282 NATURAL SCIENCE. November, 



private collections a very large number of the specimens are from 

 unknown locality, while scarcely one has any indication of the zone 

 from which it came. This has long been a complaint for the fossils 

 from other formations besides the Chalk. We know well enough that 

 foreign geologists are chary of exchanging specimens with British 

 workers, because the collections they obtain lose more than half their 

 value by being devoid of these details of locality and horizon. There 

 has just been reappointed a Committee of the British Association for 

 the purpose of determining the zones of the Carboniferous Limestone, 

 and the first task that this committee will have to perform will be to 

 persuade the numerous collectors up and down the country to pay a 

 little more attention to these details, even should they be the rough- 

 and-ready geologists of the old school who regard such minute 

 modern methods as another sign of the degeneration of the times. 

 But it seems to us that similar committees are just as much required 

 for the other strata of our island. The Chalk itself, whose equiva- 

 lents on the Continent are known by so many names and are split 

 into so many subdivisions, is still in the minds of most of our 

 collectors capable of no other division than into Upper and Lower 

 •Chalk. Any committee appointed for the purpose would naturally 

 work through the medium of local societies, instructing them in the 

 methods of zonal collecting by means of peripatetic lectures, and 

 prevailing upon energetic local geologists to organise the collectors of 

 their neighbourhood. Another line of action that ought not to be 

 unprofitable would be to impress upon those in charge of our 

 museums that at the present day it is of more importance to preserve 

 imperfect specimens carefully localised than it is to go on acquiring 

 magnificent show-specimens too precious to be of use to anyone. 



What is Paleontology ? 



" Paleontography," we have said, " is not always palaeon- 

 tology." What, then, is palaeontology ? It is the fashion nowadays 

 to say that it is merely a branch of zoology, thus carrying to the 

 extreme the saying of Huxley that "the only difference between a 

 collection of fossils and one of recent animals is that one set has been 

 dead somewhat longer than the other." This is the morphological 

 aspect of palaeontology. Then there is the geological aspect, which 

 confines itself to the use of fossils as " medals of creation," each being 

 regarded as a token to tell the geologist the age of the rock in which 

 it occurs. Important though both these aspects are, still palaeontology 

 has its independent and wider scope. It is important to trace the 

 migrations of former races from one part of the world to the other, 

 thus throwing light on problems of geographical distribution, not only 

 now but in past ages. It is important that we should make com- 

 parative studies of the faunas found in various rocks, with a view 

 to determining the conditions of life that occurred during their 



