Presidential Address. 20*7 



tunity afforded by this address to invite your attention to 

 some topics of scientific interest. In attempting to do this, 

 I must have before me the warning- conveyed by Professor 

 Huxley, in the address to which I have already referred, 

 that in our time, science, like Tarpeia, may be crushed with 

 the weight of the rewards bestowed on her. In other words, 

 it is impossible for any man to keep pace with the progress 

 of more than one limited branch of science ; and it is equally 

 impossible to find an audience of scientific men of whom 

 anything more than a mere fraction can be expected to take 

 an interest in any one subject. There is, however, some con- 

 solation in the knowledge that a speaker who is sufficiently 

 simple for those who are advanced specialists in other depart- 

 ments, will of necessity be also sufficiently simple to be 

 understood by the general public who are specialists in 

 nothing. On this principle, a geologist of the old school, 

 accustomed to a great variety of work, may hope so to scat- 

 ter his fire as to reach the greater part of the audience. In 

 endeavouring to secure this end, I have sought inspiration 

 from that ocean which connects rather than separates 

 Britain and America, and may almost be said to be an 

 English sea — the North Atlantic. The geological history of 

 this depression of the earth's crust, and its relation to the 

 continental masses which limit it, may furnish a theme at 

 once generally intelligible and connected with great ques- 

 tions as to the structure and history of the earth, which have 

 excited the attention alike of the physicists, geologists, bio- 

 logists, geographers and ethnologists. Should I, in treating 

 of these questions, appear to be somewhat abrupt and dog- 

 matic, and to indicate rather than state the evidence of the 

 general views announced, I trust you will kindly attribute 

 this to the exigencies of a short address. 



If we imagine an observer contemplating the earth from 

 a convenient distance in space, and scrutinizing its features 

 as it rolls before him, we may suppose him to be struck with 

 the fact that eleven-sixteenths of its surface are covered with 

 water, and that the land is so unequally distributed that from 

 one point of view he would see a hemisphere almost exclu- 

 sively oceanic, while nearly the whole of the dry land is 



