298 Professor Charles Lapworth, LL.D., F.R.8. 



history and dead controversy must never be allowed to clog the 

 wheels of progress. In both cases the old men had built a firm 

 platform on which the new men were standing ready for the next 

 rush forward ; they should not be too much concerned about the 

 building of that platform when once they are convinced about its 

 soundness, nor must they spend all their time quarrelling as to how 

 its parts were first put together. The great thing for them is to 

 make the next advance and to see that it is unhampered by questions 

 of authority or nomenclature. It is largely due to the moderate tone 

 of these papers that the Highland question is now no more, and that 

 the term ' Ordovician ' has been adopted nearly all over the world. 



The appointment of Professor Lapworth to the presidency of the 

 Geological Section of the British Association at Edinburgh in 1892 

 necessitated the preparation of an address, and gave him the 

 opportunity of welding together his researches and theories in 

 geology and geography by dealing with the rock - fold, the 

 ' wedding - ring ' of the two sciences. After treating of the 

 physical and geological aspects of the structure he passed on to 

 apply it to the making of mountains and continents, and to connect 

 it with the form and structure of the earth itself. Further develop- 

 ments of this subject in time and space were communicated to the 

 Geologists' Association and the Eoyal Geographical Society respec- 

 tively, and have been treated of in college and other lectures on 

 tectonic geology. 



As Lapworth's South Scottish work came into contact with and 

 made Barrande's theory of ' Colonies ' untenable, so his views on 

 the effects of mountain movement conflicted with Eichthofen's 

 beautiful theory of the coral-reef origin of the limestone masses of 

 the Dolomites. A paper on the Dolomite country by Miss Ogilvie 

 (Mrs. Gordon) was read before Baron von Kichthofen, who was 

 present at the Edinburgh meeting, and Lapworth, who had long 

 considered the matter, although he had never visited the ground, 

 took the opportunity of stating his belief that the so-called reef 

 structures were the result of crust-deformation and not of original 

 deposition, and that the associated igneous rocks belonged to the 

 period of movement. The work and conclusions of Miss Ogilvie 

 on this Dolomite region are familiar to tectonic geologists. 



But although the results of Lapworth's work have conflicted with 

 some of the grandest geological hypotheses of his time, there is 

 probably no other geologist who employs theory as a working tool 

 to a greater extent in his own research, in teaching, and in prompting 

 investigation and discovery in others, or who so instinctively relies 

 upon the scientific use of the imagination. In his favourite * fold 

 theory,' ' reciprocal ' or ' antilogous ' theory of deformation, the 

 rock-fold, made up of two homologous and balanced parts, the one 

 positive and the other negative (' antilogues'), is made to do duty 

 as the archetype, and this type, so characteristic of more or less 

 flexible sheets, is traced in the one direction into the wave-shape 

 of fluids, and in the other direction into the fractures and faults of 

 solid bodies. The fold-line or zero line is identified with the elastic 



