Geological Society of London. 181 



In presenting the "WoUaston G-olcl Medal to Prof. Eamsay, F.E.S., 

 F.G.S., the President spoke as follows : — 



Professor Eamsay, — I have great pleasure in presenting you with 

 the Wollaston Medal, which has this year been awarded to you by 

 the Council of the Society, in recognition of your many researches 

 in practical and in theoretical geology. Distinguished as your 

 services have been in connexion with the Geological Survey since 

 you entered upon it as the Assistant Geologist of Sir Henry de la 

 Beche in 1841, and more particularly since your appointment as 

 Local Director in 1845, during which period you have superintended 

 and carried out the admirably minute style of mapping now general 

 on the Survey, and done so much in training its members in the 

 field, you have not less distinguished yourself by your investigations 

 of the higher problems involved in the study of geology. Your 

 first work was on the Isle of Arran; and although then only a 

 beginner, you, instead of taking the rocks to be what they looked, 

 worked out what they were, and gave a new and independent read- 

 ing of them, which has since in great part jDroved to be the right 

 one. In 1846 your well-known memoir " On the Denudation of 

 South Wales and the adjacent Counties of England " showed the 

 enormous amount of denudation that the Palseozoic rocks had under- 

 gone before the deposition of the New Eed Sandstone. At subse- 

 quent i^eriods you dwelt on the power that produced '' Plains of 

 Marine Denudation," a term introduced, I believe, by yourself, and 

 showed in all cases, by a series of true and beautiful sections, how 

 this has operated in planing across the older strata, and how valleys 

 had been scooped out by subsequent aqueous causes in the great 

 plains so formed. 



Whilst imravelling the complicated interior phenomena of the 

 Welsh rocks, you were not unmindful of the very difierent order of 

 phenomena exhibited on their exterior surfaces. Here you showed 

 the vast extent and power of ice-action, and what a glacier land 

 Wales once was. Eeasoning from the present to the past, you also 

 boldly pushed your ice-batteries far back into geological time, and 

 were the first to bring them to bear on rocks of Permian age. That 

 advanced post you long had to hold alone ; but other geologists have 

 since followed your lead, and we have even lately had evidence in 

 the same direction from Southern Africa, where it is asserted that 

 boulders and glaciated surfaces have been found at the base of the 

 Karoo formation of supposed Jurassic age. 



You have also held a prominent place among those who, by their 

 public teaching, have done so much during the last twenty years to 

 advance the cause of our science. To myself personally, whose 

 geological career has run nearly parallel in time with your own, it 

 is a source of much pleasure that it has fallen to my lot to hand you 

 this the highest testimonial the Society has to bestow. 



Prof. Eamsay made the following reply : — 



Mr. President, — I cannot say whether 1 am more pleased or sur- 

 prised by the unexpected award to me of the Wollaston Medal by 

 the Council of this Society. Pleased I well may be, not because I 



