XXXIi REPORT—1846. 
and Eastern Europe, including Turkey*, and even parts of Siberia have been 
brought into accordance with typical strata. France has been accurately 
classified and illustrated by the splendid map of Elie de Beaumont and Du- 
frenoy; and whilst, by the labours of Deshayes and others, its tertiary fossils 
have been copiously described, the organic remains of its secondary strata are 
now undergoing a complete aualysis in the beautiful work of M. Alcide d’Or- 
bigny. Belgium, whose mineral structure and geological outlines have been 
delineated by D’Omalius d’Halloy and Dumont, has produced very perfect 
monographs of its palzozoic and tertiary fossils; the first in the work of 
M. de Koningk, the second in the recently published monograph of M. Nyst. 
Germany, led on by Von Buch, has shown that she can now as materially 
strengthen tlie zoological and botanical groundworks of the science, as in the 
days of Werner she was eminent in laying those mineralogical foundations 
which have been brought so near to perfection by the labours of several living 
men. So numerous in fact have been the recent German contributions, that 
I cannot permit myself to specify the names of individuals in a country which 
boasts so many excellent geologists. As distinctly connected, however, with 
the objects of this Meeting, I must be permitted to state that the ingenious 
botanist Goppert, whose works, in combiuation with those of Adolphe Brong- 
niart in France, have shed so much light on fossil plants, has just sent to me, 
for communication to our Geological Section, the results of his latest inqui- 
ries into the formation of the coal of Silesia—results which will be the more 
interesting to Dr. Buckland and the geologists of England, who have most 
attended to this subject, because they are founded on data equally new and 
original. Italy has also, to a great extent, been presented to us in its 
general geological facies, through the labours of Sismonda, Marmora, Pareto, 
Pasini, Catullo and others; whilst our kinsmen of the far West, with the 
true enterprise of the Saxon race, have so laid open the structure of their 
wide-spreading States, that our countryman Lyell has informed us, that the 
instructive map which accompanies his work upon North America is simply 
the grouping together of data prepared by native State geologists, which he 
has paralleled with our well-known British types. 
If then the astronomer has, to a vast extent, expounded the mechanism of 
the heavens; if lately, through his large, new telescope, our associate the 
Earl of Rosse has assigned a fixity and order to bodies which were pre- 
viously viewed as mere nebule floating in space, and has also inferred that the 
surface-cavities in our nearest neighbour of the planetary system are analo- 
gous to the volcanic apertures and depressions of the earth ; the geologist, 
contributing data of another order to the storehouse of natural knowledge, 
has determined, by tangible proofs, the very manner in which our planet has 
been successively enveloped in divers cerements, each teeming with peculiar 
forms of distinct life, and has marked the revolutions which have interfered 
with these successive creations, from the earliest dawn of living things to the 
limits of the historic era. In short, the fundamental steps gained in geology 
since the early days of the British Association, are so remarkable and so 
numerous, that the time has now come fora second report upon the progress 
of this science, which may I trust be prepared for an approaching Meeting. 
Intimately connected with these broad views of the progress of geology is 
the appearance of the first volume of a national work by Sir Henry De la 
Beche and his associates in the Geological Survey of Great Britain. Fol- 
lowing, as it does, upon the issue of numerous detailed coloured maps and 
* See the geological map of Turkey by Boué, and that of Russia and the Ural Mountains 
by my coadjutors and myself. 
