the Geological Society of the results that had been obtained among strata so obscured by change, as "among the very highest triumphs of geological field work," and mentioned Mr. Ramsay as particularly cited by the director among the laborers who had obtained them. When in 1845 the survey was transferred to another department, and enlarged by the inclusion of Ireland, Mr. Ramsay was made local director for Great Britain, with a salary of £300. He was to have immediate supervision of the field work of the staff, to see that the mapping was all conducted on uniform methods, to confer with the officers on their difficulties, to bring the experience gained in one district to bear upon the elucidation of another, so as to insure harmony and steady progress in the field work, and the supervision of certain matters of indoor work. To a book of memoirs prepared by the members of the survey at this time, Ramsay contributed a paper on the Denudation of South Wales and the Adjacent Counties of England, which is characterized by his biographer as having been the first attempt to reduce the phenomena of denudation to actual measurement by constructing horizontal sections on a true scale, and showing what thickness of rock had actually been stripped off the face of the country. Some expressions in it led to a correspondence with Darwin and Lyell respecting the relative force of disturbance in geological and recent times. In March, 1847, he delivered his first lecture before the Royal Institution, on The Causes and Amount of Geological Denudations. In June of the same year he accepted the professorship of geology in University College, London, on terms by which it was arranged that his duties there should not conflict with those on the Geological Survey.
Two papers read before the Geological Society in April, 1848, one of which was by Professor Ramsay and W. T. Aveling, are interesting in the history of British geology, inasmuch as they gave the first published outline of the results up to that time obtained by the Geological Survey in North Wales. Although they were mere sketches and printed only in abstract, the director general, Sir Henry de la Beche, was apprehensive as to the consequences of their appearance before they came out through an official channel. He held that the results described were obtained by public servants at the cost of the state, and were the property of the country, and not of the individuals who made them. Some of the staff chafed under the restraint, and it was Professor Ramsay's privilege to effect an arrangement with the director general under which papers might be read at the society after having been submitted to and approved by him. Professor Ramsay thought this was a great point gained, for the survey was "not half enough before the public."
Professor Ramsay had held a very poor opinion of the glacial
