KENDALL : PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
171 
taken as models of temperate statement and judicious inference. 
The admirable spirit of impartiality displayed by his contribution 
to the discussion of the origin of Reef-knolls is worthy of all 
praise. 
The Society loses in him an earnest friend and well A\ isher, and 
a member of over 30 years' standing. His name is still held in 
affectionate remembrance in many lonely hiU farmhouses, where 
he made his home while surve^dng the highest liills of the York- 
shire Pennines. 
Turning now to the topic upon which I have more particularly 
to address you. It seemed to me appropriate that as my immediate 
predecessor had occupied this chair for more than half a centur}^ 
I should devote myself to a brief review of the progress made by 
Geology, especially in Yorkshire, during his long tenure of office, 
and I may here parenthetically remark upon the striking circum- 
stance that this, the oldest Geological Society in the Kingdom, 
save three, has had but two Presidents in the 76 years of its 
existence. 
Lord Ripon was elected President on the 8th December, 1858. 
The sixth decade of the Nineteenth Century found British 
Geology well-established upon a firm basis. In the first flush of 
its youth, it had sown its wild oats and a rare crop of unsound 
hypotheses was springing up, but the healthy chill of criticism 
administered hy the briUiant band of the new Huttonians, fore- 
most amongst whom stood Lj^ell, cut down the Aveeds and gave 
vigour to a sounder growth. 
Ly ell's Uniformitarian doctrine had won almost universal 
acceptance though only after a severe struggle Avith the 
catastrox^hic school that long had held the field — even the great 
and broad-minded Sedgwick had made a strenuous attack upon 
Lyell's Princi]3les from the Presidential chair of the Geological 
Society in 1829, but in 1859 he w^as as convinced a Lyellian as 
anyone, and Catastrophism was making its last stand at the 
Diluvial hypothesis. 
William Smith's great principle that strata could be identified 
by their fossils had, by dint of mere reiteration, forced itself 
upon the attention of geologists and had now passed into a 
