"Vol. 70.] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lxvii 



periodic prostrating headaches preceded a stroke of paralysis, and 

 lie died at Hilterfingen, on the Lake o£ Thun, on November 4th, 

 1913, after a painful and lingering illness. 



Baltzer's work may be divided into three groups — his foundation 

 of the Geological & Mineralogical Institute at Berne, to which for 

 twenty-nine years he devoted most of his thought and energy, his 

 researches on Alpine Tectonics, and his contributions to Glacial 

 Geology. His first paper was on the geology of the Adamello 

 Group, and was contributed to the Jahrbuch of the Swiss Alpine Club 

 in 1870. This was followed by a work on the Glarnisch in 1873. 

 In 1874 and 1875 he published some studies on recent eruptive 

 rocks, collected during a visit to Sicily and the Lipari Islands. His 

 most important Alpine monograph was on the ' Mechanical Contact 

 ■of Gneiss & Limestone in the Bernese Oberland,' published in 

 1880, in which he showed that the superposition of the gneiss was 

 due to its having been overthrust. The position of the gneiss had 

 been attributed to its eruptive origin ; but Baltzer proved that the 

 contact between the two series showed only dynamic, and not 

 igneous contact-phenomena. His extension of this work westwards 

 across the Lauterbrunnen Valley, south of the Lake of Thun, was 

 published in 1907, in his last great Alpine monograph. In 1901 

 Baltzer also applied the explanation of overthrusting to the 

 geology of Lago d' Iseo, where in the Camonica valley some ancient 

 quartz-phyllites and Permian and Triassic rocks have been pushed 

 southwards on to rocks belonging to the two later systems. 



In 1888, in his monograph on the middle part of the Aar massif, 

 he described the much disputed ' gneisses ' of the Haslithal with 

 their Carboniferous plant- stems ; and he then adopted a ' younger 

 gneiss series,' but, probably in consequence of the work of 

 Prof. Bonney, he subsequently recognized the uncertaint}' of this 

 view, and in his 1901 monograph he left the age of the gneisses 

 and phyllites doubtful, assigning them either to the Archaean or 

 to the Palaeozoic. 



Baltzer also devoted much attention to Glacial Geology, and was 

 much interested in the origin of lake-basins and the rate of glacier- 

 erosion. He described the Lower Grindelwald Glacier in 1898, and 

 drilled a series of boreholes, in order that future geologists might 

 test the actual rate of ice-erosion. In his various discussions of this 

 problem he shoAved his usual moderation of view, by proclaiming that 

 he accepted neither the estimate that glacial erosion is enormous 

 nor that it is insignificant. In his monograph on Lago d' Iseo he 



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