ANNIVERSARY MEETING — MURCHISON MEDAL. 35 



absence, that we can freely speak of him and his work, regarding 

 which he would himself wish to be silent ; and it is of him and his 

 work that the Fellows doubtless wish to hear. 



It is now nearly forty years since he began his scientific career. 

 During this long interval of constant and enthusiastic labour, as 

 you have so well observed, there are few departments of Geology 

 into which he has not entered, and where he has not left the im- 

 press of his clear insight, his singular mastery of detail, and his 

 faculty of broad and luminous generalization. And yet this record 

 of fruitful work has been achieved in the midst of continual de- 

 mands on his time and thought made by professional and official 

 duties — demands which for most men would have been enough to 

 fill up a busy life. To geologists on this side of the Atlantic who 

 know him only by his published writings, there are more especially 

 three lines of research with which his name is associated. It was 

 he who in the expedition under Lieutenant Ives, eight-and-twenty 

 years ago, first made known to the world the wonders of the Colorado 

 River of the West, who recognized in that region monuments of the 

 most stupenduous denudation, and who by his clear and graphic 

 descriptions inaugurated a new era in the discussion of the problem 

 of land-sculpture. His researches on Fossil Plants have placed him 

 in the very front rank of those who have made known to us the 

 characters of the vegetation of former periods of the earth's history. 

 As a fitting crown to these researches he will shortly publish a 

 large monograph, with two hundred plates, descriptive of the fossil 

 floras of North America. And, thirdly, his long and minute in- 

 vestigation of Fossil Fishes has enabled him to repeople the ancient 

 waters of the North-American continent with the abundant and 

 often extraordinary types which characterized them. Another great 

 monograph, with sixty plates, on this subject is also in the press. 



There seems to me something peculiarly appropriate in the award 

 of the Murchison Medal to such a man. He is a geologist after 

 Murchison's own heart — keen of eye, stout of limb, with a due 

 sense of the value of detail, but with a breadth of vision that keeps 

 detail in due subordination. 



If I may be permitted, I would fain add a word of personal grati- 

 fication that it has fallen to my lot to be intermediary on this 

 interesting occasion between the Geological Society of London and 

 one of the most distinguished men of science in the United States. 

 The geologists of North America are drawn to us by stronger ties 

 and closer sympathy than most of us are perhaps aware. They 



