182 Reports and Proceedings — 



In addition to these services to the Society, you have, it may safely 

 be affirmed, done more by your lectures than almost any other man to 

 advance palaeontological studies among those who are undergoing a 

 course of scientific training, while to more popular audiences you 

 have, by your vivid and lucid descriptions, rendered intelligible those 

 marvellous natural processes by which such beds as our Limestones, 

 Coal, and Chalk have gradually been built up. 



As one of our former Secretaries, I know the deep interest you 

 take in all geological pursuits, and I therefore venture to express a 

 hope, in which all in this room will share, that the day may not long 

 be distant when, with renewed health and strength, and a greater 

 amount of leisure at your command, you may again be able to take a 

 frequent part in the meetings of this Society, of whose appreciation 

 of your labours this medal is the symbol. 



Professor Huxley, in reply, said : — Mr. President, — I am so much 

 more accustomed to the language of criticism than to that of panegyric, 

 that I feel a certain difficulty in framing a reply appropriate to the 

 address with which you have just honoured me. 



To be enrolled among the eminent men who have been recipients of 

 the Wollaston Medal is a distinction of which the most ambitious 

 aspirant to scientific honours may be proud. The terms of personal 

 kindness in which you have clothed the award of the Council, and the 

 warmth of my reception by the meeting, lead me to hope that I may, 

 in addition, regard the distinction which ha^ been conferred upon me 

 as a mark of the goodwill of the colleagues with whom in past years 

 I have been so closely associated. 



It is my hope and expectation, Mr. President, that the wish which 

 you have so kindly expressed as to the resumption of my palaeonto- 

 logical work, will be fulfilled. 



The great biological question of the day is the problem of evolu- 

 tion ; but geologists, as Kant says, are the archaeologists of nature, 

 and the sole direct and irrefragable evidence of the method whereby 

 living things have become what they are, is to be sought among fossil 

 remains. If I have in any degree merited the unexpected honour 

 you have conferred upon me, it is because I have steadily kept this 

 truth in view ; and if I shall ever succeed in deserving the Wollaston 

 Medal better than at present, it will be by further attempts to trans- 

 late the archaeological facts of nature into history. 



The President then presented the balance of the proceeds of the 

 Wollaston Donation Pund to Mr. J. Gwyn Jeffreys, for transmission 

 to Professor Giuseppe Seguenza, of Messina, P.C.G.S., and addressed 

 him in the following terms : — 



Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys, — In placing in your hands the balance of the 

 proceeds of the Wollaston Pund for transmission to our Poreign Cor- 

 respondent, Professor Seguenza, of Messina, may I request you to 

 convey to him at the same time our high sense of the value of his 

 investigations upon the Tertiary beds of Italy and Sicily, on which he 

 has already published such numerous and important memoirs. 



Will you, in addition, express a hope that this mark of our appre- 

 ciation may also prove of some assistance to him in the further 

 prosecution of his researches. 



