Geology and Mineralogy, 135 



II. Geology and Mineralogy. 



1. The Geological Society of America. — The sixth annual meet- 

 ing of the Geological Society was held at Boston, Mass., on 

 December 27th and 29th, and at Cambridge on the 28th, 1893. 

 The opening meeting was held in the hall of the Boston Society 

 of Natural History, Sir J. William Dawson, the president of the 

 Society, in the chair. The annual address of the President, on 

 Some Recent discussions in Geology, was delivered Friday even- 

 ing, Dec. 29th. A lecture by Alexander Agassiz, giving an 

 account of an expedition to the Bahamas, was read before the 

 society on Wednesday evening. 



The following officers for the year 1894 were elected, viz : 

 president, T. C. Chamberlin, Chicago; first vice-president, N. S. 

 Shaler, Cambridge ; second vice-president, G. H. Williams, Bal- 

 timore; secretary, H. L. Fairchild, Rochester, N. Y. ; treasurer, 

 I. C. White, Morgantown, Va., and editor, J. Stanley Brown, 

 Washington, D. C. 



There were fifty-one fellows in attendance and fifty-eight papers 

 were presented for reading. 



The following notes indicate "briefly the contents of some of 

 the papers read. 



Sir J. William Dawson, in his presidential address, on Some 

 Recent Discussions in Geology : defined the attitudes of geologi- 

 cal opinion regarding some of the live questions of to-day, speak- 

 ing of them as the goals of to-day which are to be the starting 

 points of the researches of tomorrow. In regard to the age of 

 the crystalline rocks he spoke of the lower Laurentian gneisses 

 as probably of igneo aqueous origin and as the oldest known 

 rocks. In regard to the theories of mountain making he was 

 disposed to think that the action of all the forces emphasised in 

 LeConte's contraction theory, in Hall's deposition theory, in the 

 expansion theory of Reade, and in Dutton's isostatic theory must 

 be considered in reaching the truth. 



In the catastrophe — uniformitarian controversy harmony was 

 to be looked for by recognizing the fact that what appears as a 

 catastrophe may be but the culmination of uniformly working 

 laws. 



He referred to the fact that organic matter, as in the case of 

 coal, is of slow and gradual accumulation, and is not peculiar to 

 any particular age though a prominent feature in the Carbonif- 

 erous era. He showed that fossil plants by their distribution are 

 evidence that the vicinitudes of climate in the geological ages 

 were mainly due to the differences in the distribution of land and 

 water. In explanation of the phenomena of the glacial age, he 

 maintained that " local glaciers of great magnitude on elevated 

 ground and depression of lower lands beneath the sea were 

 mainly responsible for this icy episode." He believed that there 

 was an open Polar Sea throughout the glacial age, and that sea- 



