144 Rev. Mr Whe well's Address to the Geological Society. 



and who shew the animating effects of the great scene in which they are there 

 placed, by the variety of subjects to which they extend their attention, and 

 by the vigour with which they combine speculative and practical employ- 

 ment. Mr Colebrooke went to India as a writer in 1782, and about 1792 be- 

 gan to attend peculiarly to Sanscrit literature. A little later we find him 

 beginning to enrich the Asiatic Researches with a series of memoirs on the 

 religion, the literature, and, above all, the science of the Hindoos. In this 

 department his labours on the Zodiac of the Indians,* and on their notions of 

 the Precession of the Equinoxes and the motions of the Planets,t are highly 

 deserving of notice; as were at a later period the account of the Indian Alge- 

 bra, given in his translations of the Lilawati and Vijaganita. But Mr Cole- 

 brooke was also ready to contribute a share in sciences with which we are 

 more nearly concerned. He took a lively interest in the correction of errors 

 respecting the physical geography of India, and was one of the first to de- 

 clare (in 1815) his opinion that the Himalaya mountains were higher than 

 the Andes, an opinion soon afterwards fully confirmed. He also was one of 

 the first to enter upon a subject, to which we may now look with the greatest 

 hope. The first part of vol. i. of our New Series of Transactions (published 

 in 1822) contains two papers by him, one upon the geology of the valley of 

 the Sutledge, which had been explored by Lieut. Gerard ; the other upon the 

 north-east of Bengal, where Mr D. Scott had noticed various rocks, and, 

 among the rest, a deposit which contained fossils, resembling, as he conceived, 

 those of the London clay. I shall have occasion, in the course of this ad- 

 dress, to refer to a recent repetition of this observation of an identity between 

 the fossils of the east of India and those of the London and Paris basin. I 

 may observe that these, and other contributions to Indian geology by other 

 writers, contained in the volume of which I spoke, and a preceding one, in- 

 duced the Secretaries of that time to insert a map, on which the localities of 

 these observations were indicated ; and to express in the volume a hope that 

 these were merely an earnest of the information which might be expected 

 from the activity of British subjects in that quarter. 



Among our foreign members deceased within the year, 1 regret much to 

 have to mention one, to whom is due in no small degree a revolution in the 

 mode of treating the subject of geology, which has taken place in our own 

 times, alid the formation of a new branch of geology. This revolution con- 

 sists in the endeavour, now so familiar to us, to identify geological with re- 

 cent changes, instead of classifying the great past changes in the surface of 

 the earth which its structure discloses to us, as separate from the newer and 

 slighter modifications of which history and tradition give us evidence ; and 

 the study of the discernible causes of change to which we are thus led, I shall 

 have occasion to speak of under the name of Geological Dynamics. You are 

 well aware that Mr Lyell is the person who has, with a bold and vigorous 

 hand, moulded the whole scheme of geology upon this idea; but the power 

 which he had of doing this was derived in no small degree from Von HofF's 

 admirable survey of the evidence of those changes which can be proved by 

 tradition. The extent and universality of the facts thus brought into notice, 

 might well forcibly strike a philosopher already seeking to apply such a 



* Aslat. Res., vol. ix. t Ibid. vol. xil. 



