President of the Geological Society for 1850. 3 



to doubt their own impartiality, and to suspect that they also 

 may be influenced by old associations, and those strong pre- 

 possessions, with which nearly all the early literature of our 

 science is imbued. It may be true that no geologist worthy 

 of the name would contend at this time of day for the modem 

 origin of our planet, or maintain the doctrine that it was 

 created contemporaneously with man, although the multi- 

 tude, including many of the educated classes, may, in their 

 gnorance of the records of creation as written in the 

 heavens and the earth, still fondly cling to such opinions. 

 The cultivators of our science may be ready to grant the 

 most indefinite duration to each successive geological epoch, 

 yet they may still unconsciously derive a love of cataclysms 

 and catastrophes, and faith in a primaeval chaos out of which 

 the present order of things was evolved, from an hereditary 

 creed, not founded on facts, or strict inductive reasoning on 

 natural phenomena. 



As introductory to this subject, I cannot do better than 

 recal your attention to the recently published memoir of Sir 

 Roderick Murchison, on the Structure of the Alps, Appenines, 

 and Carpathians, which deservedly occupies an entire Num- 

 ber of your Quarterly Journal.* It comprises a masterly 

 summary of the labours of those who had gone before him, 

 in a very difficult field of inquiry, as well as a luminous 

 account of his own personal investigations, and should be 

 studied by every one who is desirous of knowing what point 

 the modern progress of geology has reached. On various 

 important questions of which he treats, and in which I entirely 

 agree with him, I cannot enter at present, but there is one 

 leading conclusion established in his memoir which bears 

 specially on the theory selected for discussion in this Address. 

 He proves, as it appears to me in a satisfactory manner, that 

 those stupendous movements to which the loftiest chain in 

 Europe owes its complicated structure, and by which its com- 

 ponent strata have been dislocated, fractured, and contorted, 

 belong to a very modern era in the earth's history. In the 

 long calendar of geological events, the Eocene period is the first 



* Vol. V. Part i. 1848, December. 



