ical points of view. In these latter, specific
details in specific lines are important, and may even be essential,
but it is the function of the college teacher of geology _to select_
from the great mass of material of the science such factors as are
basal, vital, and talismanic. He will give these emphasis, while he
neglects the multitude of details that lack significance as working
elements or as landmarks of progress, whatever their value in other
relations. This selection is equally important, whether applied to the
great physical processes that have shaped the earth into its present
configuration, or to the great chemical and mineralogical processes
that have determined its texture and its structure, or to the great
biological and psychological processes that have given trend to the
development of its inhabitants.

Even if the undergraduate course in geology is pursued less for the
purpose of liberal culture than as a means of preparing for a
professional career as an economic geologist, no essential departure
from an effort to master first the basal features and the broader
aspects of the science, especially the dynamic aspects, is to be
advised. The shortest road to _declared success_ in professional and
economic geology lies through the early mastery of its fundamentals.
No doubt immediate and apparent success may often be sooner reached by
a narrower and shallower study of such special phases of the subject
as happen just now to be most obviously related to the existing state
of the industries; but industrial demands are constantly
changing--indeed, at present, rather rapidly--and new aspects follow
one another in close succession. These new aspects almost inevitably
spring from the more basal factors as these rise into function with
the progress of experience or the stress of new demands. Those who
have sought only the immediate and the superficial, at the expense of
the basal, and especially those who have neglected to acquire _the
power and the disposition to search out the fundamentals_, are quite
sure to be left among the unfortunates who trail behind; they are
little likely to be found among those who lead at the times when
leadership counts. In the judgment of those master minds that lead in
affairs and that take large and penetrating views, the lines along
which the most vital contributions to economic interests are being
made connect closely with basal studies of the actuating agencies that
condition