The Study of Geology: Its Values

Abstract

Below the college the elements of geology serve as an excellent substratum to a knowledge of geography. No teacher of physical geography, especially, can do his best work without having had a course in college geology. By college geology I do not mean a study of mining, rock quarrying, and oil prospecting, but a course that gives a valuable knowledge of the environments of plants, flowers, animals, and of people in general. Such a course could be named the ecology of geology. A course in geological ecology should give the student a knowledge of the earth's surface, of its hills, plains, and valleys; of its atmosphere, with its storms of wind, rain, and snowfall; of the crust of the earth, of its quakes, volcanoes, mountains, and minerals, and more especially of its soils, ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans; indeed, of all the environments which favor or give hardships to every form of life that must survive or perish on this planet in longer or shorter periods of time. The early students of physiographic ecology believed that the earth forces worked spasmodically like the eruptions of volcanoes, the appearance of tornadoes, and the coming of floods; but Lyell proved in his Principles of Geology that geologic causes are so long in operation that they may be successfully studied, and that the effects follow so regularly that they may be predicted with the certainty of the coming of summer and winter, and usually with as great certainty as the expectation that day will follow night. The student in geology will early learn that after the Ozark uplift, Kansas for hundreds of millions of years sloped from the east to the west, but that this slope was broken to give room for a range of Kansas mountains, the Nemaha mountains, which extended from what is now Butler county to Nemaha county. With the exception of this interruption, the slope continued to salt water towards the western end of the state. As a result of this slope the rock formations are oldest at the east, and youngest at the west, the strata following one another like the leaves of a book. But some millions of years ago the Rocky mountains pushed up in the midst of the salt waters and tilted Kansas to the eastward so much that the western end of the state is now more than 3,000 feet higher than the eastern end, thus reversing all her river systems and seriously modifying her climate and changing her environments. But the plants and animals living then were not seriously inconvenienced by the change in slope, for their homes were mostly in the water or on the prairies or in the swamps. They had little trouble in finding new homes. By the time man reached what is now Kansas, the Nemaha mountains had been buried from view by the late rock formations; her surface was much as we find it today; and the winds, rainfall, droughts and dust storms had been well established for many thousands of years. But the plant and animal ecology, involving the reactions of life to the many environments, gives the student unending enjoyment in solving the myr-