Abstract This short article provides my views – and not necessarily views that are shared by the British Geological Survey, where I was executive director from 2006–19, or by the Earth science community in general. I have outlined some of the trends that I see as important for the geosciences, largely from a solid-Earth perspective. I stress that fundamental discovery science in this sector must be, and will largely continue to be, led by the academic community but that Earth sciences research needs to be more focused on problem solving rather than refining our knowledge of the problems that face the Earth system. Academics and government laboratories have distinct but complementary roles in the pursuit of discovery and in applied geoscience research and training of geoscientists.

ABSTRACT The museums of Philadelphia are noted for both their variety and their longevity. Some of these institutions have been present since before the American Revolution and reflect the continuity within a population for which education was always a predominant goal. Others have arisen over subsequent centuries in response to various needs. Some, such as the American Philosophical Society and the Fairmont Water Works, are eighteenth-century institutions that relatively lately acquired a more formal museum format. Colonial interest in natural history, mineralogy, and natural resources with collateral maps and papers makes them a prime resource for historians of geology. All of these institutions reflect the nature of the museum movement itself from often private or privileged collections to those both welcoming the public and serving as sturdy arms of education. Historians of geology will find maps, instruments, collections, books, and personal and government papers that are of much interest.

ABSTRACT The Rutgers Geology Museum is America’s first geology museum. Rocks, fossils, and minerals had been collected into “cabinets of curiosities” since first contact between Europeans and Native Americans, and beginning in the late eighteenth century, many of these small personal cabinets were expanded, organized, and made available to the public at natural history and philosophical societies in Philadelphia and Boston. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, geology was widely recognized as an important new science that influenced the organization of collections on display at the growing number of colleges, academies, societies, lyceums, and museums that began popping up all over the United States, but it was not until 1872 that the first museum dedicated specifically to geology was built at Rutgers College. Rutgers University, known as Rutgers College until 1924, is itself one of the oldest colleges in America. Originally chartered as Queens College in the British colony of New Jersey in 1766, Rutgers, along with Harvard (1636), William and Mary (1693), Yale (1701), University of Pennsylvania (1740), Columbia (1754), Princeton (1755), Brown (1764), and Dartmouth College (1769), was among the nine colonial colleges founded before the American Revolution. Since its inception, the Rutgers Geology Museum’s primary mission has been to educate the public on natural history–related topics. How this was accomplished has varied greatly through the years and originated with the “cabinet” of minerals that was displayed to students, alumni, and professors in the days of Dr. Lewis Beck, the first geology professor at Rutgers College. Through the efforts of Dr. George Cook, professor and vice president of Rutgers College, Geology Hall was erected in 1872 as the permanent home for the collections, and the museum and its collections became the focal point of the natural history courses taught at the time. The many professors and curators who tended to the museum and its collections over the next half century helped shape and dictate the future of science and geology education at the university, and with the creation of the Department of Geology in 1931, the museum became a center of leading geologic research and the outlet to present the results to the community. Today, the museum strives to connect with the local K–12 and university communities to inspire the next generation of geoscientists to continue building upon the legacy that the many Rutgers University geologists worked so hard to build.