ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXXVll 



an examination, by himself and Mr. Clift, of a collection, made by 

 Mr. J. Crawford, a Fellow of the Society, of organic remains found in 

 a deposit on the east bank of the Irawadi, about half-way between 

 Ava and Prome, between 20° and 21° N. lat. Up to this time the 

 information respecting the geology of India had been very scanty, 

 consisting principally of papers by Messrs. Colebrooke and Fraser in 

 the first volume of the second series of the * Transactions ' ; so that 

 Dr. Buckland, in his ' Ileliquiae Diluviana;,' had observed, — ''Another 

 interesting branch of inquiry is, whether any fossil remains of Ele- 

 phant, Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, and Hyaena exist in the diluvium 

 of tropical climates ; and if they do, whether they agree with the 

 recent species of these genera, or with those extinct species whose re- 

 mains are dispersed so largely over the temperate and frigid zones of 

 the northern hemisphere ; " a question which was answered, after the 

 lapse of only five years, by the researches of Mr. Crawford, along the 

 course of the Irawadi from its mouth near Rangoon up to Ava, a 

 distance of nearly 500 miles. The collection consisted of both mo- 

 nocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants, the former silicified, and 

 the latter sometimes petrified by silex, and sometimes by carbonate 

 of lime, and of fossil bones, in which the interest of the discovery 

 principally depended. The bones were either fractured or worn by 

 attrition, and were found in the sand and gravel, which Dr. Buckland 

 still called diluvium and considered more recent than the alluvial 

 formations of the great deltas. They consisted, in the Pachydermata, 

 of two new species oi Mastodon {M. latidens and M. elephantoides), 

 one oi Hippopotamus^ smaller than the existing species, one species of 

 Sus, one of Rhinoceros, approximating most nearly to the Rhinoceros 

 of Java, and one of Tapir ; in the Ruminantia, one species of Deer, 

 and one of Antilope ; in the Class Reptilia and Order Chelonia, of 

 three species of Trionyx, very large, and one apparently an Emys ; in 

 the Sauria, of a species allied to, if not identical wdth, the great 

 Gavial of the Ganges, and a Crocodile resembling CrocodUus vul- 

 garis. Such an assemblage as this, connecting the ancient fauna 

 of India both with the ancient and modern faunae of America and 

 Europe, and with the recent fauna of Africa, was well calculated to 

 excite the admiration of one so enthusiastic as Dr. Buckland, and 

 called forth from him the prophetic opinion, that, as he had antici- 

 pated in his first paper on the " Cave of Kirkdale," bones of Hyaenas 

 would be discovered in the diluvium of England, as they had been 

 in that of the European Continent, so also on similar grounds he 

 would argue, •' that it is highly probable we shall hereafter find the 

 Mastodon in our own diluvium and most recent tertiary strata, — a 

 prophecy verified by the discovery of the Mastodon in our Crag. It 

 is indeed in science alone that man may venture to prophesy, for it 

 is there only he is acquainted with the laws, though sometimes only 

 imperfectly, which link together the courses of natural events. The 

 freshwater and marine tertiaries, also brought to light by these re- 

 searches, as well as by those of Colebrooke, Babington, and Scott, 

 were important extensions of those interesting deposits, which, first 

 noticed in the Basins of London and Paris, had already become 



