﻿C PEOCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May I908, 



sent by Lyell in the course of his first journeys in INTorth America 

 "which are printed in the third and fourth volumes of the Proceedings 

 and the first volume of the Quarterly Journal. Another instance 

 was that of Murchison & De Yerneuil, when, in the spring of 1841, 

 they gave to the Society the first account of the general results of 

 their traverses of the northern and central governments of Eussia 

 during the previous summer. 



By the time that the more regular and frequent publication of 

 the Society's papers was secured by the establishment of the Quarterly 

 Journal, other geological societies had made their appearance in this 

 country and abroad. The Geological Survey of the United Kingdom 

 had been set on foot, largely through the influence of Eellows of 

 this Society, and had given to other lands an example of national 

 recognition of the need for the accurate determination and mapping 

 of the rocks of a country. A change in the number and character of 

 the communications on foreign geology now began to be perceptible. 

 The regions described became more and more restricted to our own 

 colonies and dependencies, and to tracts of the earth's surface that 

 had been little visited and of which the geology was still unknown. 

 This change, however, was so gradual that for some years the 

 Journal continued to receive papers conceived, both as to subject 

 and as to treatment, in the earlier style of the Transactions. Thus 

 Murchison filled more than 150 pages of the fifth volume with an 

 account of the geological structure of the Alps, Apennines, and 

 Carpathian Mountains, his more particular object being to prove a 

 transition from Secondary into Tertiary formations, and to show the 

 development of Eocene deposits in Southern Europe. No part of 

 the European continent has bulked so largely in our publications as 

 the Chain of the Alps. But papers of the type of Murchison's on 

 that region are no longer presented to us. Such rapid sketches 

 of wide areas of complicated ground have given place to records of 

 much more detailed observations of particular lines of section or 

 special rocks of the chain. Yet in these later and more localized 

 communications questions of extreme interest and importance in 

 regard to the history of the Alps and to general problems in geology 

 may be discussed. I need only refer, in this connection, to the long 

 series of papers by Prof. Bonney on the crystalline rocks of these 

 mountains. 



The geology of our Colonies must necessarily now come less fre- 

 quently before us, seeing that most of these Colonies have their own 

 scientific journals in which the labours of their resident geologists 



