344. TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 
Srction C.—GEOLOGY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION: PRoressor Sir T. H. Houuann, 
K.C.L.E., F.B.S. 
The President delivered the following Address at Sydney, on Friday, 
August 21 :— 
Exactty eighty-three years from the day of our arrival at Sydney, Edward 
Suess was born in London. Thus the day, as much as the circumstances of our 
meeting so far from home, serves to remind us of one who was great enough 
to recognise the fact that geological evidence from any part of the world has 
the same value as that obtained in the little continent which has been the most 
prolific in the products of nomenclature and the most productive in text-books. 
Since the days of Charles Lyell no geologist has been so conspicuously suc- 
cessful in analysing the accumulated mass of evidence, in bringing together the 
essential facts from all lands, and in compensating for the local excesses of 
literature. Only those of us who, by long absence from Europe, have felt the 
full disadvantages of having to express our thoughts in alien terminology can 
appreciate the real value of Suess’s great work. His death since our last meeting 
makes a conspicuous mark in the history of geological science. 
A meeting of the British Association in Australia brings home forcibly to the 
members of Section C the fact that British Imperial geology is really ‘the 
science of the Earth’; partly for this reason one feels inclined to get outside 
the science and take a survey of some of its suburbs. Not many of them have 
been left untraversed by my distinguished predecessors in this chair; but there 
has been of recent years a tendency to avoid the inner Karth, which has rightly 
been described as ‘the inalienable playground of the imagination,’ and conse- 
quently, therefore, common land to the geologist as well as the geddesist, 
physicist, and mathematician. 
The geologist who looks below the purely superficial phenomena of the crust 
is generally regarded as straying beyond his province; but the desire to see the 
birth-certificate of some of the strange and often unacceptable ‘ causes ’ which 
the mathematical physicist offers us is a pardonable form of curiosity. Our 
ideas regarding intra-telluric conditions are even proving to be of economic 
value, one of the most recent and unexpected results of the kird being that just 
established by Baron von Eétvés in Hungary,’ whose predictions now bid fair 
to outstrip those of the ‘diviner’ ! Having noticed the low gravity values over 
the great cores of rock-salt in the Transylvanian ‘Schlier,’ he finds similar 
defects of gravity in the same region over certain of the Sarmatian and Pontian 
domes, which probably owe their shape to subterranean salt-plugs and are now 
found to be great storehouses of natural gas, which, with or without liquid 
petroleum, is commonly found with the saline ‘ Mediterranean’ facies of the 
Upper Tertiary in Eastern Europe. Baron von Eétvés also finds that on the 
eastern margin of the Great Hungarian Plain, where the younger Tertiary beds 
are completely concealed by a mantle of alluvium, mud-volcanoes and gas-springs 
are sometimes found in areas of marked gravity defect, and some of these are 
now also being drilled for natural gas. 
1 Comptes Rendus, XVITime Conf. de V Assoc, Géodés, Internat., Hamburg, 
1912, pp. 427, 437. 
