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Section C— GEOLOGY. 

 Peesident of toe Section — Professor C. Lapwokth, F.R.S., F.G.S. 



The President delivered the following Address on Monday, August 8 : — 



It has, I believe, been the rule for the man who has been honoured by election to 

 the Chair of President of tie Geological Section of the British Association to 

 address its members upon the recent advances made in that branch of geology in 

 which he has himself been most immediately interested. It is not my intention 

 upon the present occasion to depart from this time-honoured custom ; for it has 

 both the merit of simplicity and the advantage of utility to recommend it. In 

 this way each branch of our science, as it becomes in turn represented, not only 

 submits to the workers in other departments a report of its own progress, but 

 presents by implication a broad sketch of the entire geological landscape, seen 

 through the coloured glasses, it may be, of divisional prejudice, but at any rate 

 instructive and corrective to the workers in other departments, as being taken 

 from what is to them a novel and an unfamiliar point of view. 



Now every tyro in geology is well aware of the fact that the very backbone of 

 geological science is constituted by what is known as stratigraphical geology, or 

 the study of the geological formations. These formations, stratified and un- 

 stratified, build up all that part of the visible earth-crust which is accessible to the 

 investigator. Their outcropping edges constitute the visible exterior of our globe, 

 the ten-aqueous surface of which forms the physical geography of the lands of the 

 present day ; and their internal characters and inter-relationships afford us our 

 only clues to the physical geographies of bygone ages. Within them lies enshrmed 

 aU. that we may ever hope to discover of the history and the development of the 

 habitable world of the past. 



These formations are to the stratigraphical geologist what species are to the 

 biologist, or what the heavenly bodies are to the astronomer. It was the discovery 

 of these formations which first elevated geology to the rank of a science. In the 

 working out of their characters, their relationships, their development, and their 

 origin, geology finds its means, its aims, and its justification. Whatever fresh 

 maWalour science may yield to man's fuU conception of nature, organic and 

 inorganic, must of necessity be grouped around these special and peculiar objects 

 of its contemplation. 



When the great Werner first taught that our earth-crust was made up of 

 .superimposed rock-sheets, or formations, arranged in determinable order, the value 

 of his conclusions from an economic point of view soon led to their enthusiastic 

 and careful study ; and his crude theory of their successive precipitation from a 

 universal chaotic ocean disarmed the suspicions of the many until the facts 

 themselves had gained such a wide acceptance that denial was no longer 

 possible. But when the greater Hutton asserted that each of these rock- 

 formations was in reality nothing more or less than the recemented ruins of an 

 earlier world, the prejudices of mankind at large were loosed at a single stroke. 

 Like Galileo's assertion of the movement of the globe, this demanded such 



