ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. xlv 



Mr. Lyell, in his ' Travels in North America/ pubhshed within the 

 period of the review I am now taking, has given us another measure 

 of time, also within the most modern period of geological chronology, 

 in his observations on the recession of the Falls of Niagara, by the 

 slow but incessant action of the water on the rocks over which it 

 flows. The order of succession, and the geological age and position 

 of these rocks have been ably described and illustrated by Mr. James 

 Hall in his ^ State Survey of New York,' to the accuracy of which 

 descriptions Mr. Lyell has borne testimony. As the strata are 

 various in their nature and hardness, there must have been a great 

 inequality in the rate of wear at different parts ; and not from 

 that cause alone, but also from the inchned position of the strata. 

 From the observations that have been made as to the amount of 

 waste within a known period, Mr. Lyell is inclined to think that a 

 foot a year would be the most probable rate, if the retrograde move- 

 ment could be assumed to have been gradual. From the causes 

 above stated, it would probably be sometimes slow and sometimes 

 rapid ; but if we take a foot for the mean annual waste, as the length 

 of the ravine, which has been demonstrably worn by the river, from 

 Queenstown to the present position of the Falls, is seven miles, 36,960 

 years must have elapsed between the present time and the period when 

 the Niagara formed a cataract over a precipice at Queenstown. Many 

 of the species of fluviatile and terrestrial testacea now living in that 

 region must have been created before that period, for Mr. Lyell has 

 shown, and he was the first to collect the evidence of the fact and to 

 appreciate its importance, that before the river began to cut out the 

 ravine, it must have flowed over a plain of alluvial soil in which the 

 remains of existing land and river shells had been deposited, the 

 remains of its former banks having been discovered by him on both 

 sides, at the top of the cliffs which now bound the river course. 



In the recently published work on Lycia by Lieut. Spratt and 

 Professor Forbes, the latter gives a chapter on the geological structure 

 of that part of Asia Minor, which contains some interesting facts re- 

 lating to changes now in progress. The land has been subject to 

 elevations and depressions, not only in very modern geological times, 

 but even within a period not very remote in the historical epoch. 

 A sarcophagus stands in the water in the Bay of Macri, the site of 

 the ancient Telmessus, which is bored by marine animals to a third 

 of its height, indicating a subsidence and subsequent rising of the 

 land, like that on which the ruins of the temple of Jupiter Serapis 

 stand, in the Bay of Naples, but with this difference in the circum- 

 stances of the two cases, that there are no volcanic foci known to have 

 been in activity i:i the historic sera m that part of Asia, none nearer 

 than the island of Santorin in the Archipelago, a distance of nearly 200 

 miles westward ; but earthquakes almost annually convulse the country. 



The port of the ancient city of Patara is closed up by accumu- 

 lations of sand, and Cannus, which was a seaport in the time of 

 Strabo, is now two miles inland, and its harbour is a freshwater lake, 

 from whence the waters have a fall to the sea. 



