TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C, 641 



Section —GEOLOGY. 

 President of the Section— Professor W. W. Watts, M.Sc, Sec.G.S, 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



There are two circumstances which invest the fact of my presidency of the 

 Section this year with peculiar pleasure to myself. The first public lecture I ever 

 gave was in the Town Hall at Birkdale in 1882, and the first of the fifteen 

 meetings of the British Association which I have attended was that held in 

 Southport in 1883. 



There is still a third reason, that this meeting is in many respects a geological 

 meeting. A palaeobotanist is presiding over Section K, and the Council has 

 invited, for the first time for many years, one geologist to deliver an evenino- dis- 

 course and another to give the address to artisans. I need hardly say that we are 

 all looking forward to the lectures of Dr. Rowe and Dr. Flett with keen anticipa- 

 tion. To the one for his successful use of new methods of developing fossils and 

 his scientific employment of the material thus prepared' in stratigraphic research • 

 to the other for his prompt, daring, and businesslike expedition to the scene of 

 recent volcanic activity in the "West Indies, during which he and his colleague, 

 Dr. Tempest Anderson, collected so many important facts and brought away so 

 much new knowledge of the mechanism of that disastrous and exceptional volcanic 

 outbreak. 



The Functions of Geology in Education and in Practical Life. 



At the meeting in 1890, at Leeds, my old friend Professor A. H. Green de- 

 livered an address to the Section which has generally been regarded as expressino- 

 an opinion adverse to the use of the Science of Geology as an educational agent! 

 Some of the expressions used by him, if taken alone, certainly seem to bear out 

 this interpretation. For instance, he says : ' Geologists are in danger of becoming 

 loose reasouers ' ; further he says : ' I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that when 

 Geology is to be used as a means of education there are certain attendant risks 

 that need to be carefully and watchfully guarded against.' Then he adds : ' Infer- 

 ences based on such incomplete and shaky foundations must necessarily be largely 

 hypothetical.' 



Such expressions, falling from an accomplished mathematician and one who 

 was such an eminent field geologist as Professor Green, the author of some of the 

 most trustworthy and most useful of the Geological Survey Memoirs, and above all 

 one of the clearest of our teachers and the writer of the best and most eminently 

 practical text-book on Physical Geology in this or any other language, naturallv 

 exercised great influence on contemporary thought. And I should be as unwise a'a 

 I am certainly rash in endeavouring to controvert them but for the fact that 

 I think he only half believed his own words. Jle remarks that ' to be forewarned 

 1903, T T 



