601 



SECTION C— GEOLOGY. 



President op the Section — Professor T. G. Bonnet, D.Sc, LL.D., F.R.S., 



F.S.A., F.G.S. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 



I HAVE felt it a great honour and an especial pleasure to be asked to preside at the 

 meeting of Section C in Birmingham. A great honoiu", because of the repute of 

 my predecessors ; an especial pleasure because, as born in the Midlands, I am 

 naturally proud of the Midland metropolis, its intellectual activity, and its com- 

 mercial enterprise. Besides this there are few towns in England where I number 

 more friends of kindred tastes than in Birmingham. Geology especially seems to 

 thrive in this district, and little wonder wben you reckon among your residents, in 

 addition to a host of other workers, such leaders as Grosskey, onalleus ei-raticorum, 

 Allport, who taught me how to work with the microscope, and Lapworth, to 

 whose genius my duller mind is under constant obligation. 



The addresses delivered at the annual meetings of the British Association afford 

 a convenient opportunity for what may be termed stock-taking in some branch of 

 science which has especially attracted the attention of the author ; for a brief re- 

 view of past progress ; for a glance forward over the rich fields which still await 

 exploration. We may compare ourselves to pioneers in a land as yet imperfectly 

 known, the resources of which are only beginning to be developed. Taking our 

 stand upon some vantage-ground at the border of the clearings, we glance forward 

 over plains as yet untrodden, over forests as yet untracked, to consider in what 

 ■ directions and by what methods of investigation new lands can be won through 

 peaceful conquest, new treasures added to the world's intellectual wealth. 



I purpose, then, on the present occasion to offer to you a few remarks upon a 

 branch of geological investigation which appears to me full of promise for future 

 workers. The keynote of my address might be conveyed in the following sentence : 

 ' The apphcation of microscopic analysis to discovering the physical geography of 

 bygone ages.' The ultimate aim of geological researches is obtaining answers, in 

 the widest and fullest sense, to these two problems in the history of our globe — 

 the evolution of life upon it, and the evolution of its physical features. In the 

 former a host of labourers, before and since the epoch of Darwin's great book, have 

 been employed in collecting and co-ordinating facts, and in framing hypotheses by 

 scientific induction. In the latter the workers are fewer, but the results obtained 

 are neither small nor unhopeful. In the past generation, men like Godwin-Austen 

 pointed out the principles of work and gathered no small harvest, but in the present 

 the application of the microscope to the investigation of rock structure has facilitated 

 research by furnishing us with an instrument of precision ; this, by disclosing to 

 us the more minute mineral composition and structural peculiarities of rocks, 

 •enables us to recognise fragments, and sometimes even to determine the source of 

 the smaller constituents in a composite clastic rock. The microscope, in short, 

 enables us to declare an identity where formerly only a likeness could be asserted, 

 to augment largely in all cases the probabilities for or against a particular hypo- 

 thesis, and to substitute in many a demonstration for a conjecture. 



