﻿Vol. 6 1.] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. liii 



Foster, so long Secretary of the Society of Arts, our late Fellow was 

 born in 1841, receiving his early education, firstly at a Collegiate 

 School in Camberwell, and afterwards at a school in France. While 

 still very young, he entered the Royal School of Mines, where he 

 had a very distinguished career, carrying off the whole of the prizes 

 and scholarships. After spending a year in the famous old Mining 

 School of Freiberg in Saxony, and travelling in other parts of the 

 Continent, he was offered in 1860 a post on the Geological Survey 

 of England and Wales. 



It was while engaged in the survey of the Wealden area that 

 Le Neve Foster was able to make his most notable contribution to 

 Geological Science. The peculiar and seemingly-anomalous system 

 of drainage in the Wealden district had long attracted the attention 

 of geologists. The rivers, instead of following what would seem to 

 be the natural course from west to east into the North Sea, cut 

 their way through narrow gorges in the North and South Downs, 

 and flow into the Thames and the English Channel respectively. 

 This phenomenon led Hopkins and others to suggest that the 

 longitudinal fold of the Weald must have been accompanied by 

 transverse fractures, along which the rivers had cut their courses. 

 Murchison and Lyell, however, argued that the main portion of 

 the denudation of the Wealden Anticline must have been due to 

 marine action. Following the lead of Jukes in the famous memoir 

 ' On the River-Valleys of the South of Ireland/ published in 1862 

 in the Journal of our Society, Le Neve Foster with his fellow- 

 worker William Topley were able to show that the denudation of 

 the Weald must have been effected by the existing rivers when 

 flowing at higher levels than at present. In proof of this, they 

 were able to describe in detail the terraces composed of fluviatile 

 gravels, now seen at heights up to 500 feet above the present 

 Medway Valley. These conclusions, published in 1862 in the 

 well-known paper in our Journal, ' On the Superficial Deposits of 

 the Valley of the Medway, with Remarks on the Denudation of the 

 Weald/ established the reputation of Le Neve Foster and Topley 

 as able observers and acute thinkers, and their results are now 

 universally accepted. 



In 1865 Clement Le Neve Foster left the Survey, and from that 

 time forth his connection with geological research to a great 

 extent ceased. Valuable papers, however, appeared from time to 

 time from his pen, dealing with various mineral species and their 

 detection by means of blowpipe-analysis, with the phenomena of 



