The lecturer of the afternoon, Colonel Daniels, of Virginia, was introduced.

Colonel Daniels: Your commander-in-chief and shepherd of this flock asked me to talk about “How to Teach Geology.” I did not come down here for any such purpose. I came to have a little rest and have a good time, and get acquainted with Chautauqua. But as I am here, I am glad to be set at work in any way to keep me out of mischief.

He said on a subsequent occasion that he did not want me to give a written lecture. That reminds me of a story that I heard Senator Nye tell years ago in a speech. He told of one of those excellent boys that die young, standing by the roadside, and a man was on a prancing steed. The man said, “Boy, when I get up to you, don’t you take off your hat and make a bow and scare this colt; he will throw me off.” Said the boy, with rustic simplicity, “I was not going to.” [Applause and laughter.]

I suppose that my excellent friend has to keep on guard. There are prowling around through these trees people with their pockets stuffed full of old sermons and lectures, and he is always on guard to keep them from firing them off to scare his pet C. L. S. C. So I was not mad a bit. [Laughter.]

Well, now, to plunge in medias res, it is a beautiful thing to study geology. This planet was our birth place. It is the way of God. And here in its strata is written by the finger of God himself the history of all that mighty series of events through which it passed from the time it emerged from primary chaos until to-day. It is scarcely possible that any person should believe in studying the works of God, and fail to see that this portion of his work, which lies in immediate contact with us, from which in so many ways we draw sustenance, in connection with which we have our being, and from out of which flows the stream of that abundant supply which God has provided for his children, and which for all our time is to be the theater of action of our race, should be studied.

But how, how taught? Don’t give any written lectures now. I will tell you how not to do it. If you are going to teach geology, don’t deliver written lectures. Write all you can about it, but don’t deliver it. I delivered a written lecture once, and that is the reason I never delivered any more.

I began studying geology when a boy, when I was put to studying a hoe-handle and ten acres of corn for about three weeks. There were lots of these pieces of stone, and my uncle, a good old Methodist class-leader, told me that God put those stones there at the time of the deluge. That satisfied me. But when I was on a government survey away in the West, I saw hundreds and thousands of feet of those rocks, such as I saw this morning when I picked up these stones. Here you see a complete mass of shells. Such rocks make up the bluffs of the Mississippi River. We have twenty thousand feet of these in Colorado. Major Buell told me that he got in one place twenty-seven thousand feet. Then I was not satisfied. I began to look a little further. By-and-by, in the district school library, I got hold of Randall’s Geology, that blessed old book, and it began to open my mind a little. I was on these surveys, and I began to have more and more practical lessons. Among the lead mines of Wisconsin I found the miners wanted practical knowledge, and I undertook to teach them a little. I remember my first attempt on a slate; then I took my bristol-board and made some diagrams. And then in a store, and then in a church; in the basement first, and then I got up into the church. So I taught the rudest kind of people, and from one lecture, I gave two, three, four, five, and on up to fifteen. I gained a local reputation, and got to be State Geologist of Wisconsin, and was tolerably well known in that country as a practical geologist. But I had no scientific knowledge of geology.

A good friend of mine wanted to see me advanced in life, and so sent word to me if I would come and deliver a lecture on geology before the board of their college, he thought I would get a professorship. It was an Old School Presbyterian college. I prepared myself without regard to expense. I went down to Boston, and saw Prof. Hitchcock and Prof. Agassiz, and I hunted through the books, and I made a lecture. You ought to have heard it. [Laughter.] You would not be here now. [Laughter.] It treated of all the cosmogonies; it went through primal chaos, through the azoic, the silurian, the devonian, and the various strata, until it introduced man on the scene. It took me two hours. It was a cold night, and they all shivered, and looked as if they wished I was in some warmer place. I did not get the professorship, and the college died the next year. [Laughter.]

Write all you can, it tends to make you accurate and fixes your knowledge, and then do with it as a good old Methodist presiding elder told me once on a time. We had planted some melons and cucumbers, but he did not seem to be pleased with them. He told the folks that we had splendid cucumbers, and he knew how to fix them: slice them up thin, put them in water, turn off the water, and put on pepper and salt, and throw them out of the window. That is what you are to do with the written lectures, read, write, and, as Emerson says, get drunk with your subject. You will not hear anything more of the dryness of your subject. It makes a subject dry because a man has not got enough of it in him to see the great connecting principles in him, so that he is aroused and sees the ultimate of it as well as the details, and the ultimate of it is man. It is for man and made for man. This being created here and being put in the midst of all of these things, is to make him greater, grander, and bring him into relation with the truth, and then by symmetrizing his being and aligning him with God in the great work of God, that is to make of this globe a heaven.

Geology will help you to do that, as the Bishop said yesterday, it will give you visions of the infinite possibilities of yourselves when you once align yourselves with God and live up to the truth. God has put into your hands the power to subordinate this globe, its storms, its climates, and their condition; you want geology for that. You want to begin to know these rocks at Chautauqua. I would like to put in your collection first, all the stones in the vicinity of Chautauqua. Go out into the quarry, with its masonry that God has built. Here you find the stones all covered over with God’s hieroglyphics, here they are, corals, shells, and things that were alive. If you knew a way of petrifying these trees and plants, would you not think it was a pleasing way and do it? Here it is done. Here you have a study, a whole natural history, a whole natural creation that God made in order to make man possible, and capable of producing grain and grass and flower to make man live, all depending upon the fact that these rocks were built up as you find them to-day.

