PKOCEEDINGS 



AT THE 



ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING, 

 17th FEBRUARY, 1871. 



Award op the "VVoLLASToif Medal. 



The Reports of the Council and of the Committees and Auditors 

 having been read, the President, Joseph Prestwich, Esq., E.R.S., 

 handed the Wollaston Gold Medal to Professor Ramsay, E.R.S., 

 E.G.S., addressing him as follows :-— 



Propbssoe Ramsay, — I have great pleasure in presenting you with 

 the "WoUaston Medal, which has this year been awarded to you by 

 the CouncU of the Society, in recognition of your many researches 

 in practical and in theoretical geology. Distinguished as your 

 services have been in connexion with the Geological Survey since 

 you entered upon it as the Assistant Geologist of Sir Henry De la 

 Beche in 1841, and more particularly since your appointment as 

 Local Director in 1845, during which period you have superintended 

 and carried out the admirably minute style of mapping now general 

 on the survey, and done so much in training its members in the 

 field, you have not less distinguished yourself by your investigations 

 of the higher problems involved in the study of geology. Your first 

 work was on the Isle of Arran ; and although then only a beginner, 

 you, instead of taking the rocks to be what they looked, worked out 

 what they were, and gave a new and independent reading of them, 

 which has since in great part proved to be the right one. In 1846 

 your weU-known memoir " On the Denudation of South "Wales and 

 the adjacent Counties of England " showed the enormous amount of 

 denudation that the Palaeozoic rocks had undergone before the depo- 

 sition of the New Red Sandstone. At subsequent periods you dwelt 

 on the power that produced " Plains of Marine Denudation," a term 

 introduced, I believe, by yourself, and showed in all cases, by a 

 series of true and beautiful sections, how this had operated in 

 planing across the older strata, and how valleys had been scooped 

 out by subsequent aqueous causes in the great plains so formed. 



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