1864. | Geology and Paleontology. 479 
PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SocIEery. 
The last number of the Quarterly Journal of this Society can 
scarcely be said to be “full of interest” in other than a purely tech- 
nical sense; but the Anniversary Address of the President, Herr von 
Koenen’s paper on Oligocene Deposits in England, Professor Hind’s 
remarks on Glacial Drift, and a memoir on Permian Rocks, by Sir 
R. I. Murchison and Professor Harkness, all contain matter of general 
interest ; we shall, therefore, notice them first, and then discuss the 
Annual Report of the Council. 
1. Professor Ramsay’s Anniversary Address is prefaced, as usual, 
by the award of the Wollaston Medal and Donation-fund, the former 
of which was this year given to Sir R. I. Murchison; and were it not 
for the President’s explanation—that the distinguished recipient had 
served uninterruptedly on the Council of the Society for thirty-two 
years, and was thus prevented from having conferred upon him befcre 
an honour he so well deserves—we should have marvelled at the 
omission. The accident of his temporary retirement from the Coun- 
cil, as one of its senior members, has been well and gracefully taken 
advantage of by his associates for the purpose of showing their appre- 
ciation of his vast services to geology in a manner so agreable to 
himself. 
The Address itself is a continuation of that of last year, noticed in 
the last number of this Journal. As on the former occasion, Professor 
Ramsay discussed the ‘Breaks in the Succession of the British 
Paleozoic Strata,” so in this Address he treats more especially of the 
** Breaks in the Succession of the British Mesozoic Strata ;” but there 
are some collateral subjects discussed first, to which we must refer for 
a moment. 
The first subject is that of the “‘ Commencement of the Prevalence 
of Secondary Genera in Carboniferous Times,” and it is certainly a 
remarkable one as treated by Professor Ramsay. Every disbeliever 
in cataclysms and sudden great creations must have long been familiar 
with the idea that some of the secondary genera appeared by degrees 
for the first time during some one or more of the Palzozoic periods ; 
but, so far as we know, it has never before been shown what great 
fauna contains the first faint indication of secondary types. We may 
be certain of the existence of a needle in a haystack, but few of us have 
the energy or the skill to find it. But it is just such an operation as 
would be required in that case, that Professor Ramsay has performed 
with the vast mass of Paleozoic genera. 
Referring, next, to the enormous lapse of time between the Permian 
and the Trias, as evidenced by “the disturbance, contortion, partial 
upheaval into land, and vast denudations which the Paleozoic rocks 
underwent before and during the deposition of the New Red Sandstone 
in the west of Europe,’ and as sufficient reason why there should be 
so great a difference between the fauna of the latest Paleozoic period, 
and that of the earliest Secondary epoch, Professor Ramsay then dis- 
cusses the relations of the faune of the different Secondary formations 
