Notices of Memoirs — Address hy Sir T. H. Holland. 411 



Dr. Kowe's account hardly does justice to the extraordinary 

 abundance of marl in the flintless chalk. In a thickness of 32 feet 

 there are ten seams, and three of them were noted as being of 

 exceptional thickness. 



(To be continued in our next Number.) 



nsroTiOES o:f ivOiEiynoii^s. 



BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE, 

 AUSTRALIA, AUGUST, 1914. 



I. — Address to the Geological Section by Professor Sir Thomas H. Holland, 

 K.C.I.E., D.Sc, F.R.S. (President of Section C). 



EXACTLY eighty-three years from the day of our arrival at Sydney, Eduard 

 Suess was born in London.^ Thus the day, as much as the circumstances 

 of our meeting so far from home, serves to remind us of one who was great 

 enough to recognize the fact that geological evidence from any part of the 

 world has the same value as that obtained in the little continent which has 

 been the most prolific in the products of nomenclature and the most productive 

 in textbooks. 



Since the days of Charles Lyell no geologist has been so conspicuously 

 successful in analysing the accumulated mass of evidence, in bringing together 

 the essential facts from all lands, and in compensating for the local excesses of 

 literature. Only those of us who, by long absence from Europe, have felt the 

 full disadvantages of having to express our thoughts in alien terminology can 

 appreciate the real value of Suess 's great work. His death since our last 

 meeting makes a conspicuous mai'k in the history of geological science. 



A meeting of the British Association in Australia brings home forcibly to the 

 members of Section C the fact that British Imperial geology is really "the 

 science of the Earth " ; partly for this reason one feels inclined to get outside 

 the science and take a survey of some of its suburbs. Not many of them have 

 been left untraversed by my distinguished predecessors in this chair ; but there 

 has been of recent years a tendency to avoid the inner Earth, which has rightly 

 been described as "the inalienable playground of the imagination", and con- 

 sequently, therefore, common land to the geologist as well as the geodesist, 

 physicist, and mathematician. 



The geologist who looks below the purely superficial phenomena of the crust 

 is generally regarded as straying beyond his province ; but the desire to see the 

 birth-certificate of some of the strange and often unacceptable ' causes ' which 

 the mathematical physicist offers us is a pardonable form of curiosity. Our 

 ideas regarding intra-telluric conditions are even proving to be of economic 

 value, one of the most recent and unexpected results of the kind being that 

 just established by Baron von Eotvos in Hungary," whose predictions now bid 

 fair to outstrip those of the ' diviner ' ! Having noticed the low gravity values 

 over the great cores of rock-salt in the Transylvanian ' Schlier ', he finds similar 

 defects of gravity in the same region over certain of the Sarmatian and Pontian 

 domes, which probably owe their shape to subterranean salt-plugs and are now 

 found to be great storehouses of natural gas, which, with or without liquid 

 petroleum, is commonly found with the saline ' Mediterranean ' facies of the 

 Upper Tertiary in Eastern Europe. Baron von Eotvos also finds that on the 

 eastern margin of the Great Hungarian Plain, where the younger Tertiary beds 

 are completely concealed by a mantle of alluvium, mud-volcanoes and 



^ See life of Eduard Suess, Geol. Mag., January, 1913, pp. 1-3, and 

 Portrait, Plate I. His obituary appeared in Geol. Mag., June, 1914, p. 288. 



" Comptes Rendus, XVIP Couf. de 1' Assoc. Geodes. Internat., Hamburg, 

 1912, pp. 427, 437. 



