TBANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 621 



in geology also a recurrence of effects indicates a recurrence of the same causes. 

 The facts which I have brought before you have justified, I trust, my opening 

 remarks as to the rich harvest which yet awaits investigations into the structure 

 of the fragmental rocks. To resume the simile then used, I see the land of 

 promise, stretching far away from beneath my feet, till it seems to melt into the 

 dim and as yet unknown distance. Not speedily will its riches be exhausted. Our 

 hands will long have vanished, our voices will long have been still, before the 

 work of discovery is ended and men have reached the shore of that circumfluent 

 ocean which, at least in this life, limits their finite powers. 



The following Papers were read : — 



1. On the Geology of the Birmhigham District. 

 By Professor C. Lapwokth, LL.D., F.G.8. 



The town of Birmingham lies exactly in the geographical centre of England,, 

 midway between sea and sea. This, too, is its geological position, for it is built 

 upon and surrounded on all sides by strata belonging to the New Red Sandstone,, 

 the place of which is exactly in the middle of the accepted series of geological 

 formations. To the east of the town lie the gently incline! Neozoic strata of the 

 Jurassic and Cretaceous, &c., dipping in regular order, sheet below sheet, till they 

 become wholly horizontal in the neighbourhood of London. To the west of the 

 town lie the bent, broken, and more or less altered Palaeozoic foi-mations, stretching 

 onwards through Shropshire and North Wales, until they attain their greatest amount 

 of wiinkling and metamorphism in the slaty districts of Snowdon and Anglesea. 

 AVithin the limits of the Birmingham district itself we find almost every stage of 

 transition between these extreme geological types. In some localities, as in the mid- 

 Warwickshire plain, we find the strata as fiat and almost as unaltered as in the day 

 in which they were originally laid down. In others, as at the Lickey, they are 

 folded into steep arches, shattered and faulted ; and iu others, as in Charnwood 

 Forest, they are crushed into slates. "Within a radius of thirty miles of Birming- 

 ham we find representatives of all the geological formations, from the so-called 

 Laurentian and Cambrian up to the base of the Cretaceous. The Carboniferous 

 rocks of the Birmingham district have long formed the accepted model of those 

 British rock formations which are remarkable fi-om the economic point of view. Its- 

 ' Black Country ' is Dickens' classical type of a land given over body and soul to 

 mining and manufacture. The local Triassic formation is the British agricultural 

 system ])a}- excellence, and the Midland plain of Warwick, Stratford, and Worcester 

 is the heart of sylvan England— the Arden of Shakespeare, and the Loamshire 

 immortalised in the works of George Eliot. 



Among those who studied the geology offlie Birmingham district before the 

 days of the Geological Survey, we find the names of many of those most famous in 

 the annals of British geology :— Professor Playfair, William Smith, Dean Buckland, 

 AVilliam Yates, and Sir Roderick Murchison. To Murchison, indeed, the neigh- 

 bourhood was always a favourite one. Its strata afforded him some of the most 

 striking types of the formations and fossils illustrated in his gi-eat work, the 

 ' Silurian System.' The district was mapped about thirty years ago by the officers 

 of the Geological Survey— by Professor J. B. Jukes (a native of Birmingham), 

 Professor Hull (Director of the Geological Survey of Ireland), and Mr. Howell 

 (Director of the Scottish Survey). Jukes's ' South Staffordshire Coalfield ' is one 

 of our modern geological classics ; and Hull's ' Permian and Triassic Rocks of the 

 Midlands ' is the accepted authority upon the Red rocks of Britain. After the 

 survey, until very lately, little geological work was done bv Midland geologists. 

 The members of the various local societies rested in the easy assurance that there 

 was nothing more to be accomplished. Withm the last few years, however, there 

 has been a great revival of interest. Mr. Samuel Allporfs investigation of the 

 microscopical characters of the Midland volcanic rocks inaugurated the recent 

 revival and brilliant advancement of petrography in Britain. Dr. HoU worked 

 out the detailed geology of the Malvern Hills ; Dr. Charles Callaway discovered 



