as to be easily overlooked, while the hidden forces producing the landscape that the artist depicts, the battle-fields of Nature, and the burial-places of conquered and conqueror alike in the struggle for existence, are rarely noticed.
The proportion of scientific men that go abroad is not small. How much greater the number of amateurs! How naturally do college students pass from the attached life of lecture-room and laboratory, floating off into the free life of travel! Where better can they go than to Europe, where they can learn the languages, the keys to the various chambers of scientific knowledge, and where roads and inns are so good and abundant? Although Europe is not the pattern of the world, yet most of our geological theories have been founded on European facts, and it is easier to see where a theory does not apply after seeing where it does.
Notes of some of the more satisfactory of my excursions, arranged more or less continuously, may not be useless, therefore, especially if accompanied with a few references. I know that three years ago I would have given five dollars for such an article. Of course, my sketch must follow the line of my studies. Another would doubtless wish to give Kew Gardens, the Jardin des Plantes, and the zoölogical station at Naples more place; but if the imperfections of this article should cause some one else to satisfy the crying need of a set of scientific guides, I would be content. Even if it only leads some summer wanderer to buy a geological map or two, and see not only with the eyes but with the understanding also, it will have had reason for being.
Suppose we have escaped the illustrations of the floating-ice theory off Newfoundland, and passed across that hackneyed specimen of an ocean-current, the Gulf Stream, and are about to follow the course of the satchel-guide or some such book through Europe, with limited time.
We land first on the Emerald Isle (13).[1] Being a glaciated country, the casual observer will not see so much of the great basin of subcarboniferous limestone which the island is, but the bogs due to irregular deposition of drift are a characteristic feature, and we may see the drumlin—a word recently borrowed to denote those smoothly rounded hills of compact bowlder clay, formerly called lenticular, so common about Boston. We may also see the Giant's Causeway and Fingal's Cave, illustrations of basaltic jointing. I have from Portrush, not far off, a tephrite obtained by Prof. Carvill-Lewis.
Crossing over the channel, we will not stop to examine the beds of Anglesea, interesting as they are, unless we have plenty of time; yet, if one has it, and is interested in metamorphic rocks, a study of the ground, in connection with past literature,
- ↑ The numbers refer to the books at the end.
