The mission of the society is: "Making geologists acquainted with each other, stimulating their zeal, inducing them to adopt one nomenclature, facilitating the communication of new facts and ascertaining what is known in their science and what remains to be discovered".

[2] The Society was founded on 13 November 1807 at the Freemasons' Tavern, Great Queen Street, in the Covent Garden district of London.

In 1907 a decision was made by the Society to admit women as Associates, under the condition they distinguished themselves as geological investigators or submitted their own original research.

It ran programmes in the geosciences in Britain and abroad, under the auspices of the science writer and palaeontologist Professor Richard Fortey, the president that year.

These include pioneers of geology William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick, Roderick Impey Murchison, Charles Lyell, Henry Thomas De la Beche, Thomas Henry Huxley, Joseph Prestwich, Archibald Geikie, Jethro Teall, and Charles Lapworth.

Later well-known names include Alfred Harker, Arthur Elijah Trueman, Herbert Harold Read, Frederick Shotton, and Janet Watson.