4.90 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 
Section C.—GEOLOGY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE Secti0on.—Professor J. W. Grecory, D.Sc., F.R.S. 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 1. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
I. The Geological Society of London. 
1907! This is the centenary year of the Geological Society of London; next 
month the British geologists will celebrate the event, and their pleasure will he 
enhanced by the sympathetic presence of a distinguished company of foreign 
eologists. 
With a just feeling of satisfaction may we celebrate this event; for to the 
Geological Society of London is due the conversion of Geology from a fanciful 
speculation to an ordered science. Yet so quietly has this society done its work 
that the debt due to it is inadequately realised. When we consider what the world 
owes to Geology in respect of its economic guidance—the intellectual stimulus of 
its conceptions—the reverence it inspires for the venerable and majestic universe— 
its liberating influence from dogma—we may rightly regard the work of the 
Geological Society, as one of the most valuable British contributions to intellectual 
progress during the nineteenth century. 
A hundred years ago the spirit of the eighteenth century still controlled much 
of the then orthodox Geology. Jameson's ‘ Elements of Geognosy,’ of which the 
preface is dated January 15, 1808, taught, as the certain conclusions of Geology, 
doctrines that had been reached by applying prejudiced speculation to imaginary 
facts. It was a manual of pure, a priori, Wernerian Geology. The author 
claimed that to Werner ‘we owe almost everything that is truly valuable in this 
important branch of knowledge’; and that it was Werner ‘ who had discovered 
the general structure of the crust of the globe and pointed out the true mode of 
examining and ascertaining those great relations which it is one of the principal 
objects of geognosy to investigate,’ 
But Jameson’s book was the death-song of Wernerian Geology in British 
science. A new Geology was developing; and the Geological Society of London 
ushered in its birth. No more should observations be made through the distorting 
medium of preconceived fancies! No more should Geology be inspired by that 
heedless spirit, which cares not to distinguish between fancy and fact! With 
youthful vigour the new Geology would have nothing to do with the search for 
cosmogonies and such like fancy foods; and the Geological Society of London 
should be nourished on unadulterated facts. 
The time was ripe for the change. No less a person than Goethe, once an 
enthusiastic votary of Geology, was, in his play of ‘Faust,’ holding up its 
teachers to ridicule. The theories ‘evolved from the inner consciousness’ of 
Continental Neptunists and Plutonists were to Goethe excellent subjects for 
caricature. It was then the Englishman, Greenough, founded a society to turn 
Geology from the pursuit of fleeting fancies and lead her to the study of sober 
