639 
of Edinburgh^ Session 1865 - 66 . 
and he has to the present day discharged its duties with credit to 
himself and advantage to the Survey. He has thus not only 
mapped large areas with his own hand, but has had the general 
superintendence of the geological researches carried on under Sir 
Henry He La Beche, and afterwards under our distinguished coun- 
tryman, Sir Eoderick Murchison. 
In 1847 Mr Eamsay was appointed to the Chair of Geology in 
the University College, London, an office which he held till 1851, 
when he was chosen Lecturer on Geology in the Eoyal School of 
Mines in Jermyn Street. 
In the midst of these various official duties, Mr Eamsay found 
leisure for pursuing several interesting branches of geological re- 
search. In 1846 he published, in the Memoirs of the Geological 
Survey^ a paper on the “ Denudation of South Wales,” which led 
the way to those measured details by which this branch of geology 
has been so greatly advanced. 
In 1855 Mr Eamsay published his remarkable paper on the 
“ Permian Breccias of Shropshire,” in which he made it highly 
probable that there were glaciers in our latitudes during the 
Permian era ; and he at the same time suggested, that some 
of the thick conglomerates of the Scottish Old Eed Sandstone 
might, in like manner, be the representatives of an ancient glacial 
drift. 
Mr Eamsay has distinguished himself by the energy and ability 
with which he has elucidated the history of the glacial period in 
the British islands, and by the ingenious theory in which he refers 
the frequent occurrence of rock-basin lakes, in the northern hemi- 
sphere, to glacier erosion during the glacial period. 
No British geologist, in our day, has done more than Mr Eamsay 
to extend our knowledge of the causes to which the present outlines 
of the surface of our country is due. 
In his annual addresses, as President of the Geological Society, 
in 1863 and 1864, he has skilfully applied his extensive and 
minute stratigraphical knowledge to those higher branches of phi- 
losophical geology which deal with the succession of life in time, 
and with the relation between the appearance of living beings on 
the surface of the earth and the physical changes which that sur- 
face has undergone. 
4 0 
VOL. V. 
