Conclusion. 565 
In concluding this Address, I can assure you, Gentlemen, that, 
although not prepared without some labour, its composition has af- 
forded me both gratification and instruction. Had I not felt a 
strong obligation to fulfil my duty, I should necessarily have been 
absorbed in the preparation of the work upon Russia to which I 
have alluded, and could not therefore have been imbued with an 
adequate sense of the vast progress which our science has recently 
made in all quarters of the globe. 
The chief aim of this Society has been to gather sound data 
for classification ; and, following out this principle, I have en- 
deavoured to show, how the order of succession established in our 
own isles, is now extended eastwards to the confines of Asia, and 
westwards to the back-woods of America. From such researches, 
and by contributions from our widely spread colonies, we have at 
length reached nearly all the great terms of general comparison. 
Besides ascertaining where the great masses of combustible 
matter lie, we can now affirm, that during the earliest period of life, 
conditions prevailed, indicating a prevalence over enormous spaces 
—if not almost universally—of the same climate, involving a 
very wide diffusion of similar inhabitants of the ocean. We have 
learned, that in the earliest of these stages of animal life, no 
vestige of the vertebrata has yet been found, whilst in the succeed- 
ing epochs of the Paleozoic age singular fishes appear, which, 
in proportion to their antiquity, are more removed from all 
modern analogies. In each of these early and long-continued 
periods, the shells preserving on the whole a community of 
character, differ from each other in each division—and in that 
later formation, where a very few only of the same types are visible, 
they are linked on to a new class of beings, the first created of 
those Saurians, whose existence is prolonged throughout the whole 
Secondary period; whilst we have this year seen reason to admit 
that even birds (some of them of gigantic size) may have been the 
cotemporaries of the first great lizards. With the close of the Pale- 
ozoic era we have also observed a gradual change in the plants of the 
older lands, and that the rank and tropical vegetation of the Carbo- 
niferous epoch is succeeded by a peculiar flora. In the next, or 
Triassic period, we have another flora, whilst new forms of fishes 
and mollusks indicate an approach to that period when the seas were 
tenanted by Belemnites and Ammonites, marking so broadly these 
secondary deposits with which British geologists have long been 
familiar, and which, commencing with the Lias, terminate with the 
Chalk. And lastly, from the dawn of existing races, we ascend 
through successive deposits gradually becoming more analogous to 
those of the present day, until at length we reach the bottoms of 
oceans so recently desiccated, that their shelly remains are undistin- 
guishable from those now associated with Man, the last created in 
this long chain of animal life in which scarcely a link is wanting !— 
all bespeaking a perfection and grandeur of design, in contem- 
plating which we are lost in admiration of creative power. 
Such results, grand as they are—nothing less in short than the 
