Section C. — British Association. 461 



roountain ranges of the Apennines, the Alps, the Caucasus, the Atlas, 

 and the Himalaya, all of which strike more or less east and west, 

 and are to a great extent of Post-Eocene, and eA'en partly of Post- 

 Miocene age. The same, however, is not precisely the case with tlie 

 Appalachian chain, and the Eocky Mountains of North America, the 

 first of which trends N.N.W., and the latter N.N.E. The remark- 

 able chain of the Ural Mountains trends nearly true north and south, 

 and is parallel to no other chain that I know of, unless it be the 

 Andes and the mountains of Japan. It is worthy of notice that the 

 chain of the Ural is of Pre-Permian age according to Murchison, 

 while Darwin has shown that the chief upheaval of the Andes took 

 place in Post-Cretaceous times. 



The Appalachian chain is chiefly of Post-Carboniferous date, and 

 the Kocky Mountains have been re-disturbed and re-elevated as late 

 as Post-Miocene times. 



In the same address Professor Sedgwick entered an eloquent 

 protest against the broad uniformitarian views so powerfully advo- 

 cated in the first edition of Lyell's " Principles of Geology" in 1830, 

 in which, throwing aside all discussion concerning cosmogony, he 

 took the world as he found it, and, agreeing with Hutton, that 

 geology is in no way concerned with, and not sufficiently advanced 

 to deal " with questions as to the origin of things," he saw that a 

 great body of new data were required such as engaged the attention 

 of the Geological Society (founded in 1807), and which along with 

 other foreign societies and private work has at length brought 

 geological science to its present high position. 



And what is that position? With great and consistent labour 

 many men gifted with a knowledge of stratigraphical and palseonto- 

 logical geology, have, so to speak, more or less dissected all the 

 regions of Europe and great part of North America, India, and of 

 our colonies, and in vast areas, sometimes nearlj'" adjoining, and 

 sometimes far distant from each other, the various formations, by 

 help of the fossils they contain, have been correlated in time, often 

 in spite of great differences in their lithological characters. It is 

 easy, for example, to correlate the various formations in countries 

 so near as Great Britain and Ireland, or of the Secondary and 

 Lower Tertiary formations of England and France ; and what is 

 more remarkable, it is easy to correlate the Palaeozoic formations of 

 Britain and the eastern half of the United States and Canada, even 

 in many of the comparatively minute stratigraphical and lithological 

 subdivisions of the Silurian, Devonian, and Carboniferous forma- 

 tions. The same may be said with regard to some of the Palceozoic 

 formations of India, China, Africa, and Australia, and many of the 

 Secondary and Tertiary deposits have in like manner been identified 

 as having their equivalents in Europe. It is not to be inferred 

 from these coincidences that such deposits were all formed precisely. 

 at the same time, but taken in connection with their paloeontological 

 contents, viewed in the light which Darwin has shown with regard 

 to the life of the globe when considered in their relation to masses 

 of stratified formations, no modern geologist who gives his mind to 



