410 SIR RODERICK I. MURCHISOK'S ADDRESS. [May 25, 1857. 



Museum having been establislied on a small scale in Cra'g's 

 Court, with an attached experimental chemist and laboratory, 

 it was decided by Sir Eobert Peel, at the suggestion of my 

 lamented predecessor, that the whole establishment should be en- 

 larged and placed on a footing similar to that on which continental 

 countries sustain such mineral and geological surveys. Then arose 

 the Museum in Jermyn-street, which, from its origin, was constituted 

 to be not only the central Map Office of the Geological Survey, where 

 the field work of the surveyors is laid down, compared, and issued to 

 the public, but also a place where the proofs of the accuracy of such 

 works might be accessible to every one. Collocating in it speci- 

 mens of the building stones, marbles, granites, &c., of various dis- 

 tricts, this museum was rendered still more useful by the addition of 

 a Mining Eecord Office, in which plans of all the mines, abandoned or 

 existing, are, as far as practicable, registered and kept, and various 

 statistical documents brought together to show the whole mineral 

 produce of the country. Lastly, to attain the same position as is 

 occupied by the mining schools of France, Germany, and other 

 countries, it was resolved to constitute within the new building a 

 regular School of Mines, and to carry out in it (which had nowhere 

 been previously attempted in Britain) a complete course of in- 

 struction in those physical sciences on which geology is based. The 

 eminence of the gentlemen with whom I am associated in Jermyn- 

 street, is the best guarantee for the success of an establishment 

 in which youths can be thoroughly and systematically instructed in 

 physics, mechanics, chemistry, metallurgy, mineralogy, mining, and 

 geology. 



My hearers will therefore understand, that the Jermyn-street 

 establishment, having for its basis the geological and mineral illus- 

 tration of the British isles, performs, at the same time, all the other 

 duties to which brief allusion is here made, and must be viewed as 

 a truly useful national undertaking. 



The maps, which have been completed and published on the 

 1-inch scale with 6-inch horizontal sections, relate to the whole of 

 Wales, all the south-western districts, and a great portion of the 

 central counties of England; whilst vast tracts in Ireland have 

 been surveyed and the information registered on maps of the 6-inch 

 scale, and four counties published on the new 1-inch maps. 



In Scotland also, progress has been made commensurate with the 

 present force of surveyors, and there, as in Ireland, the data are 



