PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 170 



energy that is sometimes expended in prospecting operations, was afforded a 

 few years ago by a company tlxat put down a boring for oil through more tlian 

 a thousand feet of granite without being aware of the nature of the rock that 

 ■was being traversed. In this case a percussion drill was employed, but a few 

 minutes' examination of the material should have enabled the engineer in charge, 

 supposing he had even an elementary knowledge of geology, to save hundreds 

 of pounds of needless expenditure. The sum total of the funds which have 

 been uselessly expended in this country alone in hopeless explorations for minerals, 

 in complete disregard of the most obvious geological evidence, would have been 

 sufficient to defray many times over the cost of a complete scientific underground 

 survey. 



If research is to be carried out economically and effectively, it must be 

 organised systematically and directed primarily with the aim of advancing know- 

 ledge. If this aim be well and faithfully kept in view, material benefits will 

 accrue which would never have been thought to be sufficiently probable to warrant 

 the expenditure of money on prospecting. 



It is, however, not only in the areas occupied by Secondary or Tertiary rocks 

 that systematic boring is urgently needed. There are many other localities where 

 important information as to the structure of the rocks could probably be obtained 

 in this manner. Opinion is very much divided as to the relation of the Devonian 

 to the older rocks in South Devon and Corn-wall,' but there is little doubt that 

 a series of judiciously placed borings would solve the problem without difficulty. 

 In North Devon and West Somerset, the question as to whether the Foreland 

 Grits are a repetition by faulting of the Hangman Grits could also be settled 

 at once by borings in the Foreland Grits and in the Lynton Beds. 



In the North of England, again, there are many points where the strata 

 exposed at the surface are low down in the Carboniferous, and it would be com- 

 paratively easy to ascertain the nature of the earlier rocks beneath them, with 

 regard to which we are much in need of information.* 



It would be easy to cite other cases where information of considerable 

 geological value could be obtained by boring at comparatively small expense, and 

 would in all probability in the majority of cases lead ultimately to results of 

 economic importance. 



It is obviously only right that any commercial advantages resulting from 

 investigations carried out at the public cost should accrue to the State, and, if 

 this principle were a'dopted, expenditure by the Government or geological re- 

 search on the lines I have suggested would be sooner or later recouped by the 

 mineral wealth rendered available to the community. 



It is not, however, on terra firma alone that such investigations may be 

 usefully carried out. The floors of the shallow seas that separate these islands 

 from one another and from the continent of Europe are still almost unknown 

 from the geological standpoint, although their inve.'itigation would present no 

 serious difficulties. Joly ' has described an electrically driven apparatus which, 

 when lowered so as to rest on a hard sea floor, will cut out and detach a cylindri- 

 cal core of rock, and retain it till raised to the surface. Subsequently 



' I have already referred to the economic importance of this area. The 

 desirability of ascertaining its true geological structure is too obvious to need 

 emphasis here. 



' The recent borings for mineral oil in the Carboniferous rocks of Derbyshire 

 were put down largely by means of public funds, and such success as they have 

 attamed has been due to the fact that thev were directed by expert geologists ; 

 but there can be little doubt that, if they had been carried out as part of a 

 carefully-thought-out scheme of underground exploration wherever it was needed 

 to elucidate the structure of the country, economies would have been effected 

 and the sum total of our knowledge even from the economic standpoint would 

 have been far greater. It is a pity that these borings have been carried out 

 by means of the percussion process. It is, however, usually employed in borings 

 for oil — in America almost exclusively — and in war-time its greater speed was 

 no doubt an important factor in the decision to resort to it. 



' ' On the Geological Investigation of Submarine Rock.«,' ,9rf. Pror. Tfny. Dull 

 Soc, vol. viii., pp. 509-524, 189. 



