36 



PROCEEDINGS OP THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



your mathematical training gave you obvious advantages. In these 

 researches, however, which have been recorded in a number of sepa- 

 rate memoirs, worthily crowned by the publication six years ago of 

 your ' Physics of the Earth's Crust,' you have always maintained a 

 just estimate of the proper sphere and necessary limitations of the 

 mathematical method of treatment as applied to such problems. 

 Speaking of the processes you have chosen to employ, you truly 

 remark in the preface to your well-known work, " When it is re- 

 collected that, for the most part, we can assign only very hypothe- 

 tical values to our symbols, it would be affectation to seek close 

 results, which would, after all, have no greater value than those 

 which claim to be only distant approximations." In you we rejoice 

 to see that the geologist has not been altogether lost in the mathe- 

 matician, and that you have always kept in mind in your researches 

 the weakness no less than the strength of the mathematical method. 



Mr. Fi shee, in reply, said : — 

 Mr. President, — 



It is no small gratification to me that the Society, through its 

 Council, has expressed approbation of what I have done in the 

 favourite study of a long life. I commenced geologizing almost 

 before I can remember, when my uncle, the Rev. George Cookson, 

 taught me to collect fossils in the cliffs of my native village of 

 Osmington. My work in the field is now finished, and I geologize 

 in my arm-chair out of my inner consciousness, but still, I hope, to 

 some purpose. It appears to be rather these later attempts to un- 

 ravel some of the physical riddles of our science (although my 

 earlier observations in the field have not been forgotten) which have 

 been thus handsomely recognized ; and, indeed, for my own part 

 I think what I have done in applying mathematical methods to 

 these geological problems has been my most useful labour. Never- 

 theless I feel assured that my earlier work in the field has been of 

 much service to me ; for no one can pretend to grapple usefully with 

 the great problems of geology who has not personally studied the 

 actual phenomena. It is in this respect that the greatest physicists 

 of the day fail to give us the decided assistance which they might do 

 had they a more accurate knowledge of the questions to be solved. 



We pass on the torch from hand to hand. Some of the ideas 

 which I have tried to work out were suggested by conversations 

 with honoured friends long gone to their rest — Sedgwick, Hopkins, 

 Miller, Phillips, and others. May I hope that when some one now 

 young, in this assembly, receives a similar recognition of a similar 

 life's work, he may think of me as an intermediate link connecting 

 him with those earlier workers ? — a link which, whatever may be its 

 intrinsic defects, and however inferior the metal, you have seen fit 

 to gild with the Balance out of the munificent legacy of the great 

 Lyell. 



