368 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



of the science, has freed itself from a stigma. In 1883 the 

 reviewer of a text-book remarked that in the eyes of the 

 vast majority of physical geologists, stratigraphical geology 

 "has rather the appearance of an oppressive nightmare of 

 piles of indigestible facts and meaningless strings of names ". 

 This is no longer the case. The importance of stratigra- 

 phy is becoming more clearly recognised daily, and surely 

 it is a good omen to find the president of the Geological 

 Society reviewing the stratigraphical work which has been 

 published by the society of late years in his presidential 

 address. By the time this article appears the address (38), 

 which was devoted to a consideration of the work of the 

 Fellows of the Geological Society amongst the Palaeozoic 

 rocks, will have been published, and readers may there learn 

 that British geologists have been to the fore in studying the 

 earliest sedimentary rocks of which we have certain know- 

 ledge. The earliest of which we have certain knowledge ! 

 What a confession of ignorance lies in those words, yet what 

 hopes they hold out for geologists of the future. Beyond 

 the Olenellus beds, we know of sediments in which traces 

 of life are doubtful ; but how many thousands of feet of 

 sediment must have been deposited, of which we appear to 

 know nothing. I say appear, for in many areas we know of 

 great thicknesses of fossiliferous rock, which has been 

 dubbed "Silurian" or "Cambrian," simply because they 

 are fossiliferous. By further study of these we may be able 

 to carry the record of life a step farther back, and fix 

 another datum from which we may conduct our observa- 

 tions among the sediments of a still more remote past. 



And what does the recent stratigraphical work teach 

 concerning uniformitarianism and evolution ? Little as yet, 

 but something. So complex are the conditions which de- 

 termine the lithological and palaeontological characters of 

 the strata of the geological systems, that the same set of 

 conditions never recurs on a large scale, and every system 

 has therefore some characteristic. Coal may be formed in 

 the future, but there will be nothing quite analogous to the 

 state of things which prevailed during the carboniferous 

 system, and so with the other systems. By degrees we 



