Geological Society, 43 



this highly useful appropriation of his leisure moments, has aug- 

 mented those claims upon our gratitude which he had established by 

 many acts of good fellowship, and the devotion of his time and talents 

 to our cause. 



Through the early investigations of William Smith, the oolitic series 

 was divided into sub-formations ; and, by the subsequent adoption of 

 these subdivisions by Conybeare, their provincial names have become 

 classic throughout Europe, and have served to commemorate the 

 discernment of him who first taught us to identify strata by their 

 organic remains. 



At the last anniversary it was announced that, with entire confi- 

 dence in his qualifications, your Council had fixed upon Mr. Lons- 

 dale to commence a task, the prosecution of which they conceived 

 to be strictly consonant to the spirit of the bequest of the lamented 

 Wollaston j by which we are endowed with the means of rewarding 

 those who enlarge the circle of geological knowledge. Mr. Lonsdale 

 has presented us with the result of his labours, having laid down upon 

 maps of the Ordnance Survey the range of different members of the 

 oolite, from the neighbourhood of Bath, where he had previously de- 

 veloped their relations, to the southern limits of Warwickshire and 

 Oxfordshire. The success attendant upon this undertaking has already 

 been made apparent in the maps, sections, and remarks of our Curator. 

 By these you will perceive he has already demonstrated that the upper 

 shale and marl-stone of the lias, which are only visible as mere beds 

 in the neighbourhood of Bath, swell out rapidly in their north-eastern 

 course, and soon assume the same characters which Mr. Phillips has 

 assigned to them in Yorkshire. He next establishes that the whole 

 of the fine-grained white oolite in the escarpment of the Cotteswold 

 Hills, although lithologically undistinguishable from the great oolite 

 of Bath, is only an expansion of the inferior oolite. It is then made 

 apparent that the Fuller's earth disappears entirely to the north of 

 Gloucestershire ; and the highest degree of interest is added to these 

 groups, by determining, for the first time, the true position of the 

 Stonesfield slate, which he shows to be the base of the great oolite; 

 thus removing it from the geological horizon, in which, from the 

 obscure sections at Stonesfield, it had before been placed. Such 

 are a few of the evidences of the good already derived from the re- 

 vision of this series of our formations by a geologist like Mr. 

 Lonsdale, who, to the eye of an unerring observer, adds the rare 

 qualifications of a thorough acquaintance with specific distinctions in 

 organic remains. 



But the value of such a work is not to be measured by reference 

 to English geology alone ; for, if it be now ascertained that the oolitic 

 groups are made up of members which inosculate with each other, 

 expanding to vast thicknesses, or thinning out entirely, within the 

 limited range of two counties 5 and that even its principal formations 

 cannot be followed into Yorkshire, still less to Brora and the Hebrides, 

 without exhibiting great changes in their mineral and fossil contents 5 

 we can scarcely hope to identify each subordinate member of our own 

 country with the subdivisions of the series on the continent of Europe. 

 I willingly express this opinion, although it may seem tube slightly at 



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