456 Reports and Proceedings. 
REPORTS AND PROCHEDINGS. 
eee eee 
British ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE, 
BrrmincHam, September 6th, 1865. 
N his Inaugural Address, the President of the British Association 
(Professor J. Phillips) thus speaks of Geology, and of its rela- 
tions to the History of Man : — 
The greater our progress in the study of the economy of Nature, 
the more she unveils herself as one vast whole,—one comprehensive 
-plan,—one universal rule, in a yet unexhausted series of individual 
peculiarities. Such is the aspect of this moving, working, living 
system of force and law: such it has ever been, if we rightly 
interpret the history of our own portion of this rich inheritance of 
mind, the history of that Earth from which we spring, with which 
so many of our thoughts are co-ordinated, and to which all but our 
thoughts and hopes will again return. 
How should we prize this history! and exult in the thought that 
in our own days, within our own memories, the very foundations of 
the Series of Strata, deposited in the beginning of time, have been 
explored by our living friends, our Murchison and Sedgwick, while 
the higher and more complicated parts of the structure have been 
minutely examined by our Lyell, Forbes, and Prestwich!* How 
instructive the history of that long series of inhabitants which re- 
ceived in primeval times the gift of life, and filled the land, sea, and 
air with rejoicing myriads, through innumerable revolutions of the 
planet, before in the fulness of time it pleased the Giver of all good 
to place man upon the Earth, and bid him look up to Heaven ! 
Wave succeeding wave, the forms of ancient lite sweep across the 
ever-changing surface of the earth ; revealing to us the height of the 
land, the depth of the sea, the quality of the air, the course of the 
rivers, the extent of the forest, the system of life and death,—yes, 
the growth, decay, and death of individuals, the beginning and end- 
ing of races, of many successive races of plants and animals, in seas 
now dried, on sandbanks now raised into mountains, on continents 
now sunk beneath the waters. 
Had that series a beginning? Was the earth ever uninhabited, 
after it became a globe turning on its axis and revolving round the 
sun? Was there ever a period since land and sea were separated— 
a period which we can trace—when the land was not shaded by 
plants, the ocean not alive with animals? The answer, as it comes 
to us from the latest observation, declares that in the lowest deposits 
of the most ancient seas in the stratified crust of the globe, the 
monuments of life remain. They extend to the earliest sediments of 
water, now in part so changed as to appear like the products of fire. 
What life? Only the simpler and less specially organized fabrics 
* The investigations of Murchison and Sedgwick in the Cambrian and Silurian 
Strata began in 1831; the views of Sir C. Lyell on Tertiary periods were made 
known in 1829. : 
