1898] NEW SCHEME OF GEOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT 167 



■The most recent of Deshayes' divisions was that to which Lyell gave 

 the name of Pliocene. Like the other names he gave to the 

 principal divisions of the Tertiary period, it was, as he tells us, a 

 joint composition of his own and Whewell's, and in this case was a 

 derivative from --Xnm major and x"-'^^^ recens, and, as Lyell says, 

 was meant to exclude all beds in which the majority of the species 

 of testacea belong to living forms, and at the same time, as we have 

 seen, it excluded all beds in which traces of man had been dis- 

 covered. It was also co-extensive in its connotation with the 

 latest of the three divisions of Deshayes'. 



Now Deshayes' discrimination of his thii'd or latest series of 

 beds was entirely based upon the Italian beds, the beds of the 

 Subapennines, as he first called them, and those of Sicily and the 

 south of Italy respectively. So long as we restrict his definition to 

 that area I see no great cause to quarrel with it. 



Lyell's particular part in the business seems to me to be dis- 

 tinctly illogical and mischievous. In the first place he included 

 within the definition of the series and within the connotation of the 

 term Pliocene the English crag beds. 



Now I venture to think, and I want to speak very emphatically 

 upon this point, any scheme which includes the more recent beds in 

 the Mediterranean area and those in the North Sea area in a common 

 nomenclature must be of doubtful value. The recent geological 

 history of those two areas is quite different. Their molluscs are 

 different, and the mere fact that they may have been contemporary 

 no more justifies our describing them under a common name than 

 we should be justified in treating Brazil and Birmingham as parts of 

 one zoological province liecause the parrots in the one country and 

 the politicians in the other are contemporaries, or in speaking of the 

 era of Shakespeare when describing the history of China at the 

 beginning of the seventeenth century. If it be right to speak of the 

 Sicilian and Subapennine beds and their contents as Pliocene, it 

 seems to me to be utterly wrong and misleading to apply the 

 same name to any beds whatever in the area of the North Sea, and 

 vicc-vcrsd. 



This is not all. By "the crag was understood in 1830 all the 

 shell-bearing beds of eastern England, from the base of the Coralline 

 Crag upwards, including all the drift beds containing marine shells. 

 Inasmuch as Lyell excluded from his Pliocene horizon all deposits 

 contemporary with man, it is clear that he was mistaken in one 

 respect or the other, for, as we now know, the upper crag in the 

 sense in which he used the word was contemporary with the 

 mammotli, which was contemporary with man. By using the term 

 Pliocene, therefore, in the sense in which the inventor used it, we 

 are landed in a complete quagmire. In that quagmire it seems to 



