As a means of intellectual training, mathematics or classics were generally employed, and were greatly in favour; but there was this main distinction between mathematics and practical laboratory work-in mathematics the exact data were all given, in practical chemistry they were not. Thus a student in the laboratory ought to have correct reasoning inculcated, or, as Professor Faraday called it, judgment, independent thought on facts, habits of observation, and patience" to learn to labour and to wait." It is because schoolmasters had hitherto seldom seen a corresponding benefit accrue either to themselves or the boys for the expense and frequent annoyance caused by the so-called teaching of practical chemistry, that this branch of study is in such ill odour. Chemistry could not be taught in the same cut-and-dried manner as arithmetic &c. It required patience, carefulness, thought, judgment, accuracy, and could not be hurried. Practical science was not the accumulation of mere facts, but required the assistance of the eye and touch. From experience the author could bear witness to the fact that masters, university men, who had wished to learn chemistry so as to be able to teach it to boys, were always in a hurry, and could not wait to properly perform their experiments, imagining that there was some royal road to the result. A student when in the laboratory should be made to perform each experiment thoroughly. After the usual experiment (to make hydrogen, for example) had been performed, he should be made to take an atomic proportion of zinc, say 650 grains, and dissolve it, collect all the hydrogen from it, and measure it, evaporate the solution of zinc, and estimate the quantity of sulphate formed. This could not be done at one lesson. On the next occasion he would have his mind brought back to the subject of hydrogen while commencing a new experiment. By the end of the third lesson he would probably have the first experiment finished, the second to continue, and be ready to commence a third. But if from carelessness &c. he did not bring the first experiment to a satisfactory conclusion, he should be made to repeat it until he did. Thus he would for his own sake learn to be careful and patient. It may be objected that a great loss of time takes place in this way. But a fortnight spent in the proper performance of such an experiment, if it be only eventually well done, is not time lost or wasted. At present, boys nominally learn chemistry; but they do so without learning the great lessons that a proper study of chemistry ought to teach. The author proposed, in order to meet the difficulty of the study taking up so much time, that all large schools of, say, 150 boys should have their own laboratory and a resident master thoroughly capable of managing and teaching boys science. That all boys of fourteen and upwards should give up three days in the week, for at least six months, to the laboratory. For small schools there should be a united ancillary establishment in each neighbourhood, for the express purpose of giving boys this practical laboratory education. A proper science teacher ought to be a man of university education, and a thorough practical manipulator. Men would devote themselves to this work if there was a prospect of their earning a livelihood. At the universities natural science was looked down upon and not encouraged. Talk of studying science for the love of her, very few would, and very few could, make the necessary sacrifices, as long as all the money and all the university honours were reserved for classics and mathematics. there was little inducement for the student to study natural science. A man could not be fitted to become a teacher of practical chemistry by reading alone, not by six months' practical laboratory work; the preparation required several years. Heads of schools had no difficulty in getting first-class university men for £300 a year; but these could not teach in the laboratory. Chemical science had never yet had a fair chance as a means of education; nor had schoolmasters generally correct ideas of what the science was capable of doing.

Thus

GEOLOGY.

Address by ROBERT A. C. GODWIN-AUSTEN, B.A., F.R.S., &c., President of the Section.

THE basin of the North Sea, in the physical changes which it has undergone since the commencement of the Kainozoic period, is an area which well repays the study of the geologist. Suffolk and Norfolk, which geologically, as they do ethnologically, form one region, are part of the slope of this basin on its western side; for the North-Sea valley is a true physical depression; the whole secondary series of strata, on one side, dips eastwardly towards it, and rises again above the sea-level, on the opposite side, in Denmark. It is a depression which dates back its origin to some distant time in geological history.

It is to this area that I propose to restrict myself in those observations which, in compliance with established custom, I have to make in opening the meetings of this Section.

