ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XCV 



the opportunity of extending and advancing science itself. Thus the 

 one aids the other, and both combined promote the general progress 

 of mankind, as witness our railways, electrical telegraphs and steam 

 navigation. 



As connected with the objects of this Society, it may be mentioned 

 that the investigation at the Museum for the Admiralty of the coals 

 best suited to our steam navy has made great progress, that one report 

 on this subject has been presented to Parliament and has been printed, 

 and that a second report will soon appear. The waters of many of 

 our streams and springs are under examination for the Board of 

 Health. The chemical composition of fossil remains of diiferent ages 

 is under investigation, and already, as has been above mentioned, 

 shells from the Silurian rocks have been found to retain animal 

 matter. The new house for the Museum in Jermyn Street is now 

 nearly completed ; when finished, the collections of the Geological 

 Survey, illustrative of the geology of our country, including its organic 

 remains, and of our mineral wealth and its applications, will be there 

 exhibited gratuitously to the public, as those collections which the 

 limited space in the present provisional museum will permit being 

 shown now are daily, and have been for several years past, — a gratui- 

 tous admission which has been marked by very slight damage, and 

 that not chargeable upon the working classes. 



A second volume, in two parts, of the Memoirs of the Geological 

 Survey of Great Britain and of the Museum of Practical Geology 

 has been published during the past year, and illustrations of British 

 Fossils will shortly appear in connection with the publications of the 

 Survey, each decade consisting of the same kind of fossils. The first 

 decade will be devoted to fossil Star-fishes and Echinites, and the 

 second to Trilobites. 



Geological Society of France. 



The communication to this Society which succeeded those we 

 had an opportunity of noticing in the Address for the last year, 

 was from M. Frapolli on facts illustrative of the deposits of gyp- 

 sum, dolomite and rock-salt. He first mentions the gypseous deposits 

 of the country surrounding the Hartz, found in all the secondary 

 rocks, either in small isolated patches, as is generally the case in the 

 Subhercynian Gulf, or in great deposits, as in Thuringia, where it 

 appears on the limits of the muschelkalk and keuper, ranging like a 

 great abrupt crescent-formed wall on the southern side of the Hartz. 

 This gypsum is always stratified, the beds being parallel with those 

 of the rocks amid which it is found, such as zechstein, gres bigarre, 

 muschelkalk, variegated marls and chalk. A peculiar mineral aspect 

 is stated to characterize the gypsum of each of these deposits. M. 

 Frapolli considers certain of these gypsums, those of the muschel- 

 kalk, trias. Jura rocks and chalk, to have been of metamorphic 

 origin, and that the sulphates of lime were originally carbonates 

 of lime, the metamorphism having been effected in the dry v^^ay (la 

 vote seche), gaseous emanations having reached them from beneath. 

 On this head he quotes a conversation with Berzelius, whose loss to 



