1898] J^UW SCHEME OF GEOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT 163 



of one belonging to a large class of mammals, the species Bimanus, and 

 that species alone, as the foundation, not of a new subsection of a par- 

 ticular series of beds, but as equivalent to the portentous changes 

 involved when we compare the beds of the so-called Primary age 

 with those of the Secondary, and those of the Secondary with those 

 of the Tertiary. The position is too ridiculous for argument. Such 

 a classification is an inversion of all logical system and method. It 

 has frequently been protested against, and cannot, it seems to me, 

 be justified in any way whatever. Far from being separable from 

 the Tertiary series, the beds called Eecent by Lyell, and Quaternary 

 and Post Tertiary by others, ought to form in essence a very small 

 and very intimate section of the beds of the Tertiary period itself. 

 If the term Tertiary is to be logically used, it must include ourselves 

 and our works. We are not living in Post Tertiary times ; we are 

 living in Tertiary times, and we shall continue so to live until a 

 much mightier change has occurred in this world than the addition 

 in a common cemetery of the bones of Shakespeare and Bill Sykes 

 to those of many a buried Yorick, who once cracked nuts when 

 hanging from a shady branch by his tail. 



Let us proceed, however. This is not the only objection to 

 Lyell's classification. When Lyell first wrote his Principles, the in- 

 coming of Man was supposed to be a comparatively very recent 

 ■event. The fact that he had lived with such extinct beasts as the 

 Mammoth in Europasia, the Mastodon and the Megatherium in 

 America, was not generally suspected. It required a great many 

 years of patient pleading and hammering by unknown but careful 

 observers like Schmerling in Belgium, and MacEnery in Devon- 

 shire, and by others, to whom the world was deaf, before the fact was 

 accepted by the Papal authorities of latter-day science. Be it re- 

 membered that no one was more to blame for this neglect and re- 

 jection of the facts and their teaching, for more than one decade, 

 than Huxley himself when secretary of the Eoyal Society, and let 

 us beware of surrendering ourselves to the science of " the Syllabus " 

 in consequence. 



We now know that not only was man contemporary with the 

 extinct animals just referred to, but that in all probability he lived 

 with the great Southern Elephant, E. mcridionalis in Italy, and 

 was also contemporary with the same animal in England, as attested 

 by recent evidence from the forest bed in Xorfolk. Inasmuch as 

 (so far as. we can tell) the forest bed in Xorfolk was contemporary 

 with the latest of the three divisions of the marine crao;, the so-called 

 Norfolk or Weybourne crag, it follows that Lyell's name " Eecent 

 beds," as defined by himself, and the names subsequently substituted 

 for that phrase, are really equivalent to a great deal more than he 

 supposed, and make a great invasion into his Pliocene horizon. 



