550.1 321 
III 
A New Scheme of Geological Arrangement and 
Nomenclature 
Parr I 
i (aa only scientific men whom Charon will carry across the Styx 
without a fee will probably be those who conform to orthodox 
shibboleths. For the rest, including most of the editors of and 
contributors to Natural Science, | mean the purveyors of audacious 
heresy, a heavy charge will no doubt be made. Meanwhile we 
ought to have our turn in this world and if we shock those who 
sit on velvet and dislike to have the picturesque dust of their 
cherished prejudices disturbed, they will remember that they will 
have their comfort when the Conservative old boatman leaves the 
flagrantly and impudently wicked in the mud. 
In venturing to ventilate a fresh heresy I thought it needed 
such a preface. 
The systematic arrangement of the various beds which compose 
the Earth’s crust began, as is well known, with the Italian writers 
of the seventeenth century. It was Lehmann, however, who first 
really proposed a rational arrangement by separating the crystalline 
unstratified rocks, which he called Primitive, from the beds arranged 
in successive strata, which he called Secondary. 
This classification with modifications including notably the 
introduction of a third class of beds called Transition, and answer- 
ing largely to our present Cambrian and Siberian strata, continued 
in vogue until the beginning of the present century, and it was, 
in fact, the only possible arrangement so long as petrographical 
considerations were alone considered of importance in discriminating 
between different rocks, for it was early and easily seen that beds 
of very different chemical composition might graduate horizontally 
into each other, being therefore probably on the same horizon, 
while in other cases beds of the same chemical composition 
were clearly situated at different horizons. 
The key to the problem which finally unlocked the geological 
riddle was the discovery, not made at one bound, but first applied 
systematically by William Smith, namely, that different geological 
horizons are marked by different species of fossil remains. This 
prime discovery has, of course, enabled us to map out the long 
Z 