You find the old rocks arranged in strata, layers. You have them there by the depot. How was that? Go by the hillside. Let a portion of the drops of rain get together and make a stream, and they will form a gulley. What do you see? The soil has been washed out, and the material of the soil has been spread out. A pond, perhaps, will be there, such as you and I used to navigate, and then it dries up on the surface, and cracks at right angles. Here it is. There was a little mud puddle, and it cracked when it dried up. If you will take up a piece of it, you will find that it is arranged in layers. Here, see that. Through all that summer, and the previous summer, there was a succession of storms, and each one brought its contribution to the whole. If it was a big storm, it was thick, if a little storm, it was thin. Just like the exogenous trees. You count the lines of growth, and know the age of the tree. We have one layer spread over the other, all little volumes, but when it has quit growing, as in libraries, you will have a thick book. So, I say the layers write the storms of the past.

What else would we find there? If there were snails, leaves and sticks, they would be carried down and buried in the mud. If we take a section, and take out all that loose stuff, we have a section which gives a history of the different seasons, and the animals and plants that washed in there during the time that little mud puddle had been in existence. That is the beginning, the starting point of all the knowledge of the rocks; to begin right by us and see what is done now, and observe that wearing action. If you will go from that little gulley on the hillside to a larger valley, and still larger, to the great valley of the Mississippi, you will find the same thing repeated.

Here is a specimen that I got right here where they are ballasting the road. Here you could see a mass of sand and gravel. It goes on wherever there is sand and gravel and there is lime and water; it is compounded together. We have there fossils. Here, for instance, you have various forms of plants and corals, and so on, and you have here in the rocks right about you shells, coral, seaweed, preserved in the same way. Thus you get your petrefactions. Thus you get the layers that you call strata. All these layers of rock are simply sediment that was once carried down and spread out in a body of water. Is not that simple enough?

Here is that slab, all covered over with seaweed and shells, that was one time a bottom of the ocean; there was a volume of clay, and you see resting in there rolls of seaweed. Trailing over this all along these shores on the spot where we now stand, there were seaweed, and coral, and all the animal life. Here is a head of a large animal, a cephalopod, and here is a tail, and the rest of the body is probably under the railroad track. Here is a curved shell. This rock abounds in the ocean. They were the pirates of the ocean. They were the ancient devilfish. They had enormous arms. They were very fine in their time, but, as some one says about the Pilgrim Fathers, we should be thankful that they did not come down to us.

We have another class of rocks in our boulders and hard heads. Here are some without any section. Here is a mass of modern lava. Here you see this huge mass. All these landscapes show the different kinds of rocks in their relations. This irregular mass is the unstratified rocks. They have been melted and cooled from a state of melting. We know them to be crystals. They consist of quartz, feldspar, and mica, which are the alphabet of mineralogy. We have the crystals, which we know only exist when there has been a state of melting. These unstratified rocks are the material of all our quarries and great rocks.

There are two great classes: the stratified, in layers, which came from sediment deposited in the ancient seas, and the unstratified, which were once melted masses thrown out of the interior of the earth. The granite, the unstratified rocks, form the backbone of the continent; they are the underlying rocks. They occur as veins, coming up through the stratified rocks, and overflowing the surface.

Now, in this section of the rocks which we have as they are stratified, formed in layers one above the other, we come to the idea of time. I was going along this morning, with a basket and one of these stones in my hand, and a man’s attention was attracted, and he asked how long since those animals were alive. I said a million of years. He looked rather astonished, and expressed himself that I could not know. The idea of such great amounts of time strikes any one like the vast areas of space. At the first step in geology we have got to expand our notions of time. The six thousand years will not do. Some people think there is something in the Bible about six thousand years. There is no such thing. It is a chronology that has grown up like Milton’s Paradise Lost. Many people think that Milton’s Paradise Lost is a part of the Bible. In Genesis we are told of days, which everybody understands to mean periods of time, and of time since the beginning, when the earth was without form and void. We have nothing definite said in the Bible, or any other book, except the approximate indications which are found in the great stone book of Nature.

Let us look at the idea of time, and see how we get at it. If we should come again to the mud puddle dried up, we should get an approximate idea of how long it took to form the deposit. Suppose we do not know the history, we know about the number of storms that are usual, and the amount of rainfall, and we have some guide in that succession of layers that are there. In the ancient rocks we have exactly the same guide. Somebody says in answer to all this, that in some places deposits take place very rapidly, and we can not judge. For instance, a flood in the Mississippi bears down a vast amount of matter. There is a delta of the Mississippi that has been built out during the memory of man. Whenever we find coarse material in a delta we say it was rapidly formed; if it is fine material, we say it was formed slowly. To-day the Mississippi is bearing down a vast mass of material, and the coarser materials drop by the mouth, but the finer are carried out over the sea, perhaps along the shore. This fine silt settles down amid the corals, the sea-weed and the ships. If the ocean could be drained, we would find on the decks of the ships that have been sunk a hundred years, as the divers tell us, this deposition on the bottom of the sea. No one can doubt about these deposits which have so many shells, that the deposit was made very slowly, because it would have been impossible for the shells to have lived if the material had been thrown down rapidly.

