1864.] ADDRESS BY SIR CHARLES LYELL. 389 



was with the confident hope that I should carry out this work, and 

 I do not mean to give it up. If being baffled had ever made me lose 

 heart, I should never have been here in the position which by your 

 kindness I now occupy. I intend to make another attempt, but 

 this time to the north of the Portuguese territory ; and I feel greatly 

 encouraged by the interest you show, as it cannot be for the person, 

 but from your sympathy for the cause of human liberty; for it 

 startles us to see a areat nation of our own blood despising the 

 African's claims to humanity, and drifting helplessly into a war 

 about him, and then drifting quite as helplessly into abolition 

 and slavery principles ; then, leading the Africans to fight. No 

 mighty event like this terrible war ever took place without teaching- 

 terrible lessons. One of these may be that, though " on the side 

 of the oppressor there is power, there be higher than they." With 

 respect to the African, neither drink, nor disease, nor slavery can 

 root him out of the world. T never had any idea of the prodig- 

 ious destruction of human life that takes place subsequently to the 

 slave-hunting, till I saw it ; and as this has gone on for centuries, 

 it gives a wonderful idea of the vitality of the nation. 



EXTRACTS FROM THE ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT, 

 SIR CHARLES LYELL, D.C.L., F.U.S. 



Gentlemen of the British Association, — The place where we 

 have been invited this year to hold our thirty-fourth meeting 

 is one of no ordinary interest to the cultivators of physical science. 

 It might have been selected by my fellow-laborers in geology as 

 a central point of observation, from which, by short excursi^ ns to 

 the east and west, they might examine those rocks which constitute, 

 on the one side, the more modern, and on other the more ancient 

 records of the past, while around them and at their feet lie monu- 

 ments of the middle period of the earth's history. But there are 

 other sites in England which might successfully compete with Bath 

 as good surveying stations for the geologist. What renders Bath 

 a peculiar point of attraction to the student of natural phenonjena 

 is its thermal and mineral waters, to the sanatory powers of which 

 the city has owed its origin and celebrity. The great volume and 

 high temperature of these waters render them not only unique 

 in our island, but perhaps without a paralled in the rest of Europe, 

 when we duly take into account their distance from the nearest 

 region of violent earthquakes or of active or extinct volcanoes. The 



Vol. I. AA No. 5 



