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town, he availed himself of it freely from his youth onwards. The 

 early volumes of the Society's 'Bulletin' are full of short notices or 

 reports by him, referring either to his own work or to that of other 

 observers. In looking through these volumes one may notice the 

 appreciation which he shows of the progress of geology in Britain 

 One of his first papers, for example, read as far back as July 1855 

 was a sympathetic summary of the memoirs of Daniel Sharpe on 

 the Cleavage and Foliation of the rocks of the North of Scotland, 

 which had appeared in our Quarterly Journal. A few months later 

 he gave an account to the same Society of his studies in the South 

 of England, to which I have already alluded, and he there referred 

 to the collections of Dr. Fitton, the Geological Society, and the 

 Geological Survey, which had been liberally placed at his service, 

 announcing at the same time that he had himself been so diligent 

 in the search for the fossils of the English Lower Greensand and 

 Blackdown Beds that he had been able to form a collection which, 

 in his opinion, was undoubtedly one of the finest after those just 

 mentioned. 



Renevier's passion for stratigraphy based on the accurate deter- 

 mination of fossils, so prominently manifest in his earliest writings, 

 found abundant expression through his long and strenuous life. I 

 have referred to his quarto memoir on the Perte du Rhone, which, 

 although the work of so young a man, has become a classic in the 

 history of Swiss geology. It may be taken as the type and fore- 

 runner of all his subsequent labours. A trained and able palaeon- 

 tologist, he well knew how to appreciate and enforce the value of 

 the evidence of fossils in every branch of stratigraphical research. 

 He was less interested in the tectonic structure of the Alps than in 

 unravelling the order of succession among the stratified formations 

 of these mountains. He had indeed shown in early life an appre- 

 ciation of the importance of tectonic studies, when he applied the 

 generalizations of Daniel Sharpe to the interpretation of the crushed 

 and contorted rocks of Switzerland. But his relation to this de- 

 partment of geology became rather that of a keen and watchful 

 critic of the opinions of others, than that of an original observer in 

 the same field. 



He had for many years been engaged in Alpine research, and had 

 his material in great part ready for publication when an affection 

 of the eyes retarded his progress, and became at last so serious that 

 in 1880 he nearly lost his sight. Not until 1890 did his great 

 quarto monograph on the Hautes Alpes Yaudoises appear as one of 



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