A7imversaty of IS3S. Address of the President, 515 



which contents itself with such a general reference of the foreign to 

 the home strata as we have described, till by its own labours it has 

 earned the right of asserting some closer correspondence. If to deny 

 the value of our geological terms within the home district, where 

 they mark an order which has been repeatedly verified, would be a 

 suicidal scepticism in geologists, there would be a rashness and levity 

 no less fatsd in applying them to distant regions where no order has 

 yet been ascertained. 



Captain Grant in his account of Cutch, and Mr. Malcolmson in 

 his description of a large portion of the Indian peninsula, have not 

 ventured to call the strata which they have examined by the names 

 which describe European formations. We may trust that, hereafter, 

 the admirable activity and resource which our countrymen display 

 in that wonderful appendage of our empire, will enable them to com- 

 municate to us a genuine Indian arrangement of secondary strata. 

 In the mean time, Mr. Malcolmson has most laudably employed him- 

 self in determining the age of the wide-spread igneous rocks of the 

 peninsula of India, with reference to the contiguous strata*. And 

 Dr. McCleland, who was associated with Mr. Griffith in the scientific 

 deputation sent under Dr. Wallich into Upper Asam, has, among other 

 geological observations, noted a raised bed, at 1500 feet above the 

 sea level, in which none of the species are identical with those of the 

 Bay of Bengal on the one hand, or the secondary strata on the north 

 of the Himalaya on the other ; but in which a resemblance was at 

 once recognised with the species of the Paris basin. 



This resemblance between the extinct animal population of regions 

 so remote from each other, is in itself remarkable enough. It is still 

 more curious to observe, that the same coincidence of the ancient 

 animals of France and India has recently been detected in another 

 case ; and what makes the circumstance stiU more remarkable is, that 

 the animal was not only new in both countries as a fossil genus, but 

 involved a transgression of the supposed boundaries of fossil forms. 

 Not only had no human bones been found in genuine strata, but as it 

 had been generally held, no traces of those creatures which most 

 nearly imitate the human form. This rule now no longer holds 

 good ; for during the past year the bones of monkeys have been dis- 

 covered both at Sansan, in France, in the Sewalik Hills in the north 

 of Hindostanf, and more recently under the city of Calcutta. 



That this is a highly interesting and important discovery, no one 

 who attends to the signification of geological speculations can doubt. 

 I do not know if there are any persons who lament, or any who 

 exult, that this discovery tends to obliterate the boundary between 

 the present condition of the earth, tenanted by man, and the former 

 stages through which it has passed. For my own part I can see no 

 such tendency. I have no belief that geology will ever be able to 

 point to the commencement of the present order of things, as a pro- 

 blem which she can solve, if she is allowed to make the attempt. The 

 gradation in form between man and other animals, a gradation which 

 we all recognise, and which, therefore, need not startle us because 



[* See present vol. p. 286.] [f See vol. xi. p. 33, and 208.] 



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