392 Rev. Professor T. G. Bonney, I).Sc., F.R.S. 



this, suffering first disintegration and then deposition, is known to 

 give rise to sedimentary rocks, while these under the magic of 

 metamorphism were supposed to be converted into granite again. 

 Thus a beginning or ending to which Lyellians were always averse 

 was evaded. To insist on the significance of the missing link, and 

 to restore to the igneous rocks their true place in the constitution 

 of our planet, was one of the tasks which Bonney set himself and 

 successfully accomplished. But if where geologists had traced 

 a gradual passage a sharp line of demarcation could be shown to 

 exist, dividing the igneous from the sedimentary rocks, what of 

 the alleged transitions between the various schists themselves ? 

 Had imagination played its useful part in their case also ? 

 " Metamorphic action is of all ages " had been translated into 

 the statement that "any kind of metamorphic rock may be of 

 any age." This is a formula that Bonney has never been able 

 to accept : the Archaean rocks are for him marked as such not 

 only by their infraposition to the Eozoic systems but also by 

 their intimate structure ; and he professes to be able to distinguish 

 them not only in the field but also under the microscope. 

 Whether in this important matter he be in the right or no, again 

 time alone can decide, but whatever its verdict on this point 

 the immense additions to our knowledge which have resulted from 

 his researches into the difficult and obscure subject of the most 

 ancient rocks will always retain a permanent value. The difficulties 

 are sufficient to render it repulsive to most minds, but the less 

 known about a thing the greater are its attractions for Bonney. 

 Charnwood was a true terra incognita up to 1877, when Bonney 

 first made known the fragmental igneous character of much of its 

 rock, and afterwards assigned it to a Pre-Cambrian horizon. How 

 thorough his work was in this region will appear from the 

 subsequent investigations and detailed mapping of Professor Watts, 

 who has been known to grumble that Professor Bonney was always 

 right, and has left very little for his successors to discover in this 

 region. From Charnwood attention was next directed to Anglesey, 

 which was found to offer so many perplexities that it was abandoned 

 for a while, and the Alps were again resorted to in the hope that 

 there might be found some suggestive clue to their interpretation. 

 But in the Alps Professor Bonney found himself in mediis rebus ; he 

 had left the outskirts for the very centre of the arcanum, and ever 

 since has been engaged in trying to decipher the history of the 

 crystalline schists and gneisses in that chain, as well as in other 

 lands. A summary of his views is given in his Presidential Address 

 to the Geological Society in 1885 ; a more recent account appears in 

 "An Outline of the Petrology and Physical History of the Alps," read 

 before the Geologists' Association in 1897. Of course, while working 

 on such subjects as this, when the facts are often obscure and opinion 

 still fermenting, the chances of controversy are great, scarcely indeed 

 to be avoided, even were it well to avoid them ; for it is still true 

 that strife in the domain of things intellectual, as elsewhere, is 

 lord over the ways of evolution, the great eliminator of error, and 



