PROCEEDINGS 
AT THE 
ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING, 
18tu FEBRUARY, 1848. 
AWARD OF THE WOLLASTON MEDAL AND DONATION FuND. 
Arter the Reports of the Council and Committees had been read, 
the President delivered the Wollaston Palladium Medal to Dr. Buck- 
land, Dean of Westminster, addressing him as follows :— 
Dr. Bucktanp,—The Geological Society has awarded you its 
Wollaston Palladium Medal for the important services you have ren- 
dered to Geology during a long series of years, by your labours in 
the field, and by your numerous and valuable writings; for your 
exertions to promote the study of geology in the University of Ox- 
ford ; and especially for the zeal and energy with which, in its 
earlier day, you laboured to advance the objects of this Society, a 
zeal and energy which has remained unabated to the present time. 
To attempt an enumeration of your many geological works before 
the geologists I now see assembled in this room, would be a poor 
compliment to those to whom they are so familiar, and who have 
employed them so frequently to aid them in their labours. Your 
works will remain lasting memorials of your power to observe, and 
your ability to describe and render clear to others those discoveries 
and researches, which have so materially advanced that science for 
which we are here associated. 
It may not be generally known, especially to the younger members 
of our Society, that, while yet a child, at your native town, Axminster 
in Devonshire, ammonites, obtained by your father from the lias- 
quarries in the neighbourhood, were presented to your attention. As 
a scholar at Winchester, the chalk, with its flmts, were brought under 
your observation, and there it was that your collections in natural 
history first began. Removed to Oxford as a scholar of Corpus 
Christi College, the future teacher of geology in that university was 
fortunate in meeting with congenial tastes in our colleague, Mr. W. 
J. Broderip, then a student at Oriel College. It was during your 
walks together to Shotover Hill, when his knowledge of conchology 
was so valuable to you, enabling you to distinguish the shells of the 
Oxford oolite, that you laid the foundation for those field-lectures, 
forming part of your course of geology at Oxford, which no one is 
VOL. IV.— PART I. b 
