2 
HOUGHTON I ADDRESS. 
future interest by a man now gone from us, carrying 
with him the respect he had won. He may be con- 
sidered as the founder of Yorkshire geology, and any means 
we have of continuing his operations and elucidating the 
facts of which he laid the foundation will, I am sure, be 
most grateful to all persons of intelligence in our important 
district. The geology of Yorkshire is so large and so 
various that there may be found in it sources of instruction 
for almost every geological system. It is different in that 
respect from many of the counties which lie contiguous to it, 
especially different from that great fen land which may be 
said to extend from Grimsby to Ely, and upon which a most 
interesting work has lately appeared which I would recom- 
mend to the study of all geologists. The time will come 
when some future geologist will collect together the scattered 
materials which you are now laying before the world, and 
produce a more complete geology of Yorkshire than any 
which has hitherto appeared. The study itself is acquiring 
far more remarkable interest than it could have done in its 
earlier commencement. The foundations of it have been 
taught in some of our best schools, and the direction of it 
was given to youths in many of our most important centres 
as a valuable source of information. We must all feel that 
this is a right and a natural thing, because there is no study 
which could be suggested to the minds of young people in 
which they would be better able to connect the material world 
in which they are immediately living with the processes of 
their own intelligence. I have always felt that besides any 
abstract advantage of knowledge itself there was a special 
interest and a special value in all those sciences which con- 
nect a man with the immediate circumstances in which God 
has placed him. And thus if you could induce all the young 
people who come within your influence after a very super- 
ficial instruction in the main facts — that is, in the grammar 