Therefore, when we come to take the rate of deposit, and the vast thickness of these rocks into account, we have a basis for determining approximately the periods of the time during which these rocks have formed. Of course, it is only to those who become minutely intelligent in regard to the details that this thought will have weight. If, for instance, I should go along where a man was cutting a tree, and count the annular rings, and I had never seen a tree cut down; if he should say an hundred years ago that tree was an acorn, I should be astonished, and it would have no weight with me, for I would not have the knowledge necessary. It is necessary to become familiar with this class of phenomena. Therefore in the beginning we want to study the phenomena that are taking place on the seashore, at the mouth of the rivers, and compare these with the phenomena that we find in the rock.

I recall a notable instance of this: That grand man, President Hitchcock, long since gone to rest, one of the greatest and most eminent scientists of his State, discovered tracks in the valley of the Connecticut River. He had to classify some sixty different classes of tracks, which are found in the valley of the Connecticut sandstone ledges, which, when it was soft, was admirably calculated to receive impressions. His attention was called to them, and he made them out to be bird tracks. The European naturalists were very reluctant to believe it. They did not believe that any such discovery could be made by any American. They sent over a man to see the alleged bird tracks, and he went all over the museum, and he went down to the quarry and saw all the specimens, and went away and came back again. President Hitchcock asked him about it, and he said that he did not think there were any bird tracks there. After dinner he took him out to the porch. A few days before he had found a flat stone, on which mud had been deposited, and a snipe had walked over it; the mud dried, and he thought it was an exact parallel with his bird tracks. So he put it on his porch. The gentleman said, “What have you got here?” There they were, the tracks of a bird, and a wader. He said nothing. He went away, and said they were bird tracks. He wrote afterward that he had for the first time to study how a wading bird walked on both sides of a median line. And so when he studied the habits of a bird, he saw that these fossils were bird tracks. I speak of this because it is a key.

I allude again to that sermon of Bishop Simpson’s, where Job asks these questions, and the Lord tells him to find out that right next to him. Why don’t you study that, and interpret it in that manner so sensible? You find everywhere we are doing that. On that account people can not get a knowledge of geology, because geology asks you to commence right at the door. Stoop and pick up the pebble there; learn the soil, and teach yourselves and your children what it was. This is a progressive world where we have all got to begin. It seems wonderful that we have not done that before. If you will try it, if you will get the first weed by your door, and teach your children about it, and go out further and study geology and all the other ologies in that way, life will be lifted on the highest plane for all. [Applause.] Everybody that has tried that has found an exceeding great reward.

I remember years ago a poem by James Russell Lowell, in which he describes the prophet going up to the hoary mountain to go and learn from God.

[Applause.]

Now, I simply say, if there are those who wish to pursue the study of geology, I will be very glad while I stay here to be of any assistance I can to you. I know the difficulty of starting without some help. The geology published here by Prof. Packard is an admirable little treatise, but with the reading of that you need observation and the knowledge to be gained by handling the specimens. If there are those who would like to learn, I am at liberty after 5 o’clock in the morning for a few days. I get up at 5 and keep very still. If you could keep those bells still that keep me awake until about 11:30: I like babies, but if you could put the babies in some babies’ retreat for a little while——.

The geological charts are excellent for teaching in a circle or a school. These are the charts that are published with Prof. Packard’s Geology. With the book they will enable one to get a very good idea of geology. If you will take up geology now, and start here, we will start from the quarry. These specimens will decay; one-half of them will go down into the lake very soon. I went out here and saw these splendid books being wasted, so I made use of a few of them. These will be a starting point in your museum, and then every C. L. S. C. on this continent will send from his locality a box of specimens, two or three of them, express paid, to your museum, and I will send my quota from West Virginia. And I will come over here some time and help label them. [Applause.]

[Pointing to the charts behind him.] Here is a section of rocks from below, and here are the different phenomena of volcanic action. Here is a picture of the ancient seas. There is one of these valleys. There are vast species of chambered shells. We have now only one species living, the chambered nautilus. The animal had the power of increasing or diminishing his density by absorbing or casting out water. Here is another representative of the animals that have been restored by the laws of comparative anatomy. Cuvier, or Agassiz, by a bone, or scale, even, could restore an animal. Here are some of your ancestors. Here is a specimen of the plesiosaurus and the iguanodon. These are marine animals. These are more modern. This is the period of bone caves. This was a great clawed animal, that was for a long time supposed to be a lion. Here is a representation of the ice period, of which you hear so much, the period when the huge boulders were brought down. The entire collection will be one of value.

I thank you for your attention. [Applause.]

After some conversation on preparation for Commencement day, the Round-Table adjourned.