Rev. Professor T. Q. Bonney, D.Sc, F.R.S. 391 



President in 1884 and 1885. In 1889 he received the award of 

 the Wollastou Medal. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal 

 Society in 1878. In 1886 he was President of the Geological 

 Section of the British Association ; in 1888 he delivered one of its 

 Evening Discourses. He has also been President of the Mineralogical 

 Society, is a member of the Alpine Club and has been its President. 

 He is a Doctor of Science, Cambridge, he has received the honorary 

 degree of LL.D. from the University of Montreal, and of D.Sc. 

 from the University of Dublin, which was conferred on the occasion 

 of the celebration of the Tercentenary of Trinity College. 



The subject which earliest engaged the attention of Professor 

 Bonney was glaciers and their action ; this was at the time when 

 Ramsay's fascinating theory of the origin of lake-basins, developed 

 by that genial and brilliant investigator with his accustomed skill, 

 and urged with all his infectious enthusiasm, had captivated the 

 minds of nearly all the young English geologists. Possibly the 

 more readily, owing to the besetting sin of the so-called Uuiformitarian 

 School, which in its neglect of quantitative reasoning was content for 

 the most part to discover tendencies, without proceeding to inquire 

 whether these were sufficient or continued far enough to produce 

 the effect they were supposed to explain. Thus it was urged that 

 since a glacier can be shown to have produced a number of mountain 

 tarns, there is no reason why in sufficient time it should not 

 accomplish the incavation of a lake or an inland sea, such as Lake 

 Geneva, or Superior, or the Caspian. 



Bonney's mathematical training had freed him from this fallacious 

 tendency, and his intimate knowledge of the Alps and their glaciers 

 led him to take very different views as to the origin of the Swiss 

 lakes ; and thus amongst his earliest papers we find a careful 

 analysis of the problem as illustrated by particular instances, with 

 observations and arguments which led to complete disproof of the 

 erosion theory and a return to views which are more suggestive 

 of the spirit of De la Beche than of Lyell. Glacial problems have 

 from that time to this always maintained their interest for him, 

 and the popular theories of to-day are at present as little accepted 

 by him as were those which first engaged his attention. Whether 

 the present theories will be longer lived than those of the past, time 

 alone will show. From glaciers Bonney next turned his attention 

 to rocks, and here again was led into conflict with prevailing views, 

 which seem to have been inspired by the same pursuit of suggestive 

 tendencies. The remarkable changes produced on sedimentary rocks 

 by what is vaguely termed metamorphic action had led the Lyellian 

 school to assign a metamorphic origin to granite. If a shale may 

 become converted into a slate, or even a mica-schist, why should 

 not the process continue and mica-schist pass into gneiss, and gneiss 

 find its final term in granite ? A study of contact phenomena will 

 frequently afford evidence of the continuity of granite with gneiss, 

 and thus but one link remains to be discovered by the connection 

 of gneiss with mica-schist. The imagination sometimes supplied 

 this, and thus a cycle was completed ; for, commencing with granite, 



