“I for one can speak with gratitude of the practical lessons I have received from Mr. Smith. It was by tracking his footsteps, with his maps in my hand, through Wiltshire and the neighbouring counties, where he had trodden nearly thirty years before, that I first learned the subdivisions of our oolitic series, and apprehended the meaning of those arbitrary and somewhat uncouth terms, which we derive from him as our master, which have long become engrafted into the conventional language of English geologists, and through their influence have been, in part, also adopted by the naturalists of the continent. “After such a statement, gentlemen, I have a right to speak boldly, and to demand your approbation of the council’s award. I could almost dare to wish that stern lover of truth, to whose bounty we owe the “Donation Fund,” that dark eye, before the glance of which all false pretensions withered, were once more amongst us. And if it be denied us to hope that a spirit like that of Wollaston should often be embodied on the earth, I would appeal to those intelligent men who form the strength and ornament of this society, whether there was any place for doubt or hesitation? whether we were not compelled, by every motive which the judgment can approve and the heart can sanction, to perform this act of filial duty, before we thought of the claims of any other man, and to place our first honour on the brow of the father of English geology? “If, in the pride of our present strength, we were disposed to forget our origin, our very speech bewrays us: for we use the language which he taught us in the infancy of our science. If we, by our united efforts, are chiselling the ornaments and slowly raising up the pinnacles of one of the temples of nature, it was he who gave the plan, and laid the foundations, and erected a portion of the solid walls by the unassisted labour of his hands. “The men who have led the way in useful discoveries, have ever held the first place of honour in the estimation of all who in after times have understood their works or trodden in their steps. It is upon this abiding principle that we have acted; and in awarding our first prize to Mr. Smith, we believe that we have done honour to our own body, and are sanctioned by the highest feelings which bind societies together. “I think it a high privilege to fill this chair on an occasion when we met, not coldly to deliberate on the balance of conflicting claims, in which, after all, we might go wrong, and give the prize to one man by injustice to another; but to perform a sacred duty, where there is no room for doubt or error, and to perform an act of public gratitude, in which the judgment and the feelings are united.”[6] On this occasion Mr. Smith presented to the society the original Table of Stratification drawn in 1799, and a circle-map of the vicinity of Bath, which had been geologically coloured about the same period.