Reports and Proceedings—Geological Society of London. 181 
* Professor Sollas,—The Council of the Geological Society has this year awarded 
the Wollaston Medal to you in recognition of the value of your varied and prolonged 
contribution to the development of Geology. ‘There is hardly a department of our 
Science into which you have not carried the light and impulse of your brilliant and 
versatile genius. You have united in no ordinary way the qualifications of an 
accomplished petrographer, an excellent paleontologist, an able stratigrapher, and 
a philosophical mineralogist, and to this wide range of accomplishment you have 
added an originality and inventiveness which have introduced notable improvements 
into the processes of research. I regard it as of special honour and pleasure that it 
has fallen to me to be the medium of presenting this medal to you. You have long 
been one of my most esteemed friends, and I trust that I may be allowed, even in 
this public place, to add my own personal felicitations to those of, I am sure, all the 
Fellows of the Society that the highest honour which we have to bestow should now 
be conferred upon you. 
If the award is a recognition of past services in the cause of our beloved science, 
you will, we hope, accept it as no less an augury that we look forward with 
confidence to much fresh work from your hands in the future. We hope to see 
a flourishing School of Geology growing up at Oxford under your fostering care, and 
to welcome from you in the years to come many memoirs not less suggestive and 
important thau those with which you have already enriched the literature of geology. 
Professor Sollas, in reply, said :— 
Mr. President,—I deeply appreciate the honour conferred upon me by the Council, 
and if by any means I could be reconciled to the sense of my own insignificance, 
awakened by the recollection of the many illustrious names that have preceded me 
in this place before the President’s chair, it would be by your kind, I fear too kind, 
words, and the favour with which they have been received by the Fellows of this 
Society. 
It is by no merit of mine that I am a lover, an ardent lover, of geology, for I feel, 
perhaps with a lover’s partiality, that our gracious mistress, bountiful as she is fair, 
requires only to be seen as she truly is to captivate at once all hearts. I have 
found in her service a perpetual delight, and if your kind wishes should be fulfilled 
shall ever continue to do so, for she repays our constancy with a variety that never 
stales. 
I know how close is the interest taken by you, Sir, in the cause of Geology at 
Oxford ; it has been a frequent source of encouragement to me, and the hope you 
now express is that which lies nearest to my own heart. As a teacher I increasingly 
feel with advancing years how great is my debt to my masters, Huxley, Ramsay, 
Bonney, and, Sir, yourself, for I have been a diligent student of your teaching ever 
since the appearance of ‘‘ The Scenery of Scotland’’ in 1865. But to you, Sir, and 
to my revered tutor, I am indebted not only for direct instruction, but for the light 
of example, the privilege and stimulus of friendship, and indeed for those very 
opportunities by which I stand here to-day. I count it, therefore, not the least of 
my good fortune that I receive the Wollaston Medal from your hands. 
_ The President then presented the Murchison Medal to Mr. Alfred 
Harker, F.R.S., addressing him in the following words :— 
Mr. Harker,—The Murchison Medal has been assigned to you as a testimony of 
the Council’s appreciation of the importance of your contributions to Petrographical 
and Structural Geology. You had already distinguished yourself by your studies in 
cleavage, by the zeal and success with which you had thrown yourself into the 
pursuit of petrographical research along those modern paths in which this department 
of our science has been so transformed and enlarged, and lastly by the skill which 
you had shown in the field investigation of the ancient igneous rocks of North Wales 
and of part of the Lake District. With this reputation already established and 
yearly growing, you were induced, at my request, to enter the Geological Survey. 
Although the circumstances under which you joined that service formed a new 
departure in its usages, I have always felt that on no part of my long connection 
with the Survey could I look back with more satisfaction than on the arrangements 
which enabled us to secure your services. You speedily acquired the skill of 
a practised surveyor, and among the hills of Skye and Rum you had an opportunity 
of mapping some of the most complicated and deeply interesting pieces of volcanic 
