296 Geological Surveys in Great Britain, s&c. 



on which the structure and disposition of the rocky masses is laid 

 down in still more precise detail. On the death of Sir Henry De 

 la Beche the office of Director General was conferred on Sir 

 Roderick Murchison, himself a geological workman whose field of 

 operations has extended from the Atlantic to the Caspian Sea. 



The Government School of Mines and Geological Museum in 

 Jermyn-street is an offshoot of the Survey. There, in addition to 

 the published maps, other substantial proofs of the progress of the 

 Survey are preserved and exhibited. Ores, metals, rocks, and 

 whole suites of fossils are stratigraphically arranged in such a 

 manner, that, with an observant eye for form, all may easily un- 

 derstand the more obvious scientific meanings of the succession of 

 life in time and its bearing on geological economics. It is perhaps 

 scarcely an exaggeration to say that the greater number of so- 

 called educated persons are still ignorant of the meaning of this 

 great doctrine. They would be ashamed not to know that there 

 are many suns and material worlds besides our own ; but the 

 science, equally grand and comprehensible, that aims at the dis- 

 covery of the laws that regulated the creation, extension, deca- 

 dence, and utter extinction of many successive species of genera 

 and whole orders of life is ignored, or if intruded on the attention, 

 is looked on as an uncertain and dangerous dream — and this 

 in a country which was almost the nursery of geology, and which, 

 for fifty-one years, has boasted the first Geological Society in the 

 world. Several other governments have followed the example of 

 • that of Great Britain. Similar Surveys have long been established 

 in France, Belgium, Austria, and the United States ; and others 

 will certainly be founded as knowledge progresses, and as those 

 branches of material prosperity advance on which the subject im- 

 mediately bears. A direct result, perhaps not at first foreseen by 

 the founder of the British Survey, was the establishment of kin- 

 dred undertakings in our possessions abroad. In 1843, a syste- 

 matic geological survey was commenced in Canada, in 1846 in 

 India, and at later dates in Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, 

 and Trinidad ; and all of these sprang from the parent institution in 

 which the chief Colonial geologists were trained in the field, while 

 both the Survey and the School of Mines supplied many of the 

 younger officers. We have before us a pile of Blue-books, Reports, 

 and a large Atlas of the Geological Survey of Canada, published 

 by order of the Legislative Assembly, and probably almost un- 

 known in England except to a few scientific geologists. From 



