ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. Iv 



England. But whether the suggestion be acted on or not in the 

 present day, we are greatly indebted to Mr. Godwin- Austen for 

 bringing forward the subject, and for bringing his knowledge of the 

 palaeozoic rocks of the Boulonnais to bear on the geology of the 

 neighbouring Wealden. 



Professor Ramsay read at one of our Evening Meetings an interesting 

 paper "On the occurrence of Angular, Subangular, Polished, and 

 Striated Fragments and Boulders in the Permian Breccia of Shrop- 

 shire, Worcestershire, &c." This formation, remarkable on account 

 of the imbedded fragments being angular, instead of being rounded 

 as in the usual conglomeratic beds of the Permian and New Bed 

 Sandstone formation, had long ago attracted the attention of different 

 geological observers, and various causes had been assigned to account 

 for this discrepancy in the appearance of its contents. The object 

 of Prof. Ramsay, after carefully examining all the localities where 

 these breccias occur in Staffordshire and Worcestershire, and every 

 opening, exposed whether by nature or in quarries, is to point out 

 the probable existence of glaciers and icebergs in the Permian epoch. 

 And although it may be premature to consider this statement as 

 correct, or to adopt all the conclusions of Prof. Ramsay, it mast be 

 admitted that there is something peculiar in this breccia formation ; 

 and there seems no reason for questioning the conclusion which Prof. 

 Ramsay has arrived at from an extensive examination of these 

 scratched and angular boulders, viz. that they have been derived 

 from a considerable distance, and that they have been transported 

 by the agency of water. Nor am I prepared to admit that all the 

 arguments by which it has been attempted to refute the theory of 

 Prof. Ramsay are altogether conclusive. Some of these objections 

 he has noticed in his paper, and more or less satisfactorily answered. 

 We know too little of central heat as yet, or in what proportion, if at 

 all, it has diminished by radiation since the Carboniferous and Permian 

 epochs, to found any safe conclusion on such an argument ; still less, 

 even admitting such a supposition as the existence of central heat, 

 do we know the causes from whence it proceeded. It was long 

 considered as a geological axiom, that our earth was before its first 

 consolidation a mass of liquid or viscous igneous matter. But the 

 truth of this so-called axiom has now been seriously called in question, 

 and many geologists are disposed to admit the equal, if not greater, 

 probability of the soft or liquid state of the primitive earth being due 

 to aqueous rather than igneous causes. 



But to return to Prof. Ramsay : surely they who would wish to 

 invalidate his arguments on the general ground of the improbability 

 of the existence of glaciers and icebergs during a period when a 

 tropical vegetation is supposed to have flourished in the neighbouring 

 districts, must have forgotten the eloquent description given by Mr. 

 Darwin of the glaciers of South America, when he states*, that 

 " glaciers here descend to the sea within less than two degrees and a 

 half from arborescent grasses, and (looking to the westward in the 

 same hemisphere) less than two from orchideous parasites, and within 

 * Researches in Geology and Natural History, p. 285. 



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