His example is one well worthy of remembrance at the present epoch. The "whirligig of time" has brought its revenges, and has introduced into geology a class of students almost unknown in the days when Lyell was in his vigour. The developments of mineralogy and palæontology, helpful and valuable as they have been by making geology more of an exact science and, in some cases, substituting order for confusion, have tended to produce students very familiar with the apparatus of a laboratory or the collections of a museum, but not with the face of the earth. This, in itself, would not be necessarily hurtful, because the field of geology is so wide that there is room for all; but it leads sometimes to an undue exaltation of trifles, to an over-estimation of the "mint, anise, and cummin" of science, to a waste of time upon what is called the literature of the subject. This last often means either searching much chaff for a few grains of wheat, or spending much labour with the hope of discovering whether A or B was the first to confer a name upon a species; the priority perhaps being only of a few months, and that name neither particularly appropriate nor euphonious. Partly from this, partly from other causes, the importance, nay, the absolute necessity of travel, for the education of a geologist is now too often forgotten. In this science there are many questions--some of them almost fundamental--for which no perquisitions in a library, no research in a laboratory, no studies in a museum, however conscientiously patient and painstaking they may be, can be accepted as an adequate preparation; questions in which Nature is at once the best book, the best laboratory, and the best museum, and experience is the only safe teacher. What would Lyell have said to men--and such might now be named--who undertook to discuss wide geological problems with the most limited experience who, for example, posed as authorities upon what ice can or cannot do, without having even seen a glacier or speculated on the most intricate questions in petrology without having studied more than some corner of this island, or, indeed, without any precise knowledge of that? Would not he--averse as he was to speaking severely--have censured them for talking about things which they could not possibly understand, and for darkening counsel by words without knowledge?