225 
BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT 
OF SCIENCE.— EDINBURGH MEETING. 
Opening address by Pkof. C. Lapwokth, LL. D., F. K. S., F. G. S., President 
of the Section of Geology. 
It has, I believe, been the rule for the man who has been honored by 
election to the chair of President of the Geological Section of the Brit- 
ish Association to address its members upon the recent advances made 
in that branch of geology in which he has himself been most immedi- 
ately interested. It is not my intention upon the present occasion to de- 
part from this time-honored custom; for it has both the merit of sim- 
plicity and the advantage' of utility to recommend it. In this way each 
branch of our science, as it becomes in turn represented, not only sub- 
mits to the workers in other departments a report of its own progress, 
but presents by implication a broad slietch of the entire geological land- 
scape, seen through the colored glasses, it may be, of divisional preju- 
dice, but at anj^ rate instructive and corrective to the workers in other 
departments, as being taken from what is to them a novel and an un- 
familiar point of view, 
Xow every tyro in geology is well aware of the fact that the very 
backbone of geological science is constituted by what is known as strati- 
graphical geology, or the study of the geological formations. These 
formations, stratified and unstratified, build up all that part of the vis- 
ible earth-crust which is accessible to the investigator. Their outcrop- 
ping edges constitute the visible exterior of our globe, the surface of 
which forms the physical geography of the present day, and their in- 
ternal characters and inter-relationships afford us our only clues to the 
physical geographies of bygone ages. Within them lies enshrined all 
that we may ever hope to discover of the history and the development 
of the habitable world of the past. 
These formations are to the stratigraphical geologist what species are 
to the biologist, or what the heavenly bodies are to the astronomer. It 
was the discovery of these formations which first elevated geology to 
the rank of a science. In the working out of their characters, their re- 
lationships, their development, and their origin, geology finds its means, 
its aims, and its justification. Whatever fresh material our science may 
yield to man's full conception of nature, organic and inorganic, must of 
necessity be grouped around these special and peculiar objects of its 
contemplation. 
When the grent Werner first taught that our earth-crust was made up 
of superimposed rock-sheets or formations arranged in determinable or- 
der, the value of his conclusions from an economic point of view soon 
led to their enthusiastic and careful study; and his crude theory of their 
rsuccessive precipitation from a universal chaotic ocean disarmed the 
suspicions of the many until the facts themselves had gained such a 
wide acceptance that denial was no longer possible. But when the 
greater Button asserted that each of these rock formations was in reality 
nothing more nor less than the recemented ruins of an earlier world, the 
