Vol. 59.] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lxxix 



But, in this case of Geography and Geology as in others, the 

 benefits have certainly been mutual. Broadly speaking, almost 

 the whole of that vast mass of information which geographers 

 now possess, respecting the work of those agencies which rule 

 upon the dynamical side of Physical Geography, has been wrought 

 out and accumulated by geologists engaged in searching for the 

 causes of geological action in the past. The grand processes of 

 denudation, erosion, and deposition ; the multifarious action of rain, 

 rivers, and ice ; the phenomena of earthquakes and volcanoes ; and 

 the rock-making activities of animals and plants, were most of them 

 first laboriously investigated by geologists, who welded them into 

 tools for work in their own science, and then handed them over 

 bodily for permanent lodgment in the well-filled storehouse of the 

 physical geographer. 



As regards the surface of the earth itself, so numberless of late 

 years have grown the visible and certain points of contact between 

 the phenomena previously regarded as proper to the one or the other 

 of the two sciences of Geology and Physical Geography, and so 

 evident to all has become the sequence of geological causes and 

 geographical effects, that many geographers have of late years 

 almost lost consciousness even of the existence of a possible down- 

 ward limit to their science. Revelling in the wealth of geological 

 facts and ideas already accumulated and lying ready to their hand, 

 scientific writers have combined with their geographical description 

 of the ' forms ' of the surface of the earth the geological explanation 

 of their origins in that most interesting branch of knowledge which 

 is sometimes named ' Geomorphology.' This is undoubtedly a 

 section of geonomic science, which is of great value, and is destined 

 to grow in importance as time goes on. But its study presupposes a 

 preliminary education in which Geology and geological causes take 

 perhaps the largest share ; and those who would class it merely as a 

 sub-science of Geography are as wrong as those who class it merely 

 as a sub-science of Geology. It is the healthy and vigorous child of 

 both. 



Geology and Physics. — Here we enter upon more difficult and 

 dubious ground, namely, the relations of Geology to the science 

 of Physics, especially in the matter of the so-called 'hypogene' 

 agencies. The mechanical modes and means of formation of our 

 mineralogical rock-sheets have long since been recognized and agreed 

 upon, but the mechanical modes and means of their deformation 

 have, many of them, yet to be identified and established. In the 



