1897] NEW SCHEME OF GEOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT 323 
useful when applied within one zoological province, and becomes 
utterly misleading when applied to any other. Let me explain 
what I mean. Zoologists have divided the land surfaces of the 
earth into several provinces marked by special faunas. Of these 
divisions that proposed by Mr Sclater long ago, and which was 
founded mainly on the distribution of birds, is the most popular. 
Each one of these provinces is marked by a special animal and 
vegetable facies. Similar provinces with a similar variation in 
their inhabitants occur also beneath the sea. Now it is clear that 
each of these life provinces has a special pedigree of its own. It 
may be that they all converge eventually upon some common and 
universal original, but the various lines of descent must have been 
separate from early geological times. How then is it possible or is 
it profitable to attempt to measure and test In any way whatever 
the geological record of one zoological province by that of another ? 
We may eventually be able to say what was the character of the 
different zoological provinces contemporary with different geological 
horizons in our own country, but this kind of knowledge will profit 
us little. What we want to know is the pedigree of each zoological 
province by itself, and to keep that pedigree intact and separate and 
unsophisticated by any false correlations with the pedigrees of other 
provinces. When I am asked if a particular bed in India is 
Miocene or Pliocene, or a particular bed in New Zealand is Tertiary 
or Quaternary, etc., etc., I cannot attach any useful meaning to the 
question. If it mean that the bed is actually contemporary with, 
or that it is homotaxial with the beds so-called in Europe, the 
question is desperately hard to answer and of very little use when 
answered. If it means that a particular bed is the penultimate or 
the ante-penultimate geological stage in each area irrespective of 
actual equating of periods and dates, it may convey some meaning 
but it is a meaning crossed and sophisticated with danger and with 
doubt