Reports & Proceedings — Geological Society of London. 183 



entailed in the discharge of official duties connected with the chair leaves but 

 scant leisure for original research ; and even the little that I have been able to 

 accomplish towards the furtherance of our science would have been even less 

 but for the ungrudging assistance which I have received in the field from many 

 of my former students. 



Passing down the list, my attention is arrested by the name of Dr. Marr — 

 ,» name which brings vividly before me the debt that I owe to the School of 

 Geology at Cambridge. As in the case of the founder of this medal, the 

 subject of Geology was not included in the course of study which had been 

 mapped out for me on my entrance to the University, and just as Lyell's 

 interest was first aroused by Dr. Buckland's lectures which he attended at 

 Oxford, my enthusiasm was stimulated by the courses delivered by Professor 

 Hughes and Dr. Marr at Cambridge, and I am glad of this opportunity of 

 expressing how much I owe to their help and kindness during my Cambridge 

 career. 



To Dr. Marr I am further indebted for his constant encouragement in 

 connexion with my work on the Lower Carboniferous rocks in Westmorland, 

 without which it is doubtful whether the investigation would have ever been 

 brought to a successful conclusion. 



To another of my predecessors, Professor Bonney (whose wide sympathies 

 are so well known to the Fellows of this Society), I owe much for his constant 

 kindness and interest in my work, more particularly in the development of 

 certain heresies connected with the interpretation of glacial phenomena. 



You have been good enough to allude to my interest in the part played by 

 the Calcareous Algas as rock-builders. I may therefore perhaps point out 

 that my work in this direction is really a continuation of Lyell's investigations 

 on the same subject, for it was Lyell himself who first called our attention to 

 the importance of plants as agents in limestone formation, in his paper 

 published in the Transactions of this Society in 1829, in which he records the 

 formation of nodules and strata of travertine in a lake near his old home in 

 Forfarshire. 



I thank you, Sir, for the kind words with which you have accompanied this 

 presentation ; it is an especial pleasure to receive this medal from the hands of 

 one with whom I lately shared the duties of Secretary to this Society. 



The President then handed the Bigsby Medal, awarded to 

 Mr. Henry Hubert Hayden, Director of the Geological Survey 

 of India, to Sir Thomas Henry Holland, K.C.I.E., for transmission 

 to the recipient, addressing him as follows : — 



Sir Thomas Holland, — The Bigsby Medal has been awarded by the 

 Council to Mr. Henry Hubert Hayden, in recognition of the value of his 

 contributions to our knowledge of the Geology of India. His work touches 

 nearly every phase of geological inquiry, and includes field observations in 

 most provinces of the Indian Empire as well as beyond its frontiers in Tibet 

 and Afghanistan . His exhaustive memoirs on the Central Himalayan region 

 of Spiti, on Kashmir, on Eastern Tibet, and on Afghanistan are mainly 

 concerned with palseontological and stratigraphical problems, but they include 

 also important observations on the physical geography of each region, on the 

 igneous rocks of all, and on their phenomena and metamorphism. 



During the past three years, although occupied with administrative duties as 

 Director of the Geological Survey of India, he has found time to make a new 

 excursion beyond the borderland of his subject, in a suggestive discussion of 

 the relations between the geodetic observations and the geological features of 

 the Indo-Gangetic alluvial plain. 



A cursory survey of the titles of his papers leaves the impression that they 

 are mainly regional and descriptive in character ; a closer study of their 

 contents, however, shows that they add materially, not only to our stock of 

 data, but to the wider philosophical bearings of nearly every branch of geology. 

 They are not the products of the mere student, for the observations which 

 they describe are those that could have been made only by an intrepid explorer, 



