﻿1 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May I908, 



THE ANNIVEESAKY ADDEESS OF THE PRESIDENT. 



SiE Archibald Geikie, K.C.B., D.C.L., LL.D., Sc.D., Sec.E.S. 



The losses sustained by the Society this year through death have 

 been heavy, alike as regards the number and the distinction of the 

 deceased. We have to mourn the departure of two of our Foreign 

 llembers, one of our Foreign Correspondents, and upwards of thirty 

 of our ordinary Fellows, including some who have done good service 

 in the cause of Geology and in the furtherance of the work of the 

 Society. 



By the death of Makcel Beetraisd the Society has lost one of its 

 most eminent Foreign Members. His father, Joseph Bertrand, 

 distinguished as a mathematician, was for many years the Perpetual 

 Secretary of the Academy of Sciences of Paris, and enjoyed, besides, 

 the rare distinction of being elected as one of the forty members 

 of the French Academy. Our lamented colleague was born on 

 February 2nd, 1847. Coming of such parentage, he naturally took 

 to a scientific career. At the age of twenty he entered the Ecole 

 Poljrtechnique, and passed as Ingenieur Ordinaire des Mines in 

 1872. Five years later he was attached to the service of the 

 Geological Survey of France ; and in 1886, when thirty-nine 

 years of age, he became Ingenieur-en-chef des Mines and Professor 

 of Geology at the School of Mines in Paris, while still retaining 

 his connection with the Survey. 



His first official field-work was carried on in the Jura, where he 

 spent eight strenuous years, entirely completing by himself four 

 sheets of the detailed geological map of France and revising part of 

 a fifth. The Jurassic rocks of the region which he surveyed had 

 never before been closely studied. It was, therefore, his first task to 

 master the true order of succession of the formations, and to apply to 

 them the system of zonal classification which had been employed 

 with so much success elsewhere. Starting from the work done by 

 M. Choffat in Portugal, he traced the lithological and palaeonto- 

 logical changes of the strata as they advance southwards, and he 

 was able to note the passage of the northern into the Mediterranean 

 Jurassic province. He showed that the reef-building corals of the 

 period retired gradually from the Paris Basin to the Alpine sea, 

 round which they built long chains of reefs. 



It was in the course of these early years in the field that Bertrand 