The North Sea depression, in its hydrographical features, deserves a passing notice. Compared with its breadth, its depth at present is exceedingly small. There are central portions where there are only twelve feet of water. The "Deepwater Channel" of the charts, which runs parallel with the coasts of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk, has a maximum depth of only 180 feet. A change to that amount of depression of sea-level would lay bare the whole of the sea-bed from the coast of Northumberland across to Jutland. A depression of only 120 feet would produce nearly a like result; the new coast-line would in this case run from Flamborough Head to Heligoland and Holstein. There would be an extension of the great Germanic plain nearly to our area. The "Deep-water Channel" alluded to would in either case become the course of the Thames and its tributaries, till it found its way seawards to the west of the Great Banks. To such an extent would this small amount of change of water-level alter the whole physical character of Eastern Europe; and yet this change would be insignificant, compared with those which this very area has repeatedly experienced. There is one other feature presented by the North-Sea basin. A deep submarine trough has been traced, at a mean distance of about fifty miles from the coast-line of Norway; it commences in the meridian of Christiania, and, conforming to the outline of the land, goes north beyond N. lat. 60°. South of the Naze of Norway, there are soundings of upwards of 200 fathoms; beyond they are less, but whether the decrease is progressive is not clear. Across the line of greatest depth the change is abrupt. This curious feature in the outline of the sea-bed is just what would have been produced by the subsidence of the whole of the southern portion of the Scandinavian region, together with fifty miles of area around, to a depth of 600 or 700 feet. There are good grounds for supposing that such has been the process; and the geological history of the basin seems to supply the precise date of the subsidence in question.

As a point in physical geography, it was the depression of the Scandinavian mass along the line indicated which produced the channels of the Skagerrach and the Cattegat, and opened a communication from the North Sea into the Baltic depression.

Geologically, some of the later stages or periods of the earth's past history are so abundantly illustrated over the East-Anglian area, it is a field in which there have been so many labourers, as to which, too, there yet remain so many unsolved points, that I cannot help hoping that this Section will follow to some extent the example set by their brethren the geologists of France, at their annual réunions extraordinaires, and make local geology a prominent subject of their deliberations at this Meeting.

The points of interest alluded to belong to the great Kainozoic period; indeed it is in this portion of England alone that the complete sequence of change, as it happened in this country, can be followed out; and as the term Kainozoic is what alone I propose to employ, I would explain that it is a Greek compound, signifying "recent living," or indicative of that general period of which the fauna, in

some proportion, is specifically identical, as to forms, with such as are now known to be living in some region or other.

GEOLOGICAL SUMMARY.

Wonderful as the progress of research has been during the last fifty years, still the geologist finds himself greatly wanting when he attempts to sketch out in consecutive order the history of any district, however limited and however simple it may be. He may know that the Nummulitic period was subsequent to the Cretaceous, and also that everywhere an interval of time has separated them; but he does not know, nor has he any means of ascertaining, how long that interval was; and though he may know all the details of the successive conditions of the thick series of depositions exhibited in the London basin, and have satisfied himself of the great extension they must once have had beyond their present area, yet of the process by which so much has been removed he does not know anything, nor of what was being done in any other region of the globe when so much was being undone here. All that can be said is, that here, in the south and east of England, the Nummulitic strata were cut back to a line along which are now Sudbury, Ipswich, and Yarmouth, and that beyond, on the west and north, stretched away the bare chalk hills of Suffolk and Norfolk, northwards still, into the wolds of Lincoln and York.

For our present outline we need not go further back than this in East-Anglian Geology; at the time of the early marine formations of Kainozoic age the British-Islands group was united, as a whole, with a broad European-continental region.

The Kainozoic formations of Western Europe have a striking uniformity in their general history; those of Spain and Portugal-next, those of the Bordeaux basin and of Touraine, with its Breton dependency-finally that of our North-Sea basin, were all indents from the great Atlantic, and, in all, the character of the fauna is Atlantic. It is also noteworthy that in each of these southern and now desiccated sea-basins the fauna is more southern than that now living in the adjacent seas, that the fossil mollusca of the Tagus beds present Senegambian relationships, that so, too, do those of the Lower Bordeaux beds. The Upper Bordeaux beds are Southern and Lusitanian in their fauna, as are those of Touraine and Brittany, and partly so the older Crag of Suffolk, Belgium, and Germany. The southern relations of these several assemblages grow weaker from south to north, whilst in the NorthSea basin distribution from another quarter shows itself in the presence of its many Transatlantic forms. In this there is evidence of a twofold change-First, a set or extension northwards of a marine fauna which in its recognized forms is West-African, afterwards becoming less southern over the same areas; such was the zoological change which the lapse of time brought with it. Next, the areas of these formations are first presented as terrestrial surfaces, then as lateral branches of the Atlantic, lastly as laid bare again; and this process seems to have proceeded from south northwards. The comparison of the whole of the fauna of the Tagus beds with the whole of that of the Bordeaux basin suggests that the first had been wholly laid dry before the other had; so likewise between the Bordeaux basin and that of the Loire.

