424 Reports and Proceedings. 
Beyond these random allusions, I am not aware of anything in con- 
nection with the Society that demands special remark. A fair 
amount of work has been done during the winter, but that work has 
been confined to the merest fraction of the Members; and it were 
exceedingly desirable that many more would follow the example and 
become what they ought to be—namely, ‘working geologists. A 
day in the field, under a good instructor, or with a few fellow-mem- 
bers, is worth weeks in the closet; and correct conceptions of natural 
objects can only be formed by examination of the objects themselves 
as they occur in nature. Once initiated to the subject, there is no 
fear of the investigator falling aside. There is sufficient attraction 
in geological pursuits to keep the hand of the worker at the plough, 
once his hand is fairly there, and his feet firmly in the furrow;— 
the subject is so vast and so many-sided—capable of being taken 
up as a mere recreation or as a laborious study: so replete with 
practical value, and, at the same time, abounding in problems of 
unequalled intellectual interest and scientific importance. What the 
Society desires, therefore, is an increase of its working Members,— 
an increase in-work somewhat commensurate with its increase in 
numbers. Such are the few scattered thoughts I have to offer in 
the name of our venerable President, who would have better per- 
formed the duty could he have only been induced to make the effort. 
I-know his best wishes are with the Society ; and wherever he can 
aid you, his services are freely at your command. Had he occupied 
this chair, I know he would have told you, from his matured expe- 
rience, the many advantages, economic and intellectual, which the 
study of Geology can confer—economic advantages of which our 
country, in every department of its industry, is every day reaping 
the benefit ; and intellectual promptings which have led to a newer 
and deeper insight into the laws and ordainings of nature. I say 
newer and deeper insight, for with increased knowledge of the past 
must extend our knowledge of the present; and the tendency of all 
true knowledge of God’s workings in nature must ever be to make 
men better, wiser, and happier in all their relations to that nature of 
which they form so prominent a part. On the whole, man’s rela- 
tions may be summed up in three great categories—his relations to 
external nature, his relations to his fellow-men, and his relations to 
his Creator. ‘The wider his knowledge of nature, the better will he 
understand his relations to it; the deeper his understanding of this, 
the more clearly will he comprehend his relations to his fellow- 
men; and the more he knows of both of these, the higher and more 
enlightened will be his conceptions of the duties he owes to his 
Creator. Let no one, then, attempt to gainsay the obvious ten- 
dencies of the natural sciences, and least of all of Geology, which is 
the sum of all the natural sciences, and the only revelation, when 
read aright, of God’s workings from the beginning in the beautiful and 
orderly world He has given us to inhabit. Everything is bound up 
one with another in the divine scheme of the universe; and he who 
perceives this truth most fully in the physical world, is surely the most 
likely to regard it in the intellectual and moral. On this ground alone, 
