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and immediate utility, the remarkable results of these skilful and elaborate 
experiments give them a character of national importance, and justly entitle 
_ the authors and the body which has aided them to the public thanks. 
_ After this glance at the subjects of purely physical science treated of in 
_ the last volume of our Transactions, let us now consider the domains of 
natural history ; and as one of the cultivators of a science which has derived 
its main support and most of its new and enlarged views from naturalists, 
let me express the obligation which geologists are under to this Association, 
for having aided so effectively in bringing forth the zoological researches 
of Owen, Agassiz, and Edward Forbes. These three distinguished men 
have themselves announced, that in default of our countenance and assist- 
ance, they would not have undertaken, and never could have completed, 
some of their most important inquiries. Agassiz, for example, had not 
otherwise the means of comparing the ichthyolites of the British Isles with 
those of the continent of Europe. Without this impulse, Owen would 
not have applied his profound knowledge of comparative anatomy to British 
fossil saurians ; and Edward Forbes might never have been the explorer of _ 
the depths of the Zgean, nor have revealed many hitherto unknown laws 
of submarine life, if his wishes and suggestions had not met with the warm 
support of our body, and been supported by its strongest recommendations 
to the Naval authorities. 
: Such allusions to naturalists, whose works have afforded the firmest sup- 
ports to geology, might lead me to dilate at length on the recent progress of 
this science; but as the subject has been copiously treated at successive 
anniversaries of the Geological Society of London, and has had its recent 
advances so clearly enunciated by the actual President of that body who now 
presides over our Geological Section *, I shall restrain my “ esprit de corps” 
whilst I briefly advert to some of the prominent advances which geologists 
have made. When our associate Conybeare reported to us at our second 
meeting, on the actual state and ulterior prospects of what he well termed the 
“archeology of the globe,” he dwelt with justice on the numerous researches 
in different countries which had clearly established the history of a descent 
as it were into the bowels of the earth—which led us, in a word, downwards 
through those newer deposits that connect high antiquity with our own 
_ period, into those strata which support our great British coal-fields. Beyond 
this however the perspective was dark and doubtful— 
“Res alta terra et caligine mersas.” 
_ Now, however, we have dispersed this gloom, and by researches first 
carried out to a distinct classification in the British Isles, and thence ex- 
_ tended to Russia and America, geologists have shown that the records of 
succession, as indicated by the entombment of fossil animals, are as une- 
quivocally developed in these very ancient or palzozoic strata as in any of 
the overlying or more recently formed deposits. After toiling many years in 
this department of the science, in conjunction with Sedgwick, Lonsdale, De 
_ Verneuil, Keyserling, and others of my fellow-labourers, I have arrived at 
_ the conclusion, that we have reached the very genesis of animal life upon 
_ the globe, and that no separate and clearly definable “ vestigia retrorsum ” 
will be found beneath that protozoic or Lower Silurian group, in the great 
inferior mass of which scarcely a vertebrated animal has yet been detected, 
amid the profusion of the lower orders of marine animals entombed in it. 
But however this may be, it is certain that in the last few years all Central 
* Mr. Leonard Horner. 
