1898] NEW SCHEME OF GEOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT 263 



markable in regard to some facts which are really very elementary, 

 and whose correct interpretation one would suppose was a matter of 

 no great difficulty. But here, as elsewhere in English geology, we 

 are met with an awkward difficulty. An individual geologist who 

 makes a mistake of diagnosis can be easily pushed aside. If he 

 does not choose to perform the happy dispatch, and to correct his 

 own error himself, he and his craze can be jumped upon, and he 

 speedily passes into oblivion. It is not so if the mistake is made 

 by an official geologist. . In that case it becomes the foundation of 

 a school creed. Not only have Tom, Dick, and Harry, who come 

 after the original sinner — like the French Staff in the Dreyfus 

 trial — to write memoirs on corresponding phenomena elsewhere, to 

 rub down their eccentricities to one level of official orthodoxy, but 

 they have also to remember that the office and its staff' has been 

 already committed to an opinion which must be upheld. Every 

 member of the staff is an Athanasius in esse or posse. Athanasius 

 having spoken, the Council of Nictea must uphold his view ! and 

 the subsequent memoirs issued under official sanction have to be 

 coloured by this view until some irresistible earthquake arises, 

 like the birth of Dr Hicks or Professor Lap worth, for instance, 

 when the whole set of memoirs on the particular issue go 

 tumbling down together. This sometimes takes a long time. 

 The individual stvident feels that if his work is to live at all, 

 he must not only work in the field but in the library also. 

 He must not only know what he has done himself, but what 

 other people have done, and he would consider it a piece of im- 

 pertinence, when writing upon a subject in which others have taken 

 a different view, to pass by that view without notice or criticism, 

 and to write scores of pages of controversial matter with real or 

 affected ignorance of what has been done elsewhere. He cannot 

 take up the position that the only good geological wine is that 

 contained in official bottles and that the official seal is as conclusive 

 as veuve Clicquot's corks. 



This is a very fine position to take up, so long as the public 

 appealed to is that which always requires an official seal for its 

 information, and is content with no other test, but a good many 

 people are not made that way, and among them are, perhaps, some 

 readers of this Eeview, who see perfectly well that the particular 

 policy in question must necessarily have its Nemesis. 



To come down to concrete issues, it seems to some of us that 

 the really important horizon to fix, if we are to divide the Anthro- 

 pozoic period as above defined, is the real position of the Drift beds ; 

 the beds once known as Diluvium, and now very often spoken of as 

 Glacial by a school which was some time ago a great deal more 

 cocksure than it is now. Lyell's term drift is a neutral one. Do 



