1897] NEW SCHEME OF GEOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT 323 



useful when applied within one zoological province, and becomes 

 utterly misleading when applied to any other. Let me explain 

 what I mean. Zoologists have divided the land surfaces of the 

 earth into several provinces marked by special faunas. Of these 

 divisions that proposed by Mr Sclater long ago, and which was 

 founded mainly on the distribution of birds, is the most popular. 

 Each one of these provinces is marked by a special animal and 

 vegetable facies. Similar provinces with a similar variation in 

 their inhabitants occur also beneath the sea. Now it is clear that 

 each of these life provinces has a special pedigree of its own. It 

 may be that they all converge eventually upon some common and 

 universal original, but the various lines of descent must have been 

 separate from early geological times. How then is it possible or is 

 it profitable to attempt to measure and test in any way whatever 

 the geological record of one zoological province by that of another ? 

 We may eventually be able to say what was the character of the 

 different zoological provinces contemporary with different geological 

 horizons in our own country, but this kind of knowledge will profit 

 us little. What we want to know is the pedigree of each zoological 

 province by itself, and to keep that pedigree intact and separate and 

 unsophisticated by any false correlations with the pedigrees of other 

 provinces. When I am asked if a particular bed in India is 

 Miocene or Pliocene, or a particular bed in New Zealand is Tertiary 

 or Quaternary, etc., etc., I cannot attach any useful meaning to the 

 question. If it mean that the bed is actually contemporary with, 

 or that it is homotaxial with the beds so-called in Europe, the 

 question is desperately hard to answer and of very little use when 

 answered. If it means that a particular bed is the penultimate or 

 the ante-penultimate geological stage in each area irrespective of 

 actual equating of periods and dates, it may convey some meaning 

 but it is a meaning crossed and sophisticated with danger and with 

 doubt. What we want to do if we are to do justice to the great 

 fact of the continuity of life, is to keep the two stories entirely 

 apart, and to do so if possible by using a nomenclature which shall 

 not be misleading. 



If then we are to retain the present geological nomenclature and 

 arrangement for the beds of the pan- Arctic or hoi-Arctic region where 

 a common fauna now prevails, we" ought to apply an entirely 

 different nomenclature to the arrangement of the beds in the 

 Neotropical, the South American, the Indo-African, the Australian, 

 the Indonesian, and the New Zealand provinces. We may then 

 indulge in theories and systems of liomotaxis without any danger, 

 and we shall always be sure that we are measuring the horizon we 

 are dealing with by a fixed and not by an unstable barometer. 

 This is the first parable I wish to preach. 



