Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 27.djvu/45

 PROCEEDINGS

AT THE

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING,

17th FEBRUARY, 1871.

Award of the Wollaston Medal.

The Reports of the Council and of the Committees and Auditors having been read, the President, Joseph Prestwich, Esq., F.R.S., handed the Wollaston Gold Medal to Professor Ramsay, F.R.S., F.G.S., addressing him as follows :—

Professor Ramsay, — I have great pleasure in presenting you with the Wollaston Medal, which has this year been awarded to you by the Council of the Society, in recognition of your many researches in practical and in theoretical geology. Distinguished as your services have been in connexion with the Geological Survey since you entered upon it as the Assistant Geologist of Sir Henry De la Beche in 1841, and more particularly since your appointment as Local Director in 1815, during which period you have superintended and carried out the admirably minute style of mapping now general on the survey, and done so much in training its members in the field, you have not less distinguished yourself by your investigations of the higher problems involved in the study of geology. Your first work was on the Isle of Arran ; and although then only a beginner, you, instead of taking the rocks to be what they looked, worked out what they were, and gave a new and independent reading of them, which has since in great part proved to be the right one. In 1846 your well-known memoir " On the Denudation of South "Wales and the adjacent Counties of England" showed the enormous amount of denudation that the Palaeozoic rocks had undergone before the deposition of the New Red Sandstone. At subsequent periods you dwelt on the power that produced " Plains of Marine Denudation," a term introduced, I believe, by yourself, and showed in all cases, by a series of true and beautiful sections, how this had operated in planing across the older strata, and how valleys had been scooped out by subsequent aqueous causes in the great plains so formed.

c 2