﻿XXxiv PBOCEEDTNGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Ms favourite study. Even in the spring of 1860 lie was still en- 

 gaged with this subject, and hut a few days hefore his decease he 

 sent a letter on raised beaches to an old friend. 



Johann Eeiedkich Ltjdwig Haesmakist, who was elected a Foreign 

 Member of this Society in 1829, died at Hanover, his native town, 

 on the 26th of December 1859, in the 78th year of his age. He 

 had no sooner completed his academical education than he devoted 

 himself to the prosecution of geological science. In 1807 he made 

 a geological tour in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden ;■ in 1809 he 

 was placed at the head of a Government Mining Establishment in 

 the then kingdom of "Westphalia, and during his administration of 

 it he established the School of Mines at Clausthal in the Harz 

 Mountains. On the death, in 1811, of the celebrated Beckmann, 

 Professor of Technology and Mining in the University of Gottingen, 

 Hausmann was appointed his successor, with which professorship 

 Was soon afterwards conjoined that of Mineralogy and Geology, 

 offices which he filled with unremitting zeal and with acknowledged 

 success until within a few months of his death. During his vaca- 

 tions, he followed up his geological studies in England, Erance, 

 Spain, and Italy. He was the author of a vast number of treatises 

 on Mineralogy, Geology, and Technology, and held a distinguished 

 place among the scientific men of Germany. On the death of the 

 renowned Blumenbach, he was appointed Secretary of the Royal 

 Academy of Sciences of Gottingen, which he continued to be to the 

 time of his death. 



It was in the year 1828 that Dr. Eitton, who had been elected 

 the President of this Society at the preceding Anniversary, first in- 

 troduced the custom of an address being delivered from the Chair 

 at our Annual General Meetings. In the then existing circum- 

 stances of the Society, and for the next fifteen years, when a long- 

 time usually elapsed between the reading of a paper and its publi- 

 cation in our Transactions, a review of the proceedings of the past 

 year was interesting and useful. But our Quarterly Journal gives 

 so full and early* an account of the papers read, that it is now un- 

 necessary for your President to occupy your time with such a review. 

 I therefore propose to pass them over, and to bring under your 

 notice some of the more prominent objects that have occupied the 

 attention of geologists in recent times, and which must long con- 

 tinue to do so, while we endeavour to arrive at a true Theory of 

 the Earth. 



The Geological Survey of the United Kingdom claims, however, 

 my first attention ; for I think that, without being open to the 

 charge of arrogance, we may say that it is an offspring of this So- 



* A paper by Professor Nicol, which now occupies twenty-nine pages of our 

 Journal, with fourteen illustrations, was read, referred, printed (the woodcuts 

 engraved), and published between the 5th of December and the 1st of February 

 last. 



