part 1] ANNIVEESART ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. Iv 



THE ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. 

 Richard Dixon Oldham, F.R.S. 



Death has not dealt heavily with us in numbers, but among those 

 whom we have lost during the last twelve months are three of our 

 distinguished Foreign Members, and from the list of our Fellows 

 we miss one master mind of his time. 



In the death of Prof. Charles La.pworth on March 13th, 

 1920, we have to mourn one who stands in the front rank of 

 geologists, Avorthy to be placed among the masters of the science. 

 In every branch that he touched — stratigraphy, tectonics, petrology, 

 palaeontology, the work that he did was not only brilliantly original 

 and enduring, but it has fertilized, and will continue to fertilize, 

 the research of others. 



Born in 1S42 at Faringdon, in Berkshire, his earl}^ life was 

 spent at Buckland, in Oxfordshire. His education, as well as the 

 professional Avork which he discharged in the South of Scotland 

 up to the age of 39, appear to have been purely literary, but he 

 managed to acquire for himself a knowledge of science. Interest 

 in the origin of landscape, and in the rocks to which it owes 

 its features, was quickened by his discovery of fossils in strata 

 regarded as barren ; and the attraction became insistent between 

 1866 and 1869, when he began a systematic investigation of the 

 rocks of the Southern Uplands, partly alone, and partly in the 

 company of his friend James Wilson. 



He soon saw that the Uplands area was much more complicated 

 than had previously been realized, and that the only way in Avhich 

 its structure could be unravelled was b}^ detailed mapping on a scale 

 larger than had been employed. For such work he Avas eminently 

 htted, in the possession of an acute faculty for discriminating 

 minute lithological differences and an excellent memory for 

 lithological types, combined with a good eye for a country and 

 for a fossil, and patience to search and collect exhaustively. 

 Moreover, he was able and willing to supplement published topo- 

 graphical maps by personal survey, making large-scale plans of 

 crucial areas on which there was room to record his own very 

 detailed observations. 



Th'C results appeared in a succession of jmpers, culminating in 



