FORM, DRIFT, AND RHYTHM OF THE CONTINENTS ' 



By Prof. W. W. Watts, LL. D., Sc.D., F.R.S. 



It is now 67 years since the British Association enjoyed the hos- 

 pitality of the city of Norwich, a privilege which is being renewed 

 today under the most happy auspices. 



At that meeting we find the scientific community was particularly 

 interested in underground temperatures and tidal phenomena, in 

 the application of the spectroscope to celestial objects, and in the 

 discovery of the oldest Cambrian fossils and the earliest fossil 

 mammals then known. Many papers were read on local natural 

 history, including those on Norfolk farming and the drainage of the 

 county and of the Fens. 



In his address at the meeting the President, Sir Joseph D. Hooker, 

 made special reference to the work of Charles Darwin: not to the 

 Origin of Species, which had been acrimoniously discussed by the 

 Association on previous occasions, and notably at Oxford in 1860, 

 but to some of the work that followed. 



It should be remembered that Hooker was one of the three scientific 

 men, representing botany, zoology, and geology, whom Darwin had 

 selected as judges with whose opinion on the soundness of his theory 

 of the origin of species he would be content. The others were 

 Huxley and Lyell ; and of the three Lyell was the hardest to convince, 

 chiefly because the record of life in the past then furnished by the 

 rocks was manifestly so incomplete and unsatisfactory that its evi- 

 dence was insufficient to warrant a definite verdict. 



Lyell had set out to "treat of such features of the economy of 

 existing nature, animate and inanimate, as are illustrative of geology", 

 and to make "an investigation of the permanent effects of causes 

 now in action which may serve as records to after ages of the present 

 condition of the earth and its inhabitants." By laborious study of 

 the work of others, and by his own extensive travel and research, he 

 had been able to enunciate, for the inorganic world, the principle 

 of uniformitarianism, which in its original form we owe to Hutton. 



''■ Presidential address before the British Association, Norwich, 1935. Reprinted by 

 permission from the Report of the Association for 1935. 



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