530 
THE GEOLOGIST 
whilst pledging themselves to the as yet unproved empiric method of Natural 
Selection, retard the " rapid and right progress" of zoology, unmindful of the 
Baconian warning that " knowledge, whilst it lies in aphorisms and obser\'ations, 
remains in a growing state ; but when once fashioned into methods, though it 
may be farther polished, illustrated, and fitted for use, it no longer increases in 
buli: and substance." 
The study of the palceontological and biological sciences has revolutionized 
modem knowledge. The attention to system and detail, which savans of a past 
generation so carefully bestowed upon animals and plants, is now producing 
its good fruits, and the confused mass of facts and observations which have 
been collected is now giving place to wide and comprehensive generalizations. 
The mind of modem scientific men has been " slowly and insensibly 
withdrawn from imaginary pictures of catastrophes and chaotic confusion, such 
as had haunted the imagination of the early cosmogonists. Numerous proofs 
have been discovered of the tranquil deposition of sedimentary matter, and the 
slow and successive development of organic life." He who has studied the sub- 
ject with care, quits it ^N-ith the consciousness that he has learnt the important 
lesson that, however specialized and modified man's structure, he still retains 
within him the remnants of the old primaeval tdeai, the old patterns, exemplars, 
and archetypes of being, in whose perfect image he was originally designed ; 
however remote in point of time he may be from the earliest incarnation of hfe 
on this globe, he still beai'S traces in his early career of a close analogy to the 
lowest organized monad ; and, above all, he, from the simple elements of the 
originally created spinal chord in the lower vertebrata, has developed a complex 
organ of thought far surpassing that possessed by any other animal form. 
I am, Sir, your obedient servant, 
Cha]?j,es CATfTEp Blake, 
GLACIERS IN WALES. 
By Pbofessou A. C. Ramsay, T.E.S., E.G.S. 
In the year 1851 I read a paper before the Geological Society 
" On the Superficial Accumulations and Surface-markings in North 
"Wales," in "^vliich I attempted to show that there had been two glacier 
epochs in that country, one before, and the other after the deposition 
of the boulder drift, wdiich was ploughed out of some of the larger 
valleys by the secondhand smaller set of glaciers ; and in a later 
work on the old glaciers of North Wales, I went further, showing 
that cold sufficient to form glaciers lasted during the Avhole time of 
submergence and emergence, both when the higher mountain-tops 
stood out of the sea as a cluster ofsmall islands, and afterwards when 
the whole land rose out of the water. 
The first of these memoirs touched on several subjects not im- 
mediately connected vdth. the glaciation of Wales, though bearing 
in a larger sense on the same Geological period, and on the same set 
of questions. This the Council of the Geological Society decided not 
to print in their Journal, on the ground that it was too speculative — 
an opinion with which, in a great measure, I now coincide. One 