The Crag-sea waters were expelled from the North-Sea area by the rise of the land on the south of that great bay. The most southern points for the Crag beds in Belgium are now the highest above the sea-level; this elevation decreases till we come to this place, where, if any part of the so-called Norwich Crag or the fluvio-marine be of that age, such estuary beds must have been then much in the same position as they are now, or at the sea-level. On evidence such as this, the North-Sea area, after the period of the early Kainozoic fauna or true Crag, is seen to be passing again to the condition of terrestrial surface.

This old depression of the North-Sea area, as had the other tertiary basins, again became part of the general European land-surface-a northern extension of the Rhine valley; and again the geologist meets with but little guidance as to the details of the chronology of what must have been a period of vast duration. A long list of land animals can be presented which have left their remains here: that some of these ranged over Central and Southern Europe, and included this very

district in the area of their life-period is undoubted; but as to how many of these coexisted, or to what extent they indicate a successive occupation, is still an undecided question.

The "Forest-bed" of Cromer gives a glimpse of what was the vegetation of this period; but here, again, it is more than probable that it must be taken only as the facies of the flora of the last stage of terrestrial conditions antecedent to the next great physical change, rather than that of the whole period.

The whole mammalian fauna, from the Norfolk Mastodon to the Mammoth (Elephas primigenius), seems to offer itself as an assemblage of the members of nomad tribes, which have yet to be reduced to order of time. The general condition of Northern Europe was terrestrial for the whole of the tertiary or Kainozoic period; during that time its conditions as to climate passed from warm to temperate and to arctic. To its close belongs the evidence everywhere recurring, and at every level, of its subaërial glaciation and greater elevation.

Just as the Crag and Falun beds come in here, on our East-Anglian district and on the Continent, as breaks in the lapse of tertiary terrestrial conditions, so the accumulations of the great northern submergence come in as a second intercalation; only that the physical change in this case was greater and of a different order. To what this ultimately amounted, is represented on the map of the northern hemisphere. The arctic basin extended itself as low as to N. lat. 50° by a slow process of submergence from north to south.

Again the northern hemisphere emerged, apparently, in a contrary direction, or from south northwards; again the agencies of ice and snow and excessive rainfall are exhibited, till again, for its general arrangement of land and sea, this immediate district and England generally is presented with the like relations as it had at the period of the Crag-sea.

The general character and the order of change of the Kainozoic period admit of being thus briefly told; but when it is attempted to follow out this change in its details, it is found to be a long and complicated record.

Over the whole of the European area, as yet less accurately traced across the Asiatic, very distinct upon the American continent, there is a region which presents broad expanses of waterworn detritus, sands, and loams, often placed at considerable elevations above present water-levels, which, from their superficial extent, has caused them to be identified with the component members of another detrital group (the glacial drift) peculiar to another area, from which they are distinct as to conditions and mode of accumulation. The conditions indicated are those of low winter temperatures, terrestrial surfaces with a configuration such as the same countries have at present, alluvial and fluviatile accumulations, indicative of torrential and periodic rivers.

A line drawn across the European area, occasionally on one side or other of that of north lat. 51°, defines the north limit of all this class of detrital accumulations of the Kainozoic period; on the south of this all these accumulations have their limits, and the sources of their materials are within the areas to which belong the existing river-systems of the South and Mid-European continent.

