504 Prof. Sedgwick on the May Hill Sandstone, 



whole work was sponged out of the map of Wales, and treated as 

 if it had been but one great blunder, that I defended myself, 

 and in so doing, vindicated the truth : for I made no great 

 blunder, except when I doubted about a small part of my own 

 Cambrian series, which turned out to be right, and believed in 

 the sectional truth of a part of another series, which turned out 

 to be wrong. 



2. When I first complained a little of my friend's want of 

 courtesy in having invaded the two Principalities without any 

 previous declaration of war — in having brushed out his own 

 boundary line, and incorporated all the older parts of North and 

 South Cambria in his newer state of Siluria, I was met then 

 (and I am still met) by an appeal to a passage in the anniversary 

 speech to the Geological Society for 1843 (Proceedings, vol. iv. 

 p. 73). I will quote the passage, word for word. "We were 

 both aware, and the point was fully commented upon in my own 

 work (Sil. Syst. p. 308), that the Bala limestone fossils agreed 

 with the Lower Silurian ; but depending upon Professor Sedg- 

 wick's conviction, that there were other and inferior masses also 

 fossiliferous, we both clung to the hope that such strata, when 

 thoroughly explored, would offer a sufficiency of new forms to 

 characterize an inferior system." I think it best to quote my 

 own reply to this passage, as it appears in a fifth letter on the 

 Lake District, dated June, 1853*. It is as follows : — " In omis- 

 sion and commission, it [i. e. the passage above quoted) is a 

 virtual misstatement of the facts. The author does not inform 

 the reader that he had himself consented in 1834 to put the 

 Bala limestone in my Upper Cambrian groups, — Because it had 

 a sufficiency of new forms to mark a new system ? By no means ; 

 but because it was the base of a great physical group which he 

 himself had excluded from his own system in South Wales, and 

 over which he had (erroneously, as was afterwards made out by 

 other observers) placed his Llandeilo group. Nor does he tell 

 the reader that I had, ^ from the first, strenuously opposed the 

 word system when applied to the (collective) Silurian groups ; be- 

 cause they had no defined base, either physical or palseontological. 

 The sentence quoted proves to demonstration that m)- objection 

 (and I may add the repeated objections of Professor Phillips) to 

 the word system (as applied to the Silurian groups) had been 

 right, that the Silurian nomenclature was in abeyance, and that 

 it must be considerably modified in order to bring it into any 

 conformity with a true geographical nomenclature, and with the 

 pal aeon tological evidence of more complete sections." 



Another paragraph of my letter is as follows: — "When the 

 author states ' that we both clung to the hope that the Cambrian 

 * Guide to the Lakes, by J. Hudson. Kendal, 1863. 



