﻿xlviil PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May I9IO, 



THE ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. 

 Peoe. William Johnson Sollas, LL.D., Sc.D., F.R.S. 



During the past year we have had to mourn the loss of many 

 distinguished Fellows of the Society : brief obituary notices of 

 some of them follow. 



Thomas Mellakd Reade (1832-1909). — Mr. Reade was born on 

 May 27th, 1832. He was the youngest son of William James 

 Reade, the master of a small private school in Liverpool, and 

 descended from a family of Staffordshire yeomen, some of whom — 

 Sir Thomas Reade and the Rev. Joseph Bancroft Reade, F.R.S., for 

 instance — rose to distinction. 



His mother, whose maiden name was Mary Mellard, was a sister 

 of Mrs. Craik, the author of ' John Halifax, Gentleman.' 



At the age of 12, Reade left school, and entered the office of 

 Messrs. Eyes and Son, a well-known firm of architects and 

 surveyors; in 1853 he obtained an appointment in the engineer's 

 office of the London and North- Western Railway at Warrington, and 

 remained there until 1860, when he began practice in Liverpool on 

 his own account as an architect and civil engineer, and ultimately 

 met with very considerable success. 



Mr. Reade did not take any serious interest in geology till he 

 had almost reached middle age ; his first contribution, a letter to 

 4 Nature ' on Eozoon canadense, was made in 1870, but from that 

 time scarcely a year elapsed without one or more papers from his 

 pen. His earlier work relates chiefly to Glacial and post-Glacial 

 deposits, and the question of geological time ; he was the first to 

 arrive at an estimate of the rate at which rivers are conveying 

 calcium carbonate to the ocean, and to calculate from the mass of 

 limestone contained in the sedimentary series the age of the 

 stratified crust ; this he thought must amount to 600 millions of 

 years. Later on, he devoted much attention to the origin of 

 mountain-ranges, and arrived at the original and valuable con- 

 ception of ' the level of no strain.' During the last ten years of 

 his life he was engaged, in association with Mr. Philip Holland, in 

 researches upon the lithology of the Ludlow and Old Red Sand- 

 stone rocks. He was the author of ' Chemical Denudation in 

 relation to Geological Time' (1879), 'The Origin of Mountain 

 Ranges, considered experimentally, structurally, dynamically, and 



