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learner begins with ideas which every intelligent mind associates with the objects described or named, and by degrees the marks of his knowledge are increased, the relations of things are grasped, and the content of his ideas associated with the language of his science is enlarged. In the process of learning the science he has been building up his stock of knowledge of facts and phenomena, but, of more importance than that, he has learned the method of observing and of scientific thinking. He has had training in the methods of reducing the hard facts of nature to the laws of thought and practice, he has seen the method by which theoretical order is made out of the interminable confusion and complexity of natural things.

Beside this primary reason for the use of geology as a disciplinary science-study, there is a second reason arising from the symbolic nature of a large group of its facts. This aspect of the science is best seen in the historical and stratigraphical parts of geology, in which fossils are the chief data for study. The interpretation of a fossil into a species of organism, having its definite place in the elaborate classification of the zoölogist, or as an indicator of the time and place and mode of formation of the strata in which it is buried, is, to be sure, a most intricate and, at first thought it would seem, an unattractive process. But no more so, I would say, than the interpretation of a series of Greek characters. The interpretation of the Greek reveals to us the richest results of human thought and most perfect laws of human speech, and we find therefore in the analysis required the most perfect discipline of the powers of speech and language. The fossil too holds, ready to be revealed, the story of the history of the world and the laws of the evolution of the organic life of the globe, and records an inexhaustible wealth of information regarding the laws of nature. But as an instrument of intellectual discipline its great merit lies in its symbolic nature. It is this symbolic character of the classical languages and of the mathematics which fits them to be universal means of liberal training. The symbolic nature of the fossil fits it to become the exponent of training in the pure science of nature.