100 ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS 



Sandstone of the Siccar Point is itself a rock of high 

 antiquity, dating back to more than 400 millions of 

 years from our own times, the reader may be less dis- 

 posed to be incredulous than if I had stated these 

 figures at the outset." Truly, the man of science here 

 unveils an enormous vista of time. Here is antiquity 

 indeed ; and I doubt whether anyone who has not spent 

 much of his lifetime in the open air, often perhaps in 

 solitude, studying the rocks of the earth and their life- 

 history, so that with the sky above him the truth may 

 enter his soul, can hope to obtain a mental grasp of 

 such aeons of antiquity as this. 



The Geologist by profession or devotion becomes, in 



the handling of periods and ages, a million- 

 The Natur- aire, and multi-millionaire. In looking back 

 alist as through such vast periods of time the 



Antiquary, imagination seeks some comfort, just as Mr 



Froude's imagination desired comfort in 

 looking through vast space ; and the comfort may well 

 be derived from meeting something familiar amidst 

 conditions otherwise strange. Amongst the so-called 

 solid materials of the earth's crust, geology reveals so 

 continued a restlessness, such a succession of changes of 

 position and of form, of destruction and reconstruction, 

 that but one thing seems more permanent than these, 

 and than its own name suggests — the air. And therein 

 is some comfort. The geologic eye looking far backward 

 can count upon the ancient air being much like the 

 present, though land and sea have been ever changing. 

 Indeed the permanence of the air seems to give it a 

 greater stability than the solid land surface. It is difficult 

 to imagine the atmosphere to have been greatly different 

 in volume and components — nitrogen and oxygen — from 

 its present constitution ; and the same arguments that 

 explain the existence of certain prevalent winds now, 

 would be equally good in any past geologic time. Thus 

 there would be the trade-winds and anti-trades, even the 



