TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 631 



Section C— GEOLOGY. 

 President op the Sectiox — L. Fletcheb, M.A., F.R.S., F.G.S. 



THURSDA Y, A UG UST 9. 



The President delivered tlie following Address : — 



With an anxious desire to conform to the traditions of the past, I have sought in the 

 Reports of the Association for guidance in my present difficulty, and, doing so, have 

 remarked that it is customary for a president, on first taking the Chair, to express 

 a deep sense of unworthiness for the position to which he has been called. My 

 first duty, then, seemed a simple and obvious one ; till I further remarked, to my 

 dismay,that the more able and distinguished the President the more humble have been 

 the terms in which such expression has been made. Hence I feel that it may appear 

 to you presumptuous on my part if I myself make any apology at all, and it would 

 doubtless imply a claim to the highest ability and distinction were I to make that 

 humble apology which would be really appropriate to the circumstances of the case. 



Instead, however, of dispensing with the apology altogether — that might be 

 too radical an innovation to be introduced this year — I propose, with your 

 sanction, to make a lesser change, and merely to defer the apology from the first 

 to the last day of our session. I may reasonably hope to be able, at that later 

 stage, to make clear to you, by simple reference to yoiu: own experience during 

 the Meeting, that the apology I shall then feel it my duty to make is of no merely 

 formal character, but one which is worthy of your serious consideration. 



I would ask that in the meantime your continuous sympathy be extended to 

 one who now finds himself in a position he would have been the last to seek, and 

 whose ordinary duties in life involve speechless communion with inanimate Nature 

 rather than oral address to an assembly of fellow-workers. 



This matter of apologetic precedent being thus disposed of to our common 

 satisfaction, I should have preferred to have brought the delay of the normal 

 business of the Section to an immediate end by calling upon the author of the 

 first paper to now address you. Such, indeed, was the ordinary course of pro- 

 cedure in the earlier, and perhaps presidentially happier, years of the Association ; 

 but the occasion of taking the chair having been once seized upon, in absence 

 of mind, by a mathematical president for the delivery of an address, it has como 

 about that each president now feels it his bounden duty, not merely to give an 

 address, but to make that address at least as long and at least as elaborate as any 

 which has preceded it. 



We shall all agree that a presidential address, if there is to be any at all, 

 should be elaborately short and elaborately simple ; it should deal, not with, 

 technical details such as are only intelligible, even to the president himself, after 

 much study, but with general principles such as can be immediately grasped by 

 every member of an audience : an opening address which is so long that it can l3e only 

 partly read, and is written to be studied afterwards in the Reports of the Associa- 

 tion, may more appropriately be issued as an ordinary memoir. I make this remark 



