Address to Section C, Geology. 411 
teach the branch of geology which he knew best. And _ these 
professors were no carpet knights; they were knights errant who 
derived their knowledge, not from books alone, but from their 
wanderings over hills and dales, in mines and quarries, by ice-polished 
rocks and water-worn valleys. At its meetings the leaders of the 
society announced what they had discovered, gave sure and 
demonstrable proofs of their discoveries, and showed in what direction 
the geological forces should be directed for the conquest of Nature. 
The goodly fellowship of the Geological Society has always encamped 
on the ever-advancing frontier of geological knowledge, where the 
well-surveyed tracks pass out into the bright, alluring realms of the 
unknown. 
The actual founders of the Geological Society were apparently men 
of less showy intellect than the great Werner, whose teaching had 
intoxicated many of the most gifted of his enthusiastic pupils. They 
were men, like Horner and Greenough, who had a practical insight 
that enabled them to give a permanent help to the progress of science. 
They had that supreme gift, the power to see things as they are. 
It would not be fair to claim for them that they were the originators 
of accurate methods in geology; such methods had been used before 
their day—by William Smith in England, by Lehman in Germany, 
and by Desmarest in France. But these men, acting singly, had not 
been able to save geology from the eighteenth-century spirit of 
adventurous speculation, nor had they lifted from geology the burden 
of those quaint theories that made this science the butt of Voltaire’s 
luminous ridicule. 
The great achievement of the Geological Society has been this: as 
a corporate body it has been able to spread its influence very widely ; 
its clear-sighted pursuit of a practical ideal has been adopted in other 
countries ; its resolute rejection of the temptation to wander in dream- 
land has affected geological students all over the world. In this way 
has been laid a broad foundation of positive knowledge upon which 
modern geology has been built. 
The fine self-restraint which induced the founders of the Geological 
Society to restrict its work for awhile to observing the surface of the 
earth has had its reward. The methods this society was founded to 
employ haye been so widely used that we now have geological maps 
of a wider area than was known to geographers of a century ago. 
The general distribution of all the rocks on the earth’s surface has 
been discovered; most settled countries have been surveyed in some 
detail; the main outlines of the history of life on the earth have been 
written and carried back almost as far as paleontologists are likely to 
go. There are doubtless fossiliferous areas still undiscovered in the 
‘back blocks’ of the world; but, though negative predictions are 
proverbially reckless, it seems probable that paleontology will not 
earry geological history materially farther back. Fossils have been 
discovered in the pre-Cambrian rocks; the best known is the fauna 
described by Walcot from Montana; but his Beltina, the oldest well- 
characterised fossil, is still of Paleozoic type. It may be that the 
poverty of carbonate of lime, which is so characteristic a feature of 
most Cambrian and pre-Cambrian sediments, indicates that the bulk 
