Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 25.djvu/43

 PROCEEDINGS

AT THE

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING,

19th FEBRUARY, 1869.

AWARD OF THE WOLLASTON MEDAL.

The Reports of the Council and of the Committees having been read, the President, Professor T. H. Huxley, LL.D., F.R.S., handed the Wollaston Medal to Henry Clifton Sorby, Esq., F.R.S., addressing him as follows : —

Mr. Sorby, — The Council of the Geological Society has charged me with the pleasant duty of presenting to you the Wollaston Medal, in signification of the value which all geologists attach to your long- continued and laborious investigations.

For more than eighteen years you have been engaged in researches into the structure of terrestrial rocks and minerals, and of meteorites ; a long series of memoirs testifies to your patience, your industry, your ingenuity, and your knowledge of the sciences which bear upon the problems you have attempted to solve ; and the most competent judges bear willing witness to the light which you have thrown upon the hidden processes of nature to which these bodies owe their origin and present condition*

The value of work so honest and so searching as yours cannot be fully estimated by your contemporaries. But already we see that the explanation of slaty cleavage, to which you were led by your study of the intimate structure of the rocks which exhibit that phenomenon, is in full accordance with the conclusions of physical investigators who have approached the question from a very different side, and may now be said to be universally adopted.

And, finally, it will not escape the attention of the Society, as in marked accordance with the fitness of things, that Wollaston's Medal should be conferred upon a worker in whom is apparent so much of that love of minute research and so much of that power of elucidating the great by the little, which characterized the illustrious founder.

Mr. Sorby replied :-

Mr. President and Gentlemen,— Allow me to express my best thanks for the honour you have done me by the award of the Wollaston Medal ; and allow me, Mr. President, to thank you very sincerely for the kind manner in which you have spoken of my researches. I have always contended that the greatest reward that a scientific man

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