PROCEEDINGS OF PROVINCIAL SOCIETIES. 



323 



proceedings of the Society during the past year, and offer one or 

 two observations upon its objects and future prospects. This peri- 

 odical retrospect, when we arrive at the key-stone which separates 

 the past from the coming year, prudence dictates to societies not less 

 than to individual men. ' On the first evening of the session, our 

 esteemed and indefatigable secretary, Dr. Ward, whose removal 

 from amongst us we must all regret, delivered a very interesting 

 and instructive paper, which has since been printed in a respectable 

 periodical, the Analyst, upon that extraordinary remnant of ante- 

 diluvian life, the Ichthyosaurus. When "it is considered that the 

 only unerring indications of the antiquity of the strata which com- 

 pose that part of the crust of our globe with which we are ac- 

 quainted (excepting some fragments of older strata) are derived 

 from the animal and vegetable remains which they contain, it is 

 astonishing that, by the aids of comparative anatomy and analogical 

 reasoning, upon a basis apparently so inadequate, so solid a super- 

 structure as the science of Geology now presents has been raised. 

 At the talismanic touch of the immortal Cuvier, the scattered facts 

 relating to this branch of knowledge assumed the symmetry and co- 

 herence of science ; and his labours have been ably followed up by 

 many illustrious men, and particularly by our distinguished country- 

 men, Mr. Lyell, Professor Sedgwick, and Dr. Buckland. In its in- 

 fancy, Geology had to struggle against uncommon difficulties, arising 

 from gross ignorance, and the most perverse misapprehension of its 

 objects and its tendencies. Some of the opponents of geological 

 truth, by their virulence and intolerance, remind us of the Brahmin 

 who, seizing a stone, crushed to dust the microscope that first 

 showed him living things amongst the vegetables of his daily food. 

 Surely the laws of Nature and of material phenomena can never 

 speak other language than that of eternal truth. It has been justly 

 said that " conflicting falsehoods we can comprehend, but truths can 

 never war against each other ;" and that " we have nothing to fear 

 from the results of our inquiries, provided they be followed in the 

 laborious but secure road of induction." 



At its next meeting the Society was favoured with a paper by 

 Mr. William Hawkes Smith, entitled " On Meteoric Stones, prin- 

 cipally with a view to a Shower of Talc, which fell in 1807-'' 

 This paper led to a lengthened and interesting discussion upon the 

 various conjectures which have been advanced to account for the 

 origin and formation of meteoric bodies, all of which conjectures 

 seem to be attended with some startling difficulty. Until of late 

 the most plausible hypothesis was considered to be that which attri- 

 buted the descent of these bodies to a projectile force at the moon's 

 surface ; and the necessary velocity has been computed to be that of 

 three times the swiftness of a cannon ball, which would bring such 

 a body to the earth in two days and a half. But it seems difficult 

 to account, on that hypothesis, for the generation of the great heat 

 with which meteoric stones are attended, to say nothing of the want 

 of coincidence with the moon's position, she being as often in their 



