352 Notes and Comments. 



A LOST OPPORTUNITY. 



We don't know what was in the mind of the Committee 

 when Professor Bonney was selected as the President for the 

 Sheffield meeting, but certainly the general wish of the scientific 

 world was that the esteemed professor would deal with that 

 i)ranch of science which he has made particularly his own, and 

 towards which he has made such valuable contributions, viz., 

 petrology. Certainly no place could have been more appro- 

 priate for such an address than Sheffield, Sorby's city, where 

 petrology had its birth. As yet no sufficient appreciation has 

 been made of the extraordinary pioneer work which Sorby did ; 

 work which has been of such enormous practical and economi- 

 cal importance. Sheffield has benefitted from his researches 

 as much as any other place, if not more. Professor Bonney might 

 well have taken advantage of his high position in the scientific 

 world, in his capacity as President of the British Association, 

 and devoted his address to a review of the various far-reaching 

 directions which the results of Sorby's work have attained. 

 Or he might well have confined his address to some purely 

 petrological subject. In fact, the Professor evidently antici- 

 pated that something of the kind would be expected, as he 

 stated : ' I do not, however, propose, as you might naturally 

 expect, to discuss some branch of petrology, though for this, no 

 place could be more appropriate than Sheffield, since it was 

 the birthplace and the life-long home of Henry Chfton Sorby, 

 who may truly be called the father of that science.' 



GLACIERS 



Instead, the Professor preferred to deal with a much less 

 stable subject — ice-work in western Europe. He is one of the 

 old school of ' wind and water ' geologists (as one writer has 

 expressed it), and in his seventy-seventh year, he still prefers 

 to adhere to the views he published years and years ago, and to 

 endeavour to bolster them up by new arguments, rather than 

 follow in the wake of almost every other geologist of note, and 

 admit that land ice has had a great share in the moulding of 

 the present surface features of many parts of Britain. 



PAST AND PRESENT. 



Those who have closely followed the glacial controversy in 

 recent years, and have witnessed the change that has taken 

 place (and nowhere more noticeable than at the meetings of 

 Section C at the British Association), will perhaps be able to 



Naturalist, 



