Vol. 6^.~] ANNIVERSARY MEETING WOLLASTON MEDAL. xli 



Award of the Wollaston Medal. 



In presenting the Wollaston Medal to Prof. William Johnson 

 Sollas, F.R.S., the President addressed him as follows : — 



Professor Sollas, — 



f* The Council of the Geological Society has this year awarded the 

 Wollaston Medal to you, in recognition of the value of your varied 

 and prolonged contributions to the development of Geology. There 

 is hardly a department of our science into which you have not 

 carried the light and impulse of your brilliant and versatile genius. 

 You have united in no ordinary way the qualifications of an 

 accomplished petrographer, an excellent palaeontologist, an able 

 stratigrapher, and a philosophical mineralogist, and to this wide 

 range of accomplishment you have added an originality and 

 inventiveness which have introduced notable improvements into 

 the processes of research. I regard it as a special honour and 

 pleasure that it has fallen to me to be the medium of presenting 

 this medal to you. You have long been one of my most esteemed 

 friends, and I trust that I may be allowed, even in this public 

 place, to add my own personal felicitations to those of, I am sure, 

 all the Fellows of the Society that the highest honour which we 

 have to bestow should now be conferred upon you. 



If the award is a recognition of past services in the cause of our 

 beloved science, you will, we hope, accept it as no less an augury 

 that we look forward with confidence to much, fresh work from 

 your hands in the future. We hope to see a flourishing School of 

 Geology growing up at Oxford under your fostering care, and to 

 welcome from you in the years to come many memoirs, not less 

 suggestive and important than those with which you have already 

 enriched the literature of geology. 



Prof. Sollas, in reply, said : — 

 Mr. President, — 



I deeply appreciate the honour 'conferred upon me by the Council; 

 and if, by any means, I could be reconciled to the sense of my own 

 insignificance, awakened by the recollection of the many illustrious 

 names that have preceded me in this place before the President's 

 Chair, it would be by your kind, I fear too kind, words, and the 

 favour with which they have been received by the Fellows of the 

 Society. 



