526 Geological Society: — Anniversary Address. 



During the last year the Society has received no communication 

 on Mineralogy ; and almost the only volume that has been published 

 in England on this much-neglected subject, has been a small but 

 highly elaborate treatise on Crystallography by Professor Miller, of 

 the University of Cambridge. In this treatise the author has adopted 

 the crystallographic notation proposed by Professor Whewell in his 

 paper on a General Method of calculating the Angles of Crystals, 

 and the laws according to which they are formed, published in the 

 Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1825; and Professor 

 Naumann's method of indicating the positions of the faces of a cry- 

 stal by the points in which radii, drawn perpendicular to the faces, 

 meet the surface of a sphere. The expressions which have been 

 thus obtained are remarkable for their symmetry and simplicity, and 

 are all adapted to logarithmic computation, and for the most part 

 new. 



NOTICE OF DECEASED MEMBERS. 



In proceeding to speak of the losses which, during the past year 

 our science has sustained by death, I shall offer my first tribute of 

 respect to the memory of one, whom a predecessor of mine in this 

 chair has justly called the father of English geology; since to his 

 discoveries we owe the first diffusion of exact knowledge as to the 

 order of superposition of the secondary formations which occupy so 

 large a portion of our island, and the first demonstration of that 

 constancy of the organic remains, which he proved to be cha- 

 racteristic of the component strata of each different formation. It 

 was the especial merit of Mr. William Smith to establish a series 

 of types of these groups, many of which have been adopted as 

 classical, in such a manner as will perpetuate his name among the 

 original discoverers of the age in which he lived. 



If, as it has been truly said, the honour of the first discoveries in 

 tertiary geology belongs to France, where the labours of Cuvier and 

 Brongniart gave to this great division of the strata of the earth a 

 systematic arrangement before unknown, so the establishment of 

 the types in secondary geology, from the chalk down to the new 

 red sandstone, is due to England ; and the discovery of the leading 

 natural divisions of that important portion of them which consti- 

 tutes the oolite formations, was almost exclusively the work of Mr. 

 William Smith. 



His earliest publication was a treatise on irrigation, 1806, a sub- 

 ject on which his experiments gained him a medal from the Society 

 of Arts. 



In 1801 he printed proposals for publishing accurate delineations 

 and descriptions of the natural order of the various strata that are 

 found in different parts of England and Wales, to be illustrated by 

 a small geological map*. This work was never completed, but it led 

 to the publication of his large map, in 1815, for which the Society 



* The original coloured copy of this map, dated 1801, was presented 

 by Mr. Smith to our Society, and is now in the Museum. 



