172 * TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 



Section C— GEOLOGY. 

 President of the Section: J. W. Evans, D.Sc, LL.B., F.E.S. 



TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



I PROPOSE in this address to consider the methods by which the progress 

 of geological research may be most effectively promoted, and to point out some 

 directions in which I think it possible important advances may be made in 

 the early future. 



One of the most striking features of our science is the need in which it 

 stands of a large and widely distributed body of workers, and the opportunities 

 it affords to every one of them of making important contributions to scientific 

 knowledge. 



Every locality has its geological history stretching away into the ' dark 

 backward and abysm of time,' and this history has left its records in the 

 rocks of the earth's crust : an imperfect reeord, it is true, for much of it 

 has long since been destroyed, but enough remains to reward long years of 

 patient labour in deciphering it. 



Everywhere someone is needed who will devote his spare time to the 

 examination of the quarries and cliffs, where the materials that build up 

 the solid earth are exposed to view, and who will record the changes that 

 occur in them from time to time] for a quarry that is in work, or a cliff that 

 is being undermined by the sea, constantly presents new faces, affording new 

 information, which must be recorded if important links in the chain of evidence 

 are not to be lost. It is equally important that some one should always be 

 on the look-out for new exposures, road or railway cuttings, for instance, or 

 excavations for culverts or foundations, which in too many instances are 

 overgrown or covered up without receiving adequate attention. It is, again, 

 only the man on the spot who can obtain even an approximately complete 

 collection of the fossils of each stratum and thus enable us to obtain as full 

 a knowledge as is possible of the life that existed in the far-off days in which 

 it was laid down. In his absence, many of the rarer forms which are of 

 unique importance in tracing out the long story of the development of plants 

 and animals, and even man himself, never reach the hands of the specialist 

 who is capable of interjjreting them. It was an amateur geologist, a country 

 solicitor, who saved from the road-mender's hammer the Piltdown skull, that 

 in its main features appears to represent an early human type, from which 

 the present races of man are in all probability descended. Another amateur, 

 who was engaged in the brick-making industry near Peterborough, has pro- 

 vided our museums with their finest collections of Jurassic reptiles. A third, 

 a hard-worked medical man, was the first to reveal the oldest relics of life 



