individual master students of systematic and philosophical geology, but to a very great extent it has not been done at all. It is a function which properly falls to universities, if the universities can only rise to meet it; for it is the function of universities, in the larger modern view, not only to rehearse science, nor merely even to educate young geologists, important as that is, but to develop science for science's own sake, and for its own inherent and permanent utilities as distinguished from its immediate applicabilities. To fulfill this function they must not only realize and appreciate it, but they must be equipped for field and experimental work, as well as library and laboratory study. Ideal correlations and academic systematizing are as apt to be hindrances as helps to the progress of science. While a few of the great universities of this country and Europe have made notable advances in these directions, the universities are, on the whole, far behind the great surveys in the performance of the work which properly falls to them. This is due not so much to a lack of appreciation of the function as to the lack of facilities. With the development of this higher function of the universities there goes a coördinate function for a university journal of geology, a journal whose special efforts shall be devoted to promoting the growth of systematic, philosophical, and fundamental geology, and to the education of professional geologists. No part of the wide domain can wisely be neglected by any journal, but there seems to be an open field for a periodical which specially invites the discussion of systematic and fundamental themes, and of international and intercontinental relations, and which in particular seeks to promote the study of geographic and continental evolution, orographic movements, volcanic coördinations and consanguinities, biological developments and migrations, climatic changes, and similar questions of wide and fundamental interest. This field is not likely to be successfully cultivated except by a systematic endeavor, pursued through a period of years, to bring together the latest and best summations of the results attained in the several national fields in a common medium, where they can be compared and discussed, and where tentative correlations will suggest themselves, out of which, in turn, working hypotheses will naturally spring, leading on to such direct investigations as the nature of each question invites. It would be presumptuous to assume that the =Journal of Geology= can cultivate with more than very partial success this field, but it especially invites contributions of this class.