2 PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



constitution and order of superposition, fossils having a very subordi- 

 nate place, and are only made use of to indicate the beds with which 

 they are associated. Professor Prestwich's two recently published 

 volumes embodying chemical, physical, and strato-geographical 

 geology treat exhaustively of this phase of the science, while the 

 labours of Owen, Huxley, Hulke, Lyddeker, &c., in animal 

 palaeontology, and of Carruthers, Starkie Gardner, Clement Eeid, 

 and Count Saporta in botanical palaeontology trace the various 

 changes animal and plant-life have undergone from the remotest 

 time to the present. Inductive genius has never been exercised 

 more successfully than by the late Mr. Godwin Austen, to whose 

 inspiration we are mainly indebted for the discovery of coal near 

 Dover, which is likely to prove of much national importance and 

 restore to the southern districts of England the mineral industries 

 which they lost when the iron ores of Wales and the north of 

 England associated with coal were found could be more economi- 

 cally smelted than the ferruginous beds of the Weald by the fuel 

 supplied from the forests of Kent and Sussex. From the days of 

 Buckland and Conybeare, the relation of the Belgian coalfields 

 and those of the north of Erance with the coalfields of Somerset- 

 shire was suspected. In the year 1856 Mr. Godwin Austen sent 

 forth his memorable paper, which was read before the Geological 

 Society of England in 1856, " On the possible extension of the 

 Coal Measures beneath the South-Eastern part of England," in 

 which was shown the probability of the occurrence of coal near 

 enough to the surface to be profitably worked in Kent, Sussex, and 

 the Thames Valley. A series of coalfields exist in a direct line 

 from Minden in Hanover to the neighbourhood of Calais, of which 

 the basin of the Ruhr in Westphalia is the largest, its estimated 

 area being 2,800 square miles ; those of Osnabriick and Aix la 

 Chapelle are also in the German territory. Belgium has two 

 large coal-basins in the Province of Hainault arid N"amur ; 

 while Valenciennes and the Departments of the Nord and of the 

 Pas de Calais yield abundant supplies in the French territory. 

 Mr. Godwin Austen considered that the whole of the area was once 