North of this line the detrital accumulations are neither local as to composition, nor have they much reference to surface configuration, although such configuration preexisted. Over this area, too, are the indications of low temperatures and broad alluvia. The distribution of the detritus over this area shows that the expanse water was continuous, and was marine. Over one area are the results of a general and uniform submergence; over the other the phenomena are local and alluvial,

Over the British and part of the European area there is a good break in Kainozoic time into præglacial and postglacial,-by the term "glacial" being signified the period of the great extension of the Arctic basin.

This Drift-formation, in one form or another, covers the whole surface of this county, from the sea-level up to the summits of the chalk hills. We have, in Norfolk, evidence of submergence to the extent of 600 feet and upwards. There are other parts of this island where the submergence exceeded this, even in this latitude; so that here the highest land may not be a measure of the greatest * A map of the northern hemisphere was exhibited to the Section.

amount of submergence. It was a time when the whole of the British-Islands group became submerged, with the exception of a few salient points; and, taking the levels to be derived from these points, together with the general character of the phenomena, we may accept as certain that subaerial glaciation, in all its varied modes of action, had long been at work here prior to that submergence. The change of relative level was not sudden; it proceeded from north southwards; and it is in the north that the amount of the submergence was the greatest.

The Drift of Norfolk has good illustrations of these several sets of conditions, and of the manner in which the phenomena of one period have been modified by conditions which followed. It has been well said that in geological history time is of no object; but in a geological address, such as this, it has its claims; so that instead of dwelling at any length on the general condition of the British Islands at the time of their greatest submergence, I have represented on a map of the northern hemisphere the whole of the area which became submerged, and, for the purpose of comparison, there is along with it another, showing the extent of the Arctic basin at present.

The Drift-accumulations of this county are exceptional in this one respect, that they attain unusual thicknesses. The Cromer cliff, which is wholly of this formation, is 270 feet in height: this is not so much an indication of the lapse of time during the submergence, as the result of position. Situated on the eastern slope of the English central area, towards the North-Sea depression, during the first or subaerial stage, the form and slope of the land would favour the transfer of materials downwards and outwards: in the subsequent stages, the areas of greater depth would receive the greatest amounts of the abraded spoil of the landareas encroached upon. So likewise during the period of emergence, the transfer of material would be outwards. The most reasonable explanation of the present shallow condition of the North Sea, as compared with its depths when occupied by the Crag sea, is, that it has been filled by the aggregate of the accumulations of the Drift-period.

The former extent of the Scandinavian region is of interest to the British geologist during several periods-during the glacial period, from the spoil that was drifted from it and scattered over our eastern counties.

From early times this region was in the condition of dry land. No beds of the age of the Crag have been met with on its surface; the absence of this formation, which occurs on the coast of Denmark, suggests that the land of Norway then stood at a higher relative level. That this was so is indicated by the manner and extent to which the surface is scored by glacial action, not only down to the present sealevel, but far below it. The deep fiords were occupied by glaciers; they passed over the numerous islands off that coast, which, too, are all scored.

The submarine trough which contours Norway must have been produced subsequently to this greater elevation of the region. The Crag-sea coincided with part of that period of elevation; and its marginal beds in that quarter lay some fifty miles or more from the Norwegian coast-line. The subsequent depression amounted to more than the depth of the trough, inasmuch as around the upper end of the Gulf of Christiania there occur marine beds at elevations of 500 feet above the sea, indicating a total change of level of at least 1200 feet.

Whatever the amount of this former elevation of the Scandinavian land and the precise period of its glaciation may have been, the geological phenomena about Christiania, so carefully described by the naturalist M. Sars, show clearly that the whole has also been much below its present level. The phenomena, as a whole, correspond with what took place over our area, but they are so much more definite that they deserve brief notice as part of the physical history of the North-Sea basin. From an elevation of 500 feet down to 300 feet there is a succession of marginal sealines, with banks of littoral and sublittoral shells (Skjælbanker). These have also their deeper water-beds and shells (Mergelleret). These successive lines show that the rise of the land through the 200 feet in question was at intervals.

The marine fauna of this higher sea-level is given first in its littoral, and next in its deeper-water facies. Taken together, we have this result-that all the species are now living, that it is an Arctic-basin assemblage, and not at all that of the neighbouring seas. This is the "glacial-formation series.