550.1 161 



A New Scheme of Geological Arrangement and 



Nomenclatm'e 



Part III 



I NOW propose to come to closer quarters with my subject, and 

 to do so by calling in question Lyell's scheme of arrangement 

 of the Tertiary beds, which still largely holds the field, as un- 

 scientific, mischievous and misleading. 



I have not been able to find who first used the term Tertiary 

 in its modern sense — namely, as equivalent to the greater part of 

 the beds above the chalk — nor when the term was first used. 

 Perhaps some reader of Natural Science could help me. 



Cuvier and Brongniart in their famous memoir on the Paris 

 basin; Webster in his memoirs on the beds of the Isle of Wight and 

 the Thames basin; and Bonelli, Brocchi and other Italians in North 

 Italy and Sicily, had explored with skill and acumen the Tertiary 

 deposits in the localities referred to ; but none of them had 

 attempted any general scheme of general classification of the 

 Tertiary beds as a whole. This was the work of the conchologist 

 Deshayes, who, on the evidence of the fossil shells they contain, 

 roughly arranged the beds above the chalk (excluding the beds 

 being currently deposited) into three groups. Lyell, after his 

 famous visit to Italy and France, brought back with him Deshayes' 

 arrangement, and gave names to the latter's anonymous divisions. 

 These names, he tells us, he adopted in consultation with Dr 

 Whewell. Thus arose the terms Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene. 

 These three divisions included everything which Lyell deemed to be 

 Tertiary. 



Above the Tertiary beds he placed the deposits which are now 

 being made by river and sea and volcano, etc. — i.e., the actually 

 current beds we see accumulating everywhere now. These beds he 

 called Recent, and it is important to remember that by ' Eecent ' 

 Lyell distinctly meant Non-Tertiary. To him they belonged to an 

 entirely different order of things to anything in the Tertiary beds, 

 and they answered in fact to the beginning of another cycle of Geo- 

 logical history, such as we mark the importance of when we speak 



M 



