172 NATURAL SCIENCE [March 



any maiiuc equivalents of these beds. He further reserved the 

 term Recent for everything above the so-called palaeolithic lieds 

 {Antiquity of Man, p. 2 GO). 



This is not enough. When we turn to a still later authority, 

 Mr Horace B. Woodward, we find him following the lead of Mr 

 Searles Wood, junior, and transferring the whole of the so-called 

 Glacial series to the Pleistocene horizon, and retaining the Forest 

 Bed and the Norwich Crag in the Newer Pliocene. With these 

 two he also placed the Suffolk Crag, which for the first time was 

 divorced from the Coralline Crag, and placed in another main 

 division of the Tertiaries, the latter being left alone in the Older 

 Pliocene. In the same work we are told very distinctly, and I 

 think rather rashly, that Miocene beds do not occur in England and 

 Wales at all. I am weary and tired of my imperfect analysis of this 

 most extraordinary story. Nothing surely in all the annals of 

 Science, nothing in the prodigious memory of my good kind friend 

 Sherborn (may the sun long shine brightly on so industrious a 

 worker) can equal this record, for it is not a question of naming a 

 species, but of arranging and naming a great series of geological 

 horizons. The chameleon has adopted every possible tint. The 

 names I have quoted have done service in every possible variety 

 of way, and have had as many meanings as there are whims in 

 Avomen. It is simply astounding that such a mass of absurdity as 

 is involved in the story I have told should have been tolerated. It 

 has only been so tolerated, I take it, because men have been afraid 

 to say that Lyell, great genius as he was, has in this matter, as in 

 many others, led the geological rabble into the wilderness ; has led 

 not merely the geological lambs, but the old horny rams and horn- 

 less ewes as well. Anyone who has favoured me by reading what 

 I have here written is at liberty, if he can, to find some rational 

 clue to the whole mess and maze, and thus to justify it. To me 

 the names T have quoted have been used in so many different senses, 

 apparently at the wliim of fancy of every new writer, and have such 

 an absolutely confused connotation that they are completely worth- 

 less foi' all serious purposes ; and much as I dislike changes of 

 nomenclature, I see no possible hope save to sweep them away into 

 the limbo of oblivdon. 



But the names are a small matter. 1 protest also, as a heretic 

 should, against the whole scheme and method of Lyell's systematic 

 arrangement of the Tertiary and Recent beds as utterly irrational, 

 and based upon entirely misleading and mischievous criteria, 

 namely, the proportion of recent to fossil forms in any bed, and I 

 will quote, in again doing so, a former president of the Geological 

 Society, a big man with a very wide grasp of logic and knowledge. 

 AproiJos of this very scheme, Whewell, in his address to the 



