be
considered that, as we see things, it is precisely those views that
take hold of the issues upon which our very being and all its
activities depend, that serve best to train youth to broad views and
penetrating thought. Such thinking seems to me to form the very
essence of a really liberal education.

Not only is this definition of the sphere of geology comprehensive,
but it has the special merit of being _dynamic_, rather than material.
Such a dynamic definition comports with the view that earth-study
should center on the forces and energies that actuated its evolution,
since these are the most vital feature of the evolution itself. It is
important to form adequate concepts of the energies that have
maintained the past ongoings of the earth not only, but that still
maintain its present activities and predetermine its future. It is the
study of the forces and the processes of past and of present
evolutions that constitute the soul of the science, rather than the
apparently fixed and passive aspects of the earth's formations and
configurations which are but the products of the processes that have
gone before. Even the apparent passiveness of the geologic products is
illusive, for they are in reality expressions of continued internal
activities of an intense, though occult, order. These escape notice
largely because they are balanced against one another in a system of
equilibrium which pervades them and gives them the appearance of
fixity. To serve their proper functions as sources of higher
education, the concepts of the constitution of the earth should
penetrate even to these refined aspects of physical organization and
should bring the whole into harmony with the most advanced views of
the real nature of physical organisms. This removes from the whole
terrestrial organism every similitude of inertness and gives it a
fundamental refinement, activity, and potency of the highest order. To
form a true and consistent concept, the enveloping earth-science must
be assumed to embrace, potentially at least, the essentials of all
that was evolved within it and from it, with, of course, due
recognition of what was added from without.

_The history of the earth should therefore be taught in college
courses as a succession of complex dynamic events, great in the past
and great in future potentialities._

The formations and configurations left by the successive phases of
action are to be studied primarily as the vestiges of t