and the Palceozoic System of England. 505 



groups would offer a sufficiency of new forms to characterize an in- 

 ferior system/ I can only reply, that the hope to which he clung 

 was not derived from anything I had ever said or written; and that 

 1 had not, in 1843 and 1843, the shadow of a hope that any new 

 system of animal life, any group of new forms ' marking an in- 

 ferior system,^ would be found among the Lower Cambrian 

 groups. I had constantly expressed, and repeatedly published, 

 a directly contrary opinion.'^ 



I then quote the fact (published in Jan. or Feb. 1837) that my 

 small collection of the most common and characteristic species of 

 the Bala limestone, was found by Mr. Sowerby not to have as 

 much as one which was not in his MS. Silurian lists. Again, 

 in 1838, 1 state (in the Proceedings of the Geol. Soc), 

 when writing of the Upper Cambrian group, ''that many of 

 its fossils are identical with those of the Lower Silurian rocks,^' 

 ^^ i\i2ii no distinctive zoological character's had been well ascer- 

 tained.-'' Other like quotations are given in the letter : e. g. 

 where I state that a small collection 1 had procured from the 

 Snowdonian trough, when examined in 1841, gave only Bala 

 species, &c. 



When the reader bears in mind that the passages referred 

 to were all published before I had revisited North Wales, while 

 I believed in the integrity of the Lower Silurian sections, 

 and therefore also inevitably believed that the Bala limestone 

 was several thousand feet below the Llandeilo flag, — bearing all 

 this in mind, he must, I think, conclude that the author of the 

 ' Silurian System^ had but small reason for attributing to me that 

 hope to which he himself had clung. Nay, rather the reader must 

 conclude (as I have done in the letter quoted) " that the human 

 mind will sometimes reach a foregone conclusion without any re- 

 membrance of previous facts, or any exercise of the inductive 

 faculty.'' 



Had I acted in a controversial spirit, I should have immedi- 

 ately answered (as I am now doing) the passage contained in the 

 President's speech. My paper, read four months afterwards, 

 was, however, the proper and amicable refutation of the passage, 

 so far as it did not truly represent my real and well-grounded 

 hopes or anticipations. 



3. Mr. D. Sharpe, in a paper on the Bala limestone (Pro- 

 ceedings of the Geol. Soc. vol. iv. p. 10), states " that Professor 

 Sedgwick placed the Bala and Coniston limestones in the Upper 

 Cambrian system, which he states to lie below the Silurian sy- 

 stem of Mr. Murchison, and above the Lower Cambrian system ; 

 a view adopted by Mr. Murchison in his work on the Silurian 

 system, upon the authority of Professor Sedgwick." The as- 

 sertion, implied in the concluding part of the extract, that Mr. 



Phil. Mag. S. 4. No. 55. Suppl. Vol. 8. 2 L 



