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



As our Science advances, we become more and more dependent 

 upon the followers of other sciences for fresh information with 

 regard to the Earth's history. Anyone turning over the pages of 

 the indexes of geological text-books, will be struck with the 

 numerous references to the writings of astronomers, physicists, 

 chemists, mineralogists, and biologists. At the same time some- 

 thing more than a superficial knowledge of one or more of the 

 kindred sciences is necessary to the labourers in several branches of 

 Geology. The successful palaeontologist must needs be prepared by 

 a careful training in botany or zoology, and the petrologist must 

 know more than a little of chemistry and mineralogy. 



It is not wonderful that, in these circumstances, there appears 

 to be a feeling among some that Geology as a separate science will 

 become extinct, and that in the future the really important con- 

 tributions to the Earth's history will be made by students of other 

 sciences. 



There is, however, one part of our science which must ever 

 remain the territory of the geologist, in which he will pursue his 

 labours by those exclusively- geological methods which he has 

 employed in the past. I refer, of course, to the arrangement of the 

 events which, taken together, constitute earth-history, according 

 to their proper sequence in time. 



The general character of these methods is too well known to us 

 to need comment here, but it may not be amiss to consider what 

 progress has been made in this branch of Geology. I propose, 

 therefore, to direct your attention to the Classification of 

 the Sedimentary Hocks. 



From the time of "William Smith onwards, and mainly by the 

 adoption of his principles, the classification of the strata has 

 progressed towards perfection by the method of successive approxi- 

 mations, and progress has been in two directions — namely, the 

 division of the strata of any one area in greater detail, and the 

 correlation of the beds of different parts of the globe over ever- 

 increasing areas : how far progress may be made in each of these 

 directions is yet a moot point. 



In considering our existing classification, let us at the outset 

 imagine that sediment had begun to accumulate simultaneously 

 over all parts of the globe, that the accumulation everywhere 

 proceeded at uniform rates, and that the lithological characters of 

 the sediments were always and everywhere identical. We should 

 then be able to classify and correlate these sediments by actual 



