V - ON THE DISTINCTIONS OF FORM IN SILICA (1884)

Summary

1. As this paper, by the courtesy of the secretaries, stands first on the list of those to be read at the meeting, I avail myself of the privilege thus granted me of congratulating the Society on this occasion of its meeting in the capital of a country which is itself one magnificent mineralogical specimen, reaching from Cheviot to Cape Wrath; thus gathering into the most convenient compass, and presenting in the most instructive forms, examples of nearly every mineralogical process and phenomenon which have taken place in the construction of the world.

2. May I be permitted, also, to felicitate myself, on the permission thus given me, to bring before the Mineralogical Society a question which, in Edinburgh of all cities of the world, it should be easiest to solve, namely, the methods of the construction and painting of a Scotch pebble?

3. I am the more happy in this unexpected privilege, because, though an old member of the Geological Society, my geological observations have always been as completely ignored by that Society, as my remarks on political economy by the Directors of the Bank of England; and although I have repeatedly solicited from them the charity of their assistance in so small a matter as the explanation of an agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman, they still, as I stated the case in closing my first volume of Deucalion, discourse on the catastrophes of chaos, and the processes of creation, without being able to tell why a slate splits, or how a pebble is coloured.