1852 DISCUSSIONS AT GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY 197 



observe our body annually creeps higher and higher 

 up the table. We are now next the bigger wigs. 



25^/2. Good scrimmage between Sedgwick and 

 Murchison on the Lower Silurian and Cambrian 

 question. It was not an enlivening spectacle. Sedg 

 wick used very hard words. Murchison made a 

 spirited and dignified reply. He appealed to me, and 

 I aided in a speech giving a history of the survey of 

 Wales. 



2^th March. Logan s paper [On the Footprints 

 occurring in the Potsdam Sandstone of Canada] and 

 Owen s [Description of the Impressions and Footprints 

 of the Protichnites from the Potsdam Sandstone of 

 Canada 1 ] passed off well. Murchison made what 

 Sedgwick called a speech characterised by a sort of 

 bacchanalian joy at the tracks turning out not to 

 be tortoise tracks, and Sedgwick himself rejoiced that 

 the old resting-place of his mind was not disturbed by 

 such a terrible innovation. He did not like to be too 

 much disturbed. Lyell was disappointed, he said ; 

 then Forbes followed, and Owen rebuked them in his 

 reply for entertaining any other feeling than that of 

 joy at an error being corrected, and a scientific truth 

 partly elucidated. Mantell proposed that they were 

 the tracks of great trilobites, but no one seconded him, 

 or rather every one dissented, Burmeister s paper 

 having gone so far to prove that trilobites had soft 

 membranaceous appendages and no true feet. 



One entry regarding the Royal Institution Friday 

 evenings may be quoted : $th March. Heard Dr. 

 Mantell give a most amusing lecture on the Iguanodon 

 and other Wealden reptiles. It was so clever and 

 witty, that throughout it was greeted with rounds of 



1 Quart. Journ. Geol, Soc. viii. (1852), pp. 199, 214. 



