Akkrah and Adampe^ Gold Coast, Africa. 303 



brother asserts no prerogative over them, since his appropriation of 

 them would greatly militate against his dignity and prudence, by 

 those who esteem him in the light of a father and protector to his 

 brethren, and be also deemed derogatory to the position which he 

 maintains, in descending so far below it as to unite himself with con- 

 nections whose subordinate rank entitled them to rank little better 

 than slaves.* It is well worthy of record how much these usages 

 are in unison with those Divine injunctions conveyed in many pas- 

 sages of the Mosaic writings, and what conclusive evidence they fur- 

 nish of their primeval derivation and remote history. 

 {To he continued.) 



Professor Sedgrvick's Classification and Nomenclature of the 

 Older Falceozoic Rocks of Great Britain. 



Professor Sedgwick, in a Memoir he lately read to the Geolo- 

 gical Society, first discusses some questions suggested by his former 

 paper, and states that he once considered the Coniston limestone, on 

 fossil evidence, as the equivalent of the Caradoc sandstone, and the 

 Coniston flagstone as the equivalent of the Wenlock shale ; that he 

 had afterwards (from a better knowledge of the Bala fossils, and a 

 knowledge, also, that there were material errors in the sectional po- 

 sition of the lower groups of the Silurian System) for several years 

 considered the Coniston and Bala limestone as exact or very nearly 

 equivalents. Hence the importance of determining the place of the 

 Coniston flags. He then concludes (on a review of all the new evi- 

 dence and in accordance with fossil determination, both by Mr Salter 

 and Professor M'Coy), that the Coniston flags are a true upper Bala 

 group. Hence it seems to follow inevitably, that the Coniston grits 

 are the equivalents of the Caradoc sandstone ; to which conclusion, 

 however, the fossil evidence is, at present, not contradictory, but al- 

 most entirely wanting. In the preceding view, the successive beds 

 over the Coniston grits, up to the flags, grits, and tilestones of 



* We may come to the rational conclusion, from the tenor and close appliance 

 of language used in the Koran, that the Prophet had unquestionably in contem- 

 plation the evil consequences which flow from the repeated intermarriages of 

 kindred blood, said to cease only upon the extinction of the family name. To 

 avert these dire contingencies, limitations were at length published, framed 

 almost verbatim from those passages of Scriptural history that refer to the sub- 

 ject. These are enumerated in the fourth chapter of the Koran, and are as 

 follow : — " Ye are forbidden to marry your mothers, and your daughters, and 

 your sisters, and your aunts, both on the father's and on the mother's side, and 

 your brother's daughters, and your sister's daughters, and your mothers who 

 have given you suck, and your foster-sister, and your wives' mothers, and your 

 daughters-in-law, which are under your tuition, born of your wives unto whom 

 ye have gone into ; and ye are also forbidden to take to wife two sisters, except 

 what is already past."— jSafe'* Thrantlation. 



