To account for the formation and changes of our globe, by excursions of the imagination, often splendid and imposing, but usually visionary, and almost always baseless, was, till within half a century, the business of geological speculations; but this research has now assumed a more sober character; the science of geology has been reared upon numerous and accurate observations of _facts_; and standing thus upon the basis of induction, it is entitled to a rank among those sciences which Lord Bacon’s Philosophy has contributed to create. Geological researches are now prosecuted by actually exploring the structure and arrangement of districts, countries, and continents. The obliquity of the strata of most rocks, causing their edges to project in many places above the surface; their exposure, in other instances on the sides or tops of hills and mountains; or, in consequence of the intersection of their strata, by roads, canals, and river-courses, or by the wearing of the ocean; or their direct perforation, by the shafts of mines; all these causes, and others, afford extensive means of reading the interior structure of the globe. The outlines of American geology appear to be particularly grand, simple, and instructive; and a knowledge of the important facts, and general principles of this science, is of vast practical use, as regards the interests of agriculture, and the research for useful minerals. Geological and mineralogical descriptions, and maps of particular states and districts, are very much needed in the United States; and to excite a spirit to furnish them will form one leading object of this Journal.” _The Prolonged Influence of Outgrown Ideas._ Those interested in any branch of science should, as a matter of education, read the history of that special subject. A knowledge of the stages by which the present development has been attained is essential to give a proper perspective to the literature of each period. Much of the existing terminology is an inheritance from the first attempts at nomenclature, or may rest upon theories long discarded. Popular notions at variance with advanced teaching are often the forgotten inheritance of a past generation. Gneiss, trap, and Old Red Sandstone are names which we owe to Werner. The “Tertiary period” and “drift” are relics of an early terminology. The geology of tourist circulars still speaks of canyons as made by “convulsions of nature.” Popular writers still attribute to geologists a belief in a molten earth covered by a thin crust. Within the present century the eighteenth century speculations of Werner and his predecessors, postulating a supposed capacity of water to seep through the crust into the interior of the earth, resulting in a hypothetical progressive desiccation of the surface, views long abandoned by most modern geologists, have been revived by an astronomer into a theory of “planetology.”