1852 DISCUSSIONS AT GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY 197 



observe our body annually creeps higher and higher 

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



* 2^th. 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. 



