special knowledge as the water engineer, but will naturally be more interested in getting rid of surface water without contaminating it more than he can help than in obtaining it; he will also need a more detailed acquaintance with superficial deposits than any other class of professional men.

The quarryman and architect ought to know the rocks both macroscopically and microscopically, in their chemical and mineralogical character, their grains and their cements. But he ought to be well acquainted with the laws of bedding, jointing, and cleavage, with questions of outcrop and underground extent, and all those other characters which make the difference between good and bad stone, or between one desirable and undesirable in the particular circumstances in which a building is to be erected. Further, he should make a particular study of the action of weight and weather on the rocks which he employs.

The road engineer and surveyor, now that it has been discovered that it is cheaper and better to use the best and most lasting road-metal instead of any that happens to be at hand, requires to have an extensive acquaintance with our igneous and other durable rocks. He needs, however, not only petrographic and chemical knowledge, but also a type of information not at present accessible in England, the relative value of these rocks in resisting the wear and tear of traffic, the cementing power of the worn material, and the surface characters of roads made from them, in order that he may in each case select the stone which in his particular circumstances gives the best value for money. It would surely pay the county councils to follow, with modifications, the example of the French and Americans, and carry out a deliberate and well-planned series of experiments on all the material accessible to them in their respective districts.

The teaching of the application of Geology should therefore take some such form as the following:-First, the principles should be thoroughly taught with the use for the most part of examples drawn from the economic side; thus cementing might be illustrated on the side of water percolation, jointing from the making of mine roads and from quarry sites, faulting from effects on coal outcrops and veins, unconformity from its significance to the coal-miner; while in teaching the sequence of stratified rocks the systems and stages could be mainly individualised by their economic characters. When this has been done the class must be divided into groups, each paying special attention to the points which are of essential importance to it.

The teaching at all stages should be practical and, so far as can be, experimental, and in all cases where possible a certain amount of field work should be attempted. For the field after all is the laboratory of the geologist, where he can observe experiments being made on a gigantic scale under his eyes.

The aim of the teaching should be to give to students the equipment necessary to deal with the chief geological problems that they will meet with in their varied professions; it should show them where to go for maps, memoirs, or descriptions of the areas with which they are dealing; and in cases of great difficulty should enable them to see where further geological assistance is required, and to weigh and balance the expert evidence given them against the economic and other factors of the problem before them.

From men educated thus Geology has the right to expect a valuable return. There is a vast amount of knowledge on economic subjects in existence but not readily accessible. It has been obtained by experts, and after being used is locked up or lost. And yet it is the very kind of knowledge which is wanted to extend our principles further into the economic side of the subject. So well is this recognised that many geologists are attracted to economic work mainly because of the wide range of new facts that they can only thus become acquainted with. It is possible to make use of many of these facts for scientific induction without in any way betraying confidence or revealing the source from which they are obtained; and even if they cannot be used directly they are often of great service in giving moral support, or the contrary, to working hypotheses founded on other evidence.

Resources.

The knowledge of our mineral resources is of such vital consequence to ourselves and to our present and future welfare as a nation, and yet it is a matter of so much popular misconception, that I feel bound to dwell on this subject a little longer. To anyone who studies the growth and distribution of population in any important modern State the facts and reasons become as clear as day.

It is easy to construct maps showing at a glance the density of population in any country. Perhaps the most effective way to do so is to draw a series of isodemic lines and to gradually increase the depth of tint within them as the number of people per square mile increases until absolute blackness represents, say, over 2,000 people per square mile. Such maps are the best means of displaying the geography of the available sources of energy in a country at any particular period. Population maps of England and Wales in the early part of the eighteenth century would be pale in tint with a few rather darker patches, and would show a distribution dependent solely upon food as a source of energy working through the medium of mankind and animals. Such maps would be purely agricultural and maricultural, dependent upon the harvests of the land and sea. Maps made at a later period would show a new concentration round other sources of energy, particularly wind and water, but would not be perceptibly darker in tint as a whole; for although we are apt to think that we have in this country too much wind and water, they are not in such a form that we can extract any appreciable supply of energy directly from them.

But maps representing the present population, while still mainly energy maps, at once bring out the fact that our leading source of energy is now coal and no longer food, wind, or water. The new concentrations, marked now by patches and bands of deepest black, have shifted away from the agricultural regions and settled upon and around the coalfields. The map has now become geological.

The difference between the old and the new map is, however, not only in kind; it is even more remarkable in degree. The population is everywhere much denser. Not only are the mining and manufacturing areas on the new map more than eight times as densely populated as any areas on the older map, not only is the average population five times greater throughout the country, but the lightest spot on the new map is nearly as dark as the darkest spot on the old one. sparsest population at the present day is as thick on the ground as it was in the densest spots indicated on the older map, while at the same time the standards of wages, living, and comfort, instead of falling, have risen.

The

The discovery of this new source of energy, coal, immediately gave employment to a much larger number of people; it paid for their food and provided the means of transporting it from the uttermost parts of the earth. Under agricultural conditions the map shows that the population attained a given maximum density, and no further increase was possible, the density being regulated by the food supply raised on the surface of the land. Our dwelling-house was but one story high. Under industrial conditions our mineral resources can support five times the number. Our dwelling-house is of five stories-one above ground and four below it. At the same time the type of distribution is altered. The agricultural areas are now covered by a relatively scanty population, and the dense areas are situated on or near to the coal and iron fields, the regions yielding other metals, those suitable for industries which consume large supplies of fuel, and a host of new distributing centres, nodal points on the new lines of traffic, either inside the country or on its margins where the great routes of ocean transport converge, or where the sea penetrates far in towards the industrial regions.

It has been the good fortune of this country to be the first to realise, and with characteristic energy to take advantage of, the new possibilities for development opened up by the discovery and utilisation of its mineral wealth. We were exceedingly fortunate in having so much of this wealth at hand, easy to get and work from geological considerations, cheap to transport and export from geogra phical considerations. So we were able to pay cash for the products of the whole

world, to handle, manufacture, and transport them, and thus to become the traders and carriers of the world.

But other nations are waking up. We have no monopoly of underground wealth, and day by day we are feeling the competition of their awakening strength. Can we carry on the struggle and maintain the lead we have gained?

In answering this question there are three great considerations to keep in mind. First, our own mineral wealth is not exhausted; secondly, that of our colonies is as yet almost untouched; and thirdly, there are still many uncolonised areas left in the world.

The very plenty of our coal and iron, and the ease of extracting it, has been an economic danger. There has been waste in exploration because of ignorance of the structure and position of the coal-yielding rocks; waste in extraction because of defective appliances, of the working only of the best-paying seams and areas, of the water difficulty, and the want of well-kept plans and records of areas worked and unworked; waste in employment because of the low efficiency of the machinery which turns this energy into work. With all this waste our coalfields have hardly yielded a miserable one per cent. of the energy which the coal actually possesses when in situ.

Engineers and miners are trying to diminish two of these sources of waste, and Geology has done something to reduce that of exploration. This has been done by detailed mapping and study, so that we now know the areas covered by the coal-seams, their varying thickness, the wants,' folds, and faults by which they are traversed, and all that great group of characters designated as the geological structure of the coalfields. It could not have been accomplished unless unproductive as well as productive areas had been studied, the margins of the fields mapped as well as their interiors, and unless the geological principles wrested from all sorts of rocks and regions had been available for application to the coal districts in question. We no longer imagine every grey shale to be an index of coal; we are not frightened by every roll or fault we meet with underground; nor do we, as in the past, throw away vast sums of money in sinking for coal in Cambrian or Silurian rocks.

We cannot afford, hard bitten as we are in the rough school of experience and with our increased knowledge, to make all the old mistakes over again, and yet we are on the very eve of doing it. Up to the present it is our visible coalfields that we have been working, and we have got to know their extent and character fairly well. But so much coal has now been raised, so much wasted in extraction, and so many areas rendered dangerous or impossible to work, that we cannot shut our eyes to the grave fact that these visible fields are rapidly approaching exhaustion. The Government have done well to take stock again of our coal supply and to make a really serious attempt by means of a Royal Commission to gauge its extent and duration; and we all look forward to that Commission to direct attention to this serious waste and to the possibility of better economy which will result from the fuller application of scientific method to exploration, working, and employment.

But we still have an area of concealed coalfields left, possibly at least as large and productive as those already explored and as full of hope for increased industrial development. It is to these we must now turn attention with a view of obtaining from them the maximum amount possible of the energy that they contain. The same problems which beset the earlier explorers of the visible coalfields will again be present with us in our new task, and there will be in addition a host of new ones, even more difficult and costly to solve. In spite of this the task will have to be undertaken, and we must not rest until we have as good a knowledge of the concealed coalfields as we have of those at the surface. This knowledge will have to be obtained in the old way by geological surveying and mapping and by the coordination of all the observations available in the productive rocks themselves and in those associated with them, whether made in the course of geological study or in mining and exploration. But now the work will have to be done at a depth of thousands instead of hundreds of feet, and under a thick cover of newer strata resting unconformably on those we wish to pierce and

work. When we get under the unconformable cover we meet the same geology and the same laws of stratigraphy and structure as in more superficial deposits, but accurate induction is rendered increasingly difficult by the paucity of exposures and the small number of facts available owing to the great expense of deep boring. How precious, then, becomes every scrap of information obtained from sinkings and borings, not only where success is met with, but where it is not; and how little short of criminal is it that there should be the probability that much of this information is being and will be irretrievably lost!

Mr. Harmer pointed out in a paper to this Section in 1895 that under present conditions there was an automatic check on all explorations of this kind. The only person who can carry it out is the landowner. If he fails he loses his money and does not even secure the sympathy of his neighbours. If he succeeds his neighbours stand to gain as much as he does without sharing in the expense. The successful explorer naturally conceals the information he has acquired because he has had to pay so heavily for it that he cannot afford to put his neighbours in as good a position as himself and make them his rivals as well; while the unsuccessful man is only too glad to forget as soon as possible all about his unfortunate venture. And yet in work of this kind failure is second only to success in the value of the information it gives as to the underground structure which it is so necessary to have if deep mining is to become a real addition to the resources of the country.

