124 The Fourteenth General Meeting. 



sands in the centre of our county whicli connect themselves with 

 the Oolithic series below them, and those which belong to the 

 Greensand and cretaceous deposits above — yet as an outline map is 

 the right thing to be filled up by the accurate topographer, so may 

 a very superficial but comprehensive survey rudely lay out the 

 field within which are enclosed the minute and accurate observations 

 which are the main office of these local associations. 



We have indeed in our number those who are entitled to 

 generalize, because they unite actual experience with systematized 

 science. I need not scruple to name Mr. Cunnington and Dr. 

 Thurnam as men who form links between the two branches of our 

 operations ; who connect the palaeontology of the geologist with 

 faithful research into the earliest vestiges of our race inhumed 

 among us, and trace its progress from the pre-historic, through the 

 traditionary to the truly historic. 



In both branches our county afibrds a field of considerable extent 

 and interest. To begin chronologically. We have not indeed 

 those igneous rocks which were a molten and consequently became 

 a globular mass, when " the earth was without form and void," 

 when "darkness" must have been "on the face of the deep," as 

 the whole contents of the ocean must, from the heat, have been 

 suspended in the atmosphere ; transparent indeed where the heat 

 was most intense, but gradually condensing outwards into a depth 

 of cloud of which we can have no idea. We have not, I say, these 

 igneous rocks by whose partial cooling and elevation the dry land 

 emerged, and a basin was made for the sea. We have not the 

 great coal beds, where "a tree having the fruit of a tree," i.e. 

 arborescent vegetation with its appropriate reproductive system, 

 flourished in the stovelike heat, which, produced from beneath and 

 protected from radiation by the constant cloud, made it independent 

 of latitude. Light indeed there was, for the waters which were 

 above the firmament had been to some extent separated from the 

 tepid waters which, having already been able to settle in the hol- 

 lows left by the elevation cf rocks, were below it, so that day and 

 night could be discriminated. Yet was the cloud still so continuous 

 that the Heavenly bodies had not yet appeared. 



