550.1 321 



III 



A New Scheme of Geological Arrangement and 



Nomenclature 



Pakt I 



THE only scientific men whom Charon will carry across the Styx 

 without a fee will probably be those who conform to orthodox 

 shibboleths. For the rest, including most of the editors of and 

 contributors to Natural Science, I mean the purveyors of audacious 

 heresy, a heavy charge will no doubt be made. Meanwhile we 

 ought to have our turn in this world and if we shock those who 

 sit on velvet and dislike to have the picturesque dust of their 

 cherished prejudices disturbed, they will remember that they will 

 have their comfort when the Conservative old boatman leaves the 

 flagrantly and impudently wicked in the mud. 



In venturing to ventilate a fresh heresy I thought it needed 

 such a preface. 



The systematic arrangement of the various beds which compose 

 the Earth's crust began, as is well known, with the Italian writers 

 of the seventeenth century. It was Lehmann, however, who first 

 really proposed a rational arrangement by separating the crystalline 

 unstratified rocks, which he called Primitive, from the beds arranged 

 in successive strata, which he called Secondary. 



This classification with modifications including notably the 

 introduction of a third class of beds called Transition, and answer- 

 ing largely to our present Cambrian and Siberian strata, continued 

 in vogue until the beginning of the present century, and it was, 

 in fact, the only possible arrangement so long as petrographical 

 considerations were alone considered of importance in discriminating 

 between different rocks, for it was early and easily seen that beds 

 of very different chemical composition might graduate horizontally 

 into each other, being therefore probably on the same horizon, 

 while in other cases beds of the same chemical composition 

 were clearly situated at different horizons. 



The key to the problem which finally unlocked the geological 

 riddle was the discovery, not made at one bound, but first applied 

 systematically by William Smith, namely, that different geological 

 horizons are marked by different species of fossil remains. This 

 prime discovery has, of course, enabled us to map out the long 



