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essential branches of the science. Major Powell has himself, as an individual investigator, been one of the pioneers in this new departure, and the doctrine of the base-level, which we owe so largely to him, taken with its corollaries, constitutes one of the most important contributions of recent decades. In so far as the topographic work of the Survey has become an adjunct and antecedent of the new physiographic phases of geology, it merits the highest commendation. In so far as it has fallen short of this, it perhaps expresses the practical difficulty of at once rendering topographical work geological, a difficulty not to be wondered at since topographical work has been so largely regarded as a function of some other science than geology, some science in which the mere hypsometrical factors of relief, mechanically represented, have been chiefly considered instead of the genetic factors that give meaning to the topography. Until a generation of geological topographers can be trained up, topographic work cannot be expected to be other than mechanical and relatively expressionless. It may be questioned whether some of the topographic effort that has taken the extensional form might not better have taken an intensive form in the interest of transmuting mechanical topography into geological topography, or, in other words, the substitution of genetic expression for meaningless mechanicalism. But, withal, the great development of the topographical side of the Survey has been in the line of progress and the needed transformation in the fundamental nature of the work should grow out of it through persistence in the educative process already begun. We have no sympathy with the geologist who looks upon topographic work as an alien function to be performed by those whose profession does not lead them to know how topographic relief was produced or what it means, and who carps at the Survey for an alleged invasion of fields outside its domain.

Under Major Powell's administration, the physical and philosophical phases of the Survey have received a more marked impetus than the palæontological, though an able and active corps of palæontologists have always formed a large division of the