Whilst unravelling the complicated interior phenomena of the Welsh rocks, you were not unmindful of the very different order of phenomena exhibited on their exterior surfaces. Here you showed the vast extent and power of ice-action, and what a glacier-land Wales once was. Reasoning from the present to the past, you also boldly pushed your ice-batteries far back into geological time, and were the first to bring them to bear on rocks of Permian age. That advanced post you long had to hold alone ; but other geologists have since followed your lead, and we have even lately had evidence in the same direction from Southern Africa, where it is asserted that boulders and glaciated surfaces have been found at the base of the Karoo formation of supposed Triassic age.
You have also held a prominent place among those who, by their public teaching, have done so much during the last twenty years to advance the cause of our science. To myself personally, whose geological career has run nearly parallel in time with your own, it is a source of much pleasure that it has fallen to my lot to hand you this the highest testimonial the Society has to bestow.
Prof. Ramsay made the following reply : —
Mr. President, — I cannot say whether I am more pleased or surprised by the unexpected award to me of the Wollaston Medal by the Council of this Society. Pleased I well may be, not because I ever worked for this or any other honour, but because I feel a sense of satisfaction that the work on which I have been engaged for the last thirty years has been esteemed by my friends and fellows of the Council of the Society so highly that they have deemed me a fit recipient of this honour. It is also a special satisfaction to me that this award has been bestowed by the hand of one of my oldest geological friends, who is so universally esteemed and beloved, and is himself so distinguished a contributor to physical and other branches of our science.
My first endeavour in geology (the construction of a geological map and model of Arran) necessarily drew my attention to the physical part of our science ; and when, consequent upon that work, I was, through the intervention of my old and constant friend Sir Roderick Murchison, appointed by Sir Henry De la Beche to the Geological Survey of Great Britain, my whole subsequent life was thereafter necessarily involved in questions of physical geology ; for no man can work on or conduct the field-work of such a survey who does not, aided by palaeontology, necessarily make that his first aim.
