Abstract
ALTHOUGH the British Government have undertaken the geological survey of the country, yet the valuable results obtained by this survey are unfortunately allowed to remain almost unknown to the general public. A complete set of the publications of the geological survey costs, we believe, something like 130l., and is, of course, quite out of the reach of all but great libraries and wealthy public institutions, and no authorised reductions of the maps have as yet been published. It is much to be regretted, too, that the illiberal parsimony displayed in some branches of our public service is most conspicuous of all in that scientific department of it, where its effects prove most injurious. While the publications of the American geological surveys are distributed in foreign countries with an open-handed liberality worthy of a great government, and the courtesy of the chiefs of those surveys, Dr. Hayden and Mr. Clarence King, is well known to everyone—it is notorious that the directors of our own survey are placed in the painful position of having to refuse to acknowledge the just claims of the largest and most important scientific institutions of their own and other countries. The directors of our national surveys are the more to be pitied, inasmuch as the position of grudging parsimony in which they are placed contrasts so strikingly with that course of wise and judicious liberality in making known the results of their labours which the officers of the scientific departments of the United States and some other countries are permitted to pursue.
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THE GEOLOGY OF LONDON 1 . Nature 18, 235 (1878). https://doi.org/10.1038/018235a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/018235a0