=This study concerned primarily with the typical college course, not
with vocational courses=

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.

=Knowledge of geology contributes to a truly liberal education=

To subserve these broader purpo