1897] NEW SCHEME OF GEOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT 325 



are dealing with what 1 would call parochial geology, but a term 

 which ought to have no place in a general scheme in which the 

 progressive history of a life province is to he illustrated. If there 

 is a hiatus and a gap here, it must be in the evidence and not in the 

 actual story. It is the imperfection of the geological record and not 

 the occurrence of a real unconformabilitv in two successive stages 

 of the history of a life-province which is the infirmity of our 

 inquiry, and we disguise and distort the picture utterly by painting 

 it as we do. 



The ideal arrangement of our beds ought to correspond with their 

 history in time as marked, not by their accidental sequence in any 

 particular spot, but by the successive phases of their life contents. 

 The land surface of the Palaearctic zoological province of to-day 

 must have been in geographical contact and continuity with a corre- 

 sponding land surface yesterday, and so on to the beginning of time. 



A succession of land bridges must have connected the present 

 land surfaces with those of the primitive world by a perfectly un- 

 broken chain, unless we postulate the complete periodic destruction 

 of land faunas and their re-creation ; and similarly with the marine 

 faunas. This being so, unconformability and break ought to entirely 

 disappear from our series. If we find signs that a marine sub- 

 mergence intervened between two stages of sub-aerial history of 

 some locality and caused a breach between them, we must, neverthe- 

 less, conclude that these two stages were connected geographically 

 at some point or points by a third one affording us the intermediate 

 chapter, and it is along these bridges that we ought distinctly to 

 travel. This seems to me to open up an entirely different mode of 

 arranging and studying our beds to that usually current in text- 

 books, one more consonant with modern zoological and palaeontologi- 

 cal notions. 



Our first step, as I have said, is to entirely separate the sub- 

 marine and the sub-aerial beds from one another, and to range them 

 in two series. Secondly, to arrange the beds, not according to their 

 vertical distribution in one or more spots, but according to their con- 

 tinuity in regard to conditions of deposition. This will lead us along 

 some unexpected and some not infertile lines of inquiry. Once we 

 grasp this notion we shall cease to attach much, if any, value to the 

 accepted generic terms of stratigraphical geology — the primary, 

 secondary, tertiary beds, etc. In our own country, no doubt, the 

 beds are separated by great gaps, represented fairly by their names, 

 and if we are studying English geology only, the nomenclature and 

 classification are justified ; but these gaps cannot have existed every- 

 where, unless we are to reverse all our modern teaching. The story 

 of biological development must have been quite continuous, and the 

 book in which it was recorded must have contained a continuous 



