communicated his paper embodying these opinions at the meeting of the Geological Society, in 1862, succeeding that in which he had been elected its president. His views met with strong dissent from the older geologists, while "most of the younger bloods," as he called them, accepted them.
The imperfection of the geological record, to which Darwin had called attention, became more forcibly impressed on his mind. He was struck by the extraordinary gaps in the succession of organic remains, even when there was no marked physical interruption of the continuity of sedimentation, and connected them with geographical changes of which no other trace had survived. He had spoken on the subject at the meeting of the American Association, and now made "Breaks in the Succession of the British Strata" the subject of his presidential addresses in 1863 and 1864.
Another change in the organization of the Geological Survey was made in 1867, when Scotland was constituted a distinct branch, and Professor Ramsay's title became Senior Director for England and Wales. Sir Roderick Murchison died in October, 1871, and after a few months' delay for the consideration of various other questions. Professor Ramsay was appointed Director General of the Geological Survey, being, "after thirty-one years of service, placed officially at the head of the organization of which he had so long been the life and soul." The reward came to him, however, "too late to enable him to profit by it as he would have done had it been conferred ten or fifteen years sooner" One of his excursions abroad resulted in a paper on the Physical History of the Valley of the Rhine, and a discourse to the Royal Institution on the same subject. He resigned his lectureship, "which in these last years of failing power had become an increasing burden" in June, 1876. He was made president of the Swansea meeting of the British Association, in 1880, and presented an address embodying a general summary of all the geological branches in which he had worked. At the jubilee meeting the next year, in York, as the oldest surviving president of Section G, he was made its president again, and delivered the address, principally dealing with the progress of geology for the past fifty years, with much difficulty. Later in the fall he was knighted, and on the last day of 1881 he retired from the public service.
During the last ten years of his official life Sir Andrew Ramsay gave much attention to the physical history of river valleys, concerning which he sought to trace the cause of the flow of the rivers of a district in the ancient topography of the region, and published special papers on the valleys of the Rhine and the Dee. He was a thorough uniformitarian in geology.
It is not by the visible amount of published work—Sir Archibald
