Notices of Memoirs — British Association — A. Strahan. 449 



Mullion Island basalt, forms the projecting headland at the south 

 -end of the Great Perhaver Beach, north of Gorran Haven. ^ 



These localities mark out almost precisely the same horizon as 

 the radiolarian cherts of Mr. Howard Fox. The curve followed by 

 this pillow-lava is also fairly parallel to that of the well-known 

 qnartzite of the Meneage and Gorran districts, to the slate containing 

 limestone lenticles with Upper Silurian fossils, and to that of the con- 

 glomerate placed by Mr. Upfield Green at the base of the Gedinnian. 

 Fragments of an altered basalt very similiar to the Mullion Island 

 rock were found in this conglomerate along Gillan Creek, at Flushing 

 and Lestowder Beaches. 



i5roTiOES OiF DNvCE^vnoiK-s, etc 



I. — British Association for the Advancement of Science. 

 Cabibridge Meeting, 1904. 



Addkess to the Geological Section by Aubrey Strahan, M.A., F.R.S., 

 F.G.S., President of the Sectiou. 



TT is forty-two years since the British Association last met in 

 J Cambridge, and we may turn with no little interest to the record 

 of what was taking place at a date when the science of geology was 

 still in its infancy, and in a University where its promise of develop- 

 ment was first recognised. Dr. John Woodward, the founder of the 

 Woodwardian Chair, had been dead 176 years, but his bequest to the 

 University had not long begun to bear fruit, for the determination to 

 house suitably the collection of fossils and to provide for the reading 

 of a systematic course of lectures was not arrived at until 1818. In 

 that year Adam Sedgwick, on his appointment to the Woodwardian 

 Chair, began a series of investigations into the geology of this 

 country, which made one of the most memorable epochs in the 

 history of British geology. At the Cambridge meeting of 1862 he 

 had therefore held the Professorship for forty-four years, a period 

 sufficient to spread his reputation throughout the civilised world 

 as one of the pioneers of geological science. 



Towards the close of his life Sedgwick gave expression to the 

 objects which he had had in view when he accepted a Professorship 

 in a science to which he had not hitherto specially devoted his 

 attention. "There wei-e three prominent hopes," he writes, "which 

 possessed my heart in the earliest days of my Professorship. First, 

 that I might be enabled to bring together a collection worthy of the 

 University, and illustrative of all the departments of the science it 

 was my duty to study and to teach. Secondly, that a geological 



1 Igneous rocks occur at the top of Greeb Head and at Little Perhaver Beach, but 

 they are of more acid trachytic type than the Mullion Island rock, and show large 

 porphjTitic crystals of oligoclase in a fine-grained felspathic base with little or no 

 development of ferromagnesian minerals. Fragments of somewhat similar trachytic 

 rocks, but containing shreds of opacite suggestive of altered soda-pyroxenes or 

 amphiboles, were found in a crushed breccia of grit and slate on the north-east of 

 Porthluney Cove. 