Systematic and detailed exploration, guided by scientific principles and advancing from the known to the unknown, ought to be our next move forward: a method of exploration which shall benefit the nation as well as the individual, a careful record of everything done, a body of men who shall interpret and map the facts as they are acquired and draw conclusions with regard to structure and position from them-in short a Geological Survey which shall do as much for Hypogean Geology as existing surveys have done for Epigean Geology, is now our crying need. Unless something of this sort is done, and done in a systematic and masterful manner, we run a great risk of frittering away the most important of our national resources left to us, of destroying confidence, of wasting time and money at a most precious and critical period of our history, and of slipping downhill at a time when our equipment and resources are ready to enable us to stride forward.

We do not want to be in the position of a certain town council which kept a list of its old workmen and entered opposite one, formerly sewer inspector, that he possessed' an extensive memory which is at the disposal of the corporation.'

Even supposing the scheme outlined by Mr. Harmer cannot be carried out in its complete form, a great deal will be done if mining engineers can receive a sufficient geological training to enable them to realise the significance of these underground problems, so that they can recognise when any exploration they are carrying out inside their own area is likely to be of far-reaching geological and economic significance outside the immediate district in which they are personally and immediately concerned.

Turning to our colonies it is true that in many of them much is being done by competent surveys to attain a knowledge of mineral resources, but this work should be pushed forward more rapidly, with greater strength and larger staffs, and above all it should not be limited to areas that happen to be of known economic value just at the present moment. It is almost a truism that the scientific principle of to-day is the economic instrument of to-morrow, and it will be a good investment to enlarge the bounds of geological theory, trusting to the inevitable result that every new principle and fact discovered will soon find its economic application. Further, it is necessary that we should obtain as soon as possible a better knowledge of the mineral resources of the smaller and thinly inhabited colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence: This is one of the things which would conduce to the more rapid, effective occupation of these areas. With regard to areas not at present British colonies, it seems to me that no great harm would be done by obtaining, not in any obtrusive way, some general Knowledge of the mineral resources of likely areas. This at least seems to be what

other nations find it worth their while to do, and then, when the opportunity of selection arises, they are able to choose such regions as will most rapidly fill up and soonest yield a return for the private or public capital invested in them.

Summary.

To sum up, I consider that the time has come when geologists should make a firm and consistent stand for the teaching of their science in schools, technical colleges, and universities. Such an extension of teaching will of course need the expenditure of time and money; but England is at last beginning to wake up to the belief, now an axiom in Germany and America, that one of the best investments of money that can be made by the pious benefactor or by the State is that laid up at compound interest, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt,' in the brains of its young men.

This knowledge has been an asset of monetary value to hosts of individuals who have made their great wealth by the utilisation of our mineral resources, and to our country, which owes its high position among the nations to the power and importance given to it by its coal and iron. It is surely good advice to individuals and to the State to ask them to reinvest some of their savings in the business which has already given such excellent returns, so that they and we may not be losers through our lack of knowledge of those sources of energy which have made us what we are, and are capable of keeping for many years the position they have won for us.

And in our present revival of education it would be well that its rightful position should be given to a science which is useful in training and exercising the faculty of observation and the power of reasoning, which conduces to the open-air life and to the appreciation of the beautiful in nature, which places its services at the disposal of the allied sciences of topography and geography, which is the handmaid of many of the useful arts, and which brings about a better knowledge and appreciation of the life and growth of the planet that we inhabit for a while, and wish to hand on to our descendants as little impaired in vitality and energy as is consistent with the economic use of our own life-interest in it.

The following Papers and Reports were read :

:

1. The Geology of the Country round Southport.

By J. LOMAS, A.R.C.S., F.G.S.

Looking towards Southport from the sea we notice three platforms rising in gigantic steps towards the east.

The first is low, varying in height from 9 to 20 feet above Ordnance datum, and is fringed on the seaward side by sandhills which rise to an elevation of from 50 to 90 feet. On the north the broad estuary of the Ribble separates this plain from a similar platform known as the Fylde district, and the Mersey on the south cuts off another fragment which forms the north end of the Wirral. Two less significant streams, the Douglas and the Alt, flow across the platform into the Ribble Estuary and the Crosby Channel respectively.

The whole of this plain is the gift of the Irish Sea glacier, which formerly overrode the district, the solid rocks only reaching the surface in the case of a few islands, while the bulk is below sea level.

In the immediate neighbourhood of Southport, Keuper marls occur. These are of great thickness, and contain bands of gypsum and pseudomorphs of rock salt. To the north, in the Fylde district, where similar rocks occur, salt is obtained from the beds, and the boulders of gypsum which occur in great profusion in the local drift have evidently come from this formation.

The Bunter rocks of the Trias succeed to the east, and are in places capped by Keuper sandstones. Where these occur we reach the second platform.

At Ormskirk, distant about eight miles from Southport, several interesting sections show the Keuper resting on the Upper Bunter. At Scarth Hill, near the