88 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF LEICESTER AND DISTRICT 
course of years the relations between the Society and the Museum have 
greatly changed, but up to the present time much of the most valuable 
work of the Society, that of its Sections, has been done in close connection 
with the Museum, not a little of it by officers of the Museum. The 
following pages will tell of the subjects studied by the Sections and 
indicate the shares in the work of some of the chief workers. 
Geology was taken up by the Society before the Sections were definitely 
constituted in 1849. In March 1837 the Rev. Andrew Irvine, B.D., 
F.G.S., in his Presidential Address, suggested that a Natural History 
Museum should be formed, and said that he would willingly present to 
it his own collection of specimens, mineralogical and geological. The 
first honorary members of the Society were the Rev. William Buckland, 
D.D., F.G.S., and the Rev. Adam Sedgwick, B.D., F.G.5., pioneers of 
geology in Oxford and Cambridge. The latter spoke about the geology 
of Charnwood Forest at a dinner given to him at the Three Crowns on 
October 6, 1837. 
The two members of the Society, who in these early days read most 
papers on geology, were Mr. John Laurance,® who left Leicester and 
became an honorary member in 1842, and Mr. James Plant, F.G.S. 
The latter also spoke on geology at the Society’s excursions. On March 28, 
1870, he lectured on ‘ Geological Formations of the County as illustrated 
by the Column of Rocks in the Museum Grounds.’ He had constructed 
this column in order to preserve in a permanent and educational form a 
large number of specimens liberally supplied by the owners of quarries 
throughout the county for exhibition at the meeting of the Royal Agri- 
cultural and Royal Horticultural Societies at Leicester in 1868. The 
column was removed when the Museum building was enlarged in 1877. 
It was an imitation on a small scale of a huge column at the Great 
Exhibition of 1851, and of others at the Crystal Palace.6 The late 
Dr. F. W. Bennett remembered seeing it. 
The section of the Society for Geology decreased in numbers during 
the eighties, and though there were a few who were diligent in the study 
hardly any papers were read, and the meetings dwindled away. The 
Council in their Report in 1889 ‘ regret that Section C (Geology) has 
been obliged to follow the example of Section B (Astronomy, Physics 
and Chemistry), and ask the Council to terminate its existence. They 
have however made arrangements for the amalgamation of Section C 
with Section E (Zoology), so that the opportunity for organised study of 
5 John Laurance was the author of a book entitled Geology in 1835: A 
popular sketch of the Progress, Leading Features, and latest Discoveries of this 
vising Science. The first sentence of the preface is: ‘ The attempt to compress 
so vast a theme as Geology within the narrow limits of a duodecimo volume of 
such spare dimensions will be regarded by those, who in ponderous tomes have 
communicated to the world the results of years of labour in this department of 
science, as absurd and futile.’ I 
The book was published by Simpkin and Marshall in London, 1835, but printed 
by Cockshaw in Leicester. Geology was then a rising science. The Geological 
Society of London was founded in 1807. The Oxford Dictionary gives 1795 
for the first quotation of the word in the modern sense. For many geological 
words later dates, e.g. “ Cambrian,’ 1836. ¢ 
6 Leicester Chronicle, April 2, 1870. 
