OF ARTS AND SCIENCES : JUNE 4, 1872. 451 



been a quick perception of the aspects of the rocks, and a happy 

 facility in grouping and presenting the facts and observations of him- 

 self and others. Professor Giekie, in a recent biographical sketch, speaks 

 of the rare acumen with which Murchison seized the geographical 

 details of a region, and thence deduced the general arrangement of its 

 rocks. His opinions, however, were either adopted from others, without 

 much critical examination, or, in the case of his own observations, often 

 formed hastily, and upon insufficient data ; and very many of his 

 conclusions are already inadmissible. Most of his deductions in the 

 geology of the Alps appear, when viewed in the light which Studer, 

 Lory, Pillet, and especially Favre, have thrown upon that region, to be 

 fallacious. His conclusions as to the age and geological structure of the 

 Scottish Highlands, although sustained by the members of the govern- 

 ment survey, are rejected, apparently with good reason, by Professor 

 Nicoll ; while the subsequent investigations of Sedgwick and of the 

 government surveyors have long since shown that the arrangement of 

 the rocks to which he gave the name of Lower Silurian was based upon 

 a series of mistakes in observation, and that the rocks thus called are 

 identical with the upper division of the Cambrian series of Sedgwick. 

 The history of the Cambrian and Silurian controversy, which alienated 

 him from his old friend Sedgwick, and for the last thirty years has 

 troubled geological nomenclature, is a long one, which has been lately 

 fully discussed elsewhere. Indeed, it would appear that the nomen- 

 clature and classification of Murchison, hitherto so generally adopted 

 for the paleozoic rocks, will be replaced by that of Sedgwick, the ex- 

 actitude of whose early stratigraphical determinations has been fully 

 established by the results of recent investigators both in Europe and 

 America. 



Frederic Adolf Trendelenburg, Perpetual Secretary of the 

 section of history and philosophy in the Royal Academy of Sciences at 

 Berlin, and a Foreign Honorary Member of this Academy, died in Berlin 

 in January, 1872. In him we regret the loss of one of the great meta- 

 physicians of his country, the most eminent, indeed, as a scholar and a 

 thinker in the department of philosophy, that Germany could boast of 

 since the death of Hegel, Herbart, and Schelling. With these illus- 

 trious men his own name must always be associated, not as one who 

 subscribed to their doctrines, but who followed generally the same 

 lines of investigation, and by an acute, learned, and comprehensive 



