Xliv PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May 1 904, 



I beg most heartily to thank the Council for the honour which they 

 have done me. 



Award oe the Ltell Medal. 



In handing the Lyell Medal, awarded to Prof. Alfred Gabriel 

 Xathorst, of Stockholm, to Baron C. de Bildt, Envoy Extraordinary 

 and Minister Plenipotentiary of H.M. the King of Sweden & 

 Norway, for transmission to the recipient, the Chairman addressed 

 him as follows : — 



Baron de Bildt, — • 



Your Excellency has been good enough to come here to-day to 

 receive for your countryman, Prof. Xathorst, of Stockholm, the 

 Lyell Medal, which has been awarded to him this year by the 

 Geological Society in recognition of his long and distinguished 

 labours to advance our knowledge of the vegetation which at 

 successive periods in the history of the earth has flourished in 

 Northern Europe and the Arctic regions. These labours range 

 from the oldest to the youngest ages of geological time. Among 

 the most ancient rocks various curious markings, which had gene- 

 rally been regarded as traces of marine plants, were shown many 

 years ago by Prof. Xathorst, after an ingenious series of experi- 

 ments, to be probably not of vegetable origin. But while he thus 

 cut off what had been supposed to be an early marine flora, he has 

 greatly extended our acquaintance with the terrestrial floras of 

 Palaeozoic time in the Arctic regions. His papers on the extension 

 of the vegetation of the Upper Old Bed Sandstone as far north as 

 Bear Island, continuing the earlier work of Heer, are of special 

 interest. He has thrown much light on the flora of the Triassic 

 deposits that extend into the South of Sweden. Prom the far 

 northern King Charles Land he has made known the existence of a 

 Jurassic and a Cretaceous flora. His researches among Pleistocene 

 and recent deposits, and the history which he has thence deduced 

 of plant-migration and changes of climate in Europe, are singularlv 

 interesting and suggestive. Although it is as a student of fossil plants 

 that Prof. Xathorst is most widely known, it was his keen eyes that 

 detected for the first time casts of medusae in the Lower Cambrian 

 rocks of Scandinavia. In transmitting to him our Lyell Medal, 

 your Excellency will, I hope, accompany it with an expression 



