Boston Meeting of the Geological Society. 135 
Wednesday evening, after the lecture by Mr. Alexander Ag- 
assiz, a reception was held in the rooms of the Boston Society 
of Natural History, at which Mrs. William B. Rogers, Mrs. W. 
H. Niles, Mrs. Boardman, Miss Bouve, and others, were present. 
Thursday evening the fellows of the Society had their an- 
nual dinner at the Thorndike hotel, Boston. Brief remarks 
were made by the greater number of fellows present, and there 
was a continual now of wit and good humor. 
The next winter meeting will be held in Baltimore. 
On account of the great number of papers to be read, few of 
them were adequately discussed. In view of this, the general 
impression seemed to be that the executive committee hereaf- 
ter should be more rigorous in enforcing time limits, and in 
sifting out the program ; so that more time should be allowed 
for discussion. 
In the following list of the papers read, they are arranged 
in their order on the program of the meeting. Many of the 
titles are here accompanied by brief statements of the scope 
of the papers as in the preliminary announcements of the So- 
ciety. Of many others abstracts are given as prepared by the 
authors. Fifteen of the papers were read only by title, these 
being most!}" those of fellows who were absent. 
1. Some recent discussions in geology. Sir J. William Dawson, 
Montreal, Canada. This annual address of the retiring president was 
given in the session of Friday morning. The speaker said that he 
should restrict himself to matters which had come quite recently before 
geologists, especially in Great Britain and in this country, and intro- 
duced his subject by the statement that since the goal of the science to- 
day will be its starting point to-morrow, it is most appropriate at this 
time to glance at some of the questions now actively discussed among 
geologists, and to give some suggestions as to their settlement in the 
future. As these matters are necessarily very various, he would con- 
sider them more especially in their relation to the building up and de- 
velopment of the continents on which we live. 
Sir William noted first the controversies respecting the age of the 
older crystalline rocks, the true foundation stones of the continents, in- 
stancing those of the highlands of Scotland as described by Geikie and 
the older rocks of North America' as worked out by Logan and his suc- 
cessors. He was inclined to think that the oldest rocks that we shall 
know are the gneisses of the lower Laurentian, and that these may be 
regarded as the igneo-aqueous products of the earliest action of the wa- 
ters on the crust of a cooling globe. He also gave reasons for believing 
that the whole of the pre-Cambrian rocks may be referred to four great 
systems, — the Lower Laurentian, the Upper Laurentian, the Huronian 
and the Keweenian, either in their littoral or their deeper water moditi 
cations. 
He then referred to the rival theories of mountain-building, and after 
distinguishing between mountains of eruption (volcanoes), like Vesu- 
vius and Cotopaxi, mountains of slightly inclined strata, like the Leba 
non and the Sierra Nevada, and mountains of contorted strata, like the 
Alps and the Appalachians, noted the diverse views as to the origin of 
the latter. He favored the time-honored contraction theory as explained 
recently by LeConte, but saw no objection to connecting with this the 
deposition theory of Hall and others, the expansion theory of Mellard 
