238 Address of the President of the British Association. 



such portions of the former ocean-bed as were covered with veg- 

 etation sufficient for their support ; and as these animals died, 

 their bones became enveloped in the accumulations of mud and 

 gravel, which were forming in the bays and estuaries. 



" This era also passed away — the elevatory movements con- 

 tinued — other masses of the bed of the chalk ocean, and of the 

 Wealden strata beneath, became dry land — and at length those 

 more recent deposits containing the remains of the herbivorous 

 mammalia which were the last tenants of the country. The 

 oak, elm, ash, and other trees of modern Europe, now sprang up 

 where the groves of palms and tree-ferns once flourished — the 

 stag, boar, and horse, ranged over the plains in which were en- 

 tombed the bones of the colossal reptiles — and finally, Man ap- 

 peared, and took possession of the soil. < 

 ."At the present time, the deposits containing the remains of 



the mammoth and other extinct mammalia, are the sites of towns 

 and villages, and support busy communities of the human race ; 

 the huntsman courses, and the shepherd tends his flocks on the 

 elevated masses of the bottom of the ancient chalk ocean — the 

 farmer reaps his harvests upon the cultivated soil of the deha of 

 the country of the Iguanodon — and the architect obtains from 

 beneath the petrified forest, the materials with which to construct 

 his temples and his palaces : while from these various strata, the 

 geologist gathers together the relics of the beings that lived and 

 died in periods of unfathomable antiquity, and of which the 

 very types have long since been obliterated from the face of the 

 earth, and by these natural memorials is enabled to determine the 

 nature and succession of those physical revolutions, which pre- 

 ceded all history and tradition." 



Art. XX. — Seventeenth Meeting of the British Association for 



the Advancement of Science* 



of 



We o 



mittee assembled. 



the British Association/' (held at Oxford on Wednesday, the 23d 

 of June, and the week thereafter,) " was much the same as on 

 former occasions, with such varieties only as the locality induced. 



w ~ ~ i summary. On Wednesday, the General Com- 



On Thursday, the work of the Sections be- 

 gan ; and Prof. Powell lectured in the Radcliffe Library, ° n 

 Shooting Stars. On Friday evening, Prof. Faraday delivered, at 



* From the London Athenaeum, Nos. 1026 and 1027, June 26, and July \^' 

 I he superior interest of the Address of the President of the British Association, 

 at Us late meeting, requires the omission of some other matter, which will 

 inserted in a future number. 



