86 JOURNAL OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF DUBLIN. 
that a detailed and well-illustrated report should be published 
under the Government supervision as to that district. The great 
impetus which the gold discoveries have given to the physical ex¬ 
ploration of Australia still continues to produce the most valuable 
results. Mr. Clarke, Selwyn, and others, are constantly adding to 
our knowledge of the formations of that continent, and it will sur¬ 
prise every inquirer who a few years since would have been dependent 
on the superficial inquiries of Mitchell, Streletzki, and the hurried 
notes of our late worthy President, to find the number of well 
qualified labourers in this field. The French Government has gene¬ 
rally been successful in combining the objects of war and science, 
and few of their expeditions into wild countries during the last 
thirty years have been unaccompanied with a scientific and artistic 
staff. To them we owe the valuable reports on Egypt, the Morea, 
Algeria; and I have no doubt that, at the conclusion of this war 
with Russia, there will appear, at the expense of the French 
Government, some important contributions to the natural history 
of Turkey and the Crimea, if not of the Baltic. If the additions to 
the range of our inquiries are satisfactory, it is equally satisfactory 
to find that we are rapidly obtaining a much more accurate knowledge 
of those productions, with which we flattered ourselves we were 
tolerably well acquainted. How invaluable the researches going on 
under the care of the gentlemen of the Ordnance Geological Survey 
in the Silurian and Cambrian rocks! It is to be hoped that they 
will be rewarded with the discovery in Great Britain of the unique 
protozoic fossil, the Oldhamia. In an equally interesting field, Mr. 
Prestwich has made discoveries startling and original. The London 
clay may be said to have been the first and most minutely explored 
of English fossiliferous beds, and yet it remained for Mr. Prestwich 
to place them in their proper position, and to find equivalents for one 
of the Parisian beds which had escaped the most accurate observers. 
The great English geologists do not appear by any means to be 
resting on their oars, or to trust to their past acquired name for 
maintaining their proper position in the geological world. Sir Ro¬ 
derick Murchison, ever bent on extending and correcting his former 
observations, has published a most interesting Report on the Geology 
of the North of Germany. We cannot be too grateful to him for his 
giving us the true place of the Nummulite beds. Mr. Hamilton, 
the learned President of the Geological Society, is indefatigable in 
