180 Prof. Sedgwick's Remarks on the President's Address at 



days. But the languor of ill-health so much retarded the simple 

 task of revision (undertaken in the hope of making a very ill- 

 written MS. legible in my absence), that the concluding sheets 

 of my paper were not received by the Secretary before the 27th 

 of IMarch. It was finally brought before the Society on the 3rd 

 of May, while I was in residence at Norwich, and incapable of 

 leaving it for so much as a single day. I make no complaint on 

 account of this long delay. Nay, I am vdlling to believe that the 

 delay was meant in courtesy to myself, and that the President 

 waited in the hope that I might at length be enabled to attend 

 the meeting when my paper was to be read. 



Very soon after the 3rd of May I had a letter from Mr. Ha- 

 milton, informing me that my first paper had been laid befoi'e 

 the Society, but that my second paper had not been read, and 

 could not be published in the Journal. It appeared to me at 

 the time (and I think quite naturally), that in this letter there 

 was an insinuation of something very like unfair dealing on my 

 part : viz. that while professing to send a paper which I had 

 offered to the Society for their first meeting in November 1853, 

 I had virtually changed its character by tacking to it a large and 

 unacknowledged addition. Under this impression 1 sent an 

 angry reply to Mr. Hamilton's letter ; and in his rejoinder he 

 made an ample and courteous apologyfor "his mistake,^' — stating 

 among other matters that he had been misled hy the vf ord sequel 

 in one of my former notes, which was addressed (as before 

 stated) to the Secretary of the Geological Society. He may also, 

 I think, have been misled by the interval of fifteen days which 

 elapsed between the reception of the earlier and latter portion of 

 my MS. During those days I was, however, in a condition 

 which left me neither the will nor the power to add much matter 

 to my paper ; and as a simple fact, it was sent (with the excep- 

 tion of such verbal corrections as every author is allowed to make 

 during the revision of his MS.), word for word, as I had first 

 drawn it up for the Society in October 1853. 



What took place after Mr. Hamilton's rejoinder requires no 

 long comment. In neither of his letters written after the 3rd of 

 Majr, was there the least hint that any part of my paper had passed 

 through the usual form of reference; nor was it possible for 

 me to conclude that the whole of it had been accepted by the 

 Council. How was I to believe that he could ever think of con- 

 cealing from the Council the fact that I had sent them two papers 

 instead of one ; or, perhaps more correctly, that I had so doctored 

 my old paper (to borrow a graphic expression from ]Mr. Babbage) 

 as to deprive it of its identity ? In the four pages making the con- 

 clusion of my paper, I knew that there was matter to which the 

 Council might perhaps object; and when they had learnt 



