52 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
Ulterior Prospects of Geological Science’ (Ist Rept. B.A. 1831/2, 
pp. 365-414). Such a survey would now require fifty volumes instead 
of the fifty pages which sufficed then. There is only time in this address 
to notice the main problems considered by the Geological Section in 1831 
and glance at the progress achieved in regard to them. 
Conybeare’s Report summarised the position in General Stratigraphy, 
which was still based on two divisions—the Primary and the Secondary. 
The Primary included the ‘ Primarized Slate’ of the Alps. The Secondary 
Group, thanks to the principles established by William Smith, had been 
classified into four Systems—the Carboniferous including the Old Red 
Sandstone, the New Red Sandstone (for which, owing to its variegated 
colouring, Conybeare then proposed the name Peecilitic System), the 
Oolitic and the Cretaceous. All below the Old Red Sandstone was left as 
the Primitive and Transition series. The pre-Carboniferous and post- 
Cretaceous beds were still in confusion. Thus Phillips in 1829 in his 
‘Geology of Yorkshire’ referred everything below the Carboniferous to 
the ‘ Slate Formation’; in 1837, his ‘ Treatise of Geology’ divided the 
‘ Tertiary ’ merely into the London Clay, the Freshwater Group, and the 
Crag. Conybeare’s Report was illustrated by a geological section from 
the North of Scotland to the Adriatic near Venice; it shows that the 
general succession had been established from the Tertiary to the Car- 
boniferous and Old Red Sandstone. The section illustrates the recurrence 
of geological hypotheses, for its representation of the schists of the 
Southern Highlands as the altered extension of the rocks of the Southern 
Uplands has been readopted in recent years by, amongst others, Dr. G. 
Frodin (1922) and Prof. F. E. Suess (1931). 
On the Continent stratigraphy was less developed and some of its 
leading exponents were working on lines that have not been followed. 
Alexandre Brongniart, in 1829, in his ‘ Tableau des Terrains qui composent 
YEcorce du Globe,’ divided geological history into two—the Période 
Jovienne, the ‘ actual epoch ’ or post-diluvian, and the Période Saturnienne, 
anterior to ‘the last revolution of the globe.’ The stratified rocks he 
divided into four groups, the Clysmien or diluvial, the Izémien or 
sedimentary, the Hemilysian or transitional, and the Agalysmien or 
primordial; the last included an upper division the slates and killas, and 
a lower the schists. The sediments he classified into the Thalassic or 
Tertiary; the Pelagic or Secondary (Cretaceous and Oolitic) and the 
Abyssal or Inferior, which ranged from the Lias to the Old Red Sandstone. 
England at that time unquestionably held the hegemony of the world 
in stratigraphy, as shown by the extent to which terms based on English 
names have permeated the general nomenclature. When the French 
Government decided on the construction of a national geological map, 
Eliede Beaumont and Dufrénoy were sent to England to study its classifica- 
tion and use it as a basis. So little progress had been made outside 
Europe that Macculloch? declared in 1831 that ‘ the study of Arran alone 
has taught us more than Asia and America united.’ 
The first great stratigraphical advance after 1831 was Lyell’s classifica- 
tion in 1833 of the post-Cretaceous strata. In north-western Europe they 
1 Syst. Geol., vol. I, 1831, p. vii. 
