606 BEPORT — 1881. 



commended that geologists should examine the truth of that part of the theory 

 of Elie de Beaumont, in its application to England, Scotland, and Ireland, which 

 asserts that the lines of disturbance of the strata assignable to the same age are 

 parallel ; that Professor Phillips be requested to draw up a systematic catalogue of 

 all the organised fossils of Great Britain and Ireland ; and that Mr. Robert Steven- 

 son, civil engineer, be requested to prepare a report upon the waste and ertension 

 of the kind on the east coast of Britain, and the question of the ])ermane)ice of the 

 relative level of the sea and land. 



In 1881 it seems strange to us that, in 1831, with William Smith's map of 

 'The Strata of England and Wales, with part Scotland' before them, it should 

 have been considered necessary to institute an inquiry as to the truth of the 

 general parallelism of disturbed strata, which, in a limited area like England, had 

 suffered upheaval at difl'erent successive epochs ; and we may fancy the internal 

 smile with which Phillips, the nephew of Smith, regarded the needless proposal. 

 The masterpiece of the old land surveyor and civil engineer remains to this day 

 the foundation of all subsequent geological maps of England and Wales ; and as 

 an unaided effort of practical genius — for such it was — it seems impossible that it 

 should be surpassed, in spite of all the accuracy and detail which happily modem 

 science has introduced into modern geological maps. 



The first paper read at York, in the year 1831, was by Professor Sedgwick, 

 ' On the general structure of the Lake Mountains of the North of England.' This 

 was followed by ' Supplementary Observations on the Structure of the Austrian 

 and Bavarian Alps,' by the Secretary of the Society, Mr. Murchison, a memoir 

 at that time of the highest value, and still valuable, both in a stratigraphical point 

 of view, and also for the light which it threw on the nature of the disturbance? 

 that originated the Alpine mountains, and their relations in point of date to the 

 far more ancient mountains of Bohemia. In his elaborate address in the same 

 year, on his retiring from the president's chair, he largely expatiates on the paral- 

 lelism of many of the great lines of disturbance of what were then distinguished 

 as the more ancient schistose and greywacke mountains, and quotes the authority 

 of Elie de Beaumont for the statement, ' that mountain chains elevated at the 

 same period of time, have a general parallelism in the bearing of their component 

 strata.' On a gi-eat scale this undoubtedly holds true, as, for example, in the case 

 of the Scandinavian chain, and the more ancient palaeozoic rocks north of Scot- 

 laud, Cumberland, and even of great part of Wales. The same holds good with 

 regard to the parallelism of the much more recent mountain ranges of the Apen- 

 nines, the Alps, the Caucasus, the Atlas, and the Himalayas, all of which strike 

 more or less east and west, and are to a great extent of post-Eocene, and even partly 

 of post-Miocene age. The same, however, is not precisely the case ■with the 

 Apalachian chain and the Rocky Mountains of North America, the first of which 

 trends N.N.W., and the latter N.N.E. The remarkable chain of the Ural Moun- 

 tains trends nearly true north and south, and is parallel to no other chain that 

 I know of, unless it be the Andes and the mountains of Japan. It is worthy of 

 notice that the chain of the Ural is of pre-Permian age according to Murchison, 

 while Darwin has shown that the chief upheaval of the Andes took place in post- 

 Cretaceous times. 



The Apalachian chain is chiefly of post-Carboniferous date, and the Rocky 

 Mountains have been re-disturbed and re-elevated as late as post-Miocene times. 



In the same address Professor Sedgwick entered an eloquent protest against the 

 broad uniformitarian views so powerfully advocated in the first edition of Lyell's 

 ' Principles of Geology ' in 18-30, in which, throwing aside all discussion concern- 

 ing cosmogony, he took the world as he found it, and agreeing with Hutton that 

 geology is in no ways concerned with, and not sufficiently advanced to deal ' with 

 questions as to the origin of things,' he saw that a great body of new data were 

 required such as engaged the attention of the Geological Society (founded in 1807), 

 ■which along with other foreign societies and private work has at length brought 

 geological science to its present high position. 



And what is that position ? With great and consentient labour many men 

 gifted with a knowledge of stratigraphical and palteontological geology, have, so 



