566 Geological Society: Anniversary Address, 1843. 
records of creation—are however but a portion of the labours of 
geologists. They have also struggled to explain the causes 
of those great revolutions. In some continents, it is true, the 
pages in the book of nature are, as it were, unrufled; for, by 
whatever agency effected, it is certain that beds of vast ancient 
oceans have been so equably elevated and depressed, and again so 
steadily elevated from beneath the sea, that the continuity of their 
rocky deposits over areas larger than our kingdoms of Western 
Europe is unbroken, and their original condition almost entirely 
preserved. In other regions, on the contrary, the sediments in the sea 
and the masses of the land have been pierced by numerous out- 
bursts of igneous and gaseous matters, accompanied by violent 
oscillations and breaks, whereby the chronicles of succession have 
been sorely defaced, and often rendered more illegible than the most 
carbonized of the papyri found under the lava of Vesuvius. Nay, 
so intensely has this metamorphism operated, that obliterating all 
vestiges of former life, and concealing them from us, we have been 
sorely puzzled to ascertain by what powerful physical agency such 
mighty changes can have been accomplished,—changes by which 
the strata have been convoluted into forms grotesque as the serpent’s 
coil, inverted in their order, or shivered into party-coloured and 
erystalline fragments. And yet in these broken and mineralized 
masses, as another branch of our science teaches, are found the 
precious ores and the metals most useful to mankind. 
Such complicated relations and such changes in original structure 
call forth the application of the highest powers of physical science; 
not only involving the agency of that great central heat, to which 
geologists have willingly referred, but also invoking the aid of 
agents, some of them still mysterious, by which electricity and mag- 
netism are bound together in the cycle of terrestrial phenomena. 
To few of us is it given to venture with firm steps into that region ; 
and, though I hope to live to see some of these questions answered, 
Iam well satisfied to have been among you when such solid ad- 
vances have been made, in deciphering the mutations of the surface 
of the earth, and in the compilation of a true history of its earlier 
inhabitants. 
Having now, Gentlemen, completed the term of my service, I 
bid you farewell, as friends in whose society, whilst acquiring know- 
ledge, I have passed the happiest days of my life. Large as our 
numbers are, and branching out, as our inquiries do, into all the 
paths of philosophic research, the Geological Society has always 
held firmly together by a principle of good and high feeling among 
its active members. I have, indeed, deeply felt the honour of pre- 
siding over men who, in the course of a quarter of a century, have 
demonstrated, that there is no such thing as “ odiwm geologicum,” and 
whose members, rivals as they must be, have only sought to excel 
each other in their ardent search after truth. 
By the choice of my successor you cannot fail to perpetuate this 
good feeling, for in him you recognize the philosopher, who, passing 
through other phases, returns to the object of his first love, In him 
