Vol. 56.] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lxXXVU 



Lower Greensand and the Weald Clay, where we may fairly infer 

 extension underground, and for the one boring at Telscombe, 

 we are still left in utter ignorance as to what formations next 

 underlie the Upper Cretaceous in the Hampshire Basin. Indeed 

 there are places near the border of Hampshire and Berkshire, in 

 what may be called the neutral land between the Hampshire and 

 the London Basins, where we do not know what may be found 300 

 or 400 feet down, as in the Upper Greensand inliers of Kingsclere 

 and of Shalbourn, especially in the former, where one cannot safely 

 infer anything below the Gault, the top of which can hardly be far 

 down at some spots, though I believe that even this has never been 

 proved. On Sheet 81 of the so-called Horizontal Sections of the 

 Geological Survey, published in 1870, the Gault is shown as under- 

 lying the Upper Greensand here, with Kimeridge Clay next 

 beneath ; but I have failed to find any evidence for this inference, 

 and am fain to conclude that the author, who was taken from us 

 many years ago, feeling bound to fill the section in to sea-level, 

 made the best guess that he could, based on the fact that at the 

 distant outcrop to the north that succession holds on the map, for 

 some distance. 



Enough has now been said on the subject of the underground 

 extension of beds, as proved by wells and borings in one part of 

 England, to show how the subject itself could be extended. Other 

 parts of our own country tell a like story, and in other countries 

 similar work has been done, in many cases to much greater depths 

 than with us, as in Germany and in the United States. 



Much then have we learnt, but much more have we yet to learn, 

 and that, it seems to me, is the moral that we should draw from 

 our retrospect. I remember how in my earlier days it was said 

 that the older geologists had done all the grand work, and that we, 

 their successors, would have to be content with the humbler task 

 of filling in the details of the great pictures which they had sketched 

 out. Has it been so ? Certainly not. The work of many of us, 

 including myself, may have been mostly of this detailed nature, 

 consisting largely of the collecting together of masses of facts, but 

 those collections of facts have sometimes led to new views that have 

 had a great effect in the advancement of our science. Moreover, 

 many of the subjects to which I have but briefly alluded are as 



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