244 
SIR RODERICK I. MURCHISON’S ADDRESS. 
[May 24, 1858. 
of a dean of Christchurch, William Conybeare was horn in 1787, 
and educated first at Westminster ; his earlier acquirements being 
matured at Oxford, where he was distinguished as a scholar. 
He no sooner quitted the University of Oxford, in which he had 
taken high honours at the same time- as the late Sir Robert Peel 
and the present Archbishop of Dublin, than he spent the leisure 
hours of a country clergyman in recording the natural phenomena 
of the subsoil and its products. Becoming a member of the Geo- 
logical Society, he gave to that body his first Memoir in 1814, and 
eventually prepared, in conjunction with Mr. W. Phillips, 4 The 
Geology of England and Wales’ (1822). By that excellent work, 
of which his associate undertook the mineralogical portion only, 
Mr. Conybeare fairly established himself as one of those who, fol- 
lowing in the track opened out by William Smith, of identifying 
strata by their fossils, were the founders of that British geology 
which has sent its types and nomenclature through the world. 
Any one who may refer to this volume will see how invariably 
the author adopts the true method of geological arrangement, by 
beginning the description of each natural deposit in the crust of 
the globe by a clear delineation of its geographical outlines and the 
character of the country. Even in his ‘ Introduction ’ we find 
comprehensive views of the structure of the earth enunciated with 
the enthusiasm of a real lover of geographical discovery, when 
he thus incites the geologist to push on fearlessly in the search 
after truth — “ how little comparative curiosity should we feel con- 
cerning the course of the Niger or the North Coast of America could 
they be as easily examined as the Thames and the Channel !” In 
every chapter of the same work we meet with sketches of the sur- 
face and external characters of each tract, as well as the heights of 
the hills, and the phenomena of wells and springs (all of them 
integral geographical data), duly interwoven with an account of 
the chemical and mineral qualities of the subsoil, the imbedded 
fossils, and the erosion and fractures to which the strata had been 
subjected. Again, the long, coloured section, from the Land’s End 
on the west to the German Ocean on the east, is in itself a fine 
sample of the generalising powers of Conybeare ; for although 
geology has made vast strides since the year 1822, many of the 
features of this remarkable picture of the then state of our know- 
ledge are still as true as when the author sketched them with the 
bold hand of a master. 
In the same year Mr. Conybeare also displayed his talents as a 
