322 NATURAL SCIENCE. Nov.. 



must restore geological teaching to the lines, and adopt the training, 

 which great men like Hopkins and Sedgwick and Lyell thought it 

 necessary to have when they discussed, not merely a slice of Old 

 England, but the whole realm of Jupiter, Pluto, and Neptune com- 

 bined. If this be so, we must, in our museum which is to illustrate 

 geology, have a stratigraphical collection commensurate with, and 

 illustrative of, not merely English strata, but the strata of the whole 

 world. Let us in this way try to dispel the rubbish which has been 

 so persistently taught about homotaxial relations between the strata 

 of areas as far removed from each other as China and Peru, Australia 

 and Britain. Let us in this way also get rid of a nomenclature and 

 arrangement of the beds which were perfectly sound and justified so 

 long as they were limited to English geology, but which are absurd 

 and childish when applied to entirely different stories. The history 

 of Europe and the history of China, treated as human communities, 

 differ toto ccelo at every point, and must be illustrated by collections 

 kept entirely distinct and apart. It seems to me that Chinghiz Khan 

 has as many homotaxial relations with Frederick Barbarossa as the 

 Tertiary beds of the Sivaliks have with those of Europe, with which 

 they are so often confused under a common nomenclature. This end 

 can only be secured by having a stratigraphical collection which shall 

 illustrate the stratigraphy of every separate and distinct geological 

 area as a separate and distinct field altogether. 



Thirdly — and here I am afraid my heresies will be less tolerated 

 ■ — -I hold it to be a mistake to deal with mineralogy and palaeontology 

 as if they were subsections of geology. Collecting fossils, as we all 

 know, is what a schoolboy means by geologising ; but some older 

 people believe that geology (meaning the history of the various 

 revolutions which the world has seen) is a different thing to collecting 

 fossils and discriminating the various species of minerals. It is true 

 that, in collating the disordered leaves into which Nature's book has 

 been confused, we find that we can distinguish the various pages in 

 a very satisfactory way by their being ear-marked by the presence of 

 certain fossil forms ; and these indices of geological horizons we must 

 have in any stratigraphical collection. But for this purpose it is the 

 reverse of useful to have every fossil occurring at every level exhibited : 

 we want the typical forms alone which specially mark the various 

 horizons. It is they that give us the real pagination, and it is merely 

 confusing the student to exhibit everything contained in a bed as its 

 special ear-mark. The great bulk of pala:ontological remains do not 

 appertain to geology at all, but to the special provinces of zoology and 

 botany. They illustrate the continuity, or the reverse, of life, and not 

 the history of the revolutions of the earth's crust, and should be 

 remorselessly removed from the geological collection to the general 

 biological one. In this way an adequate geological museum illus- 

 trating the general geology of the earth becomes a much more 

 manageable affair than many suppose. 



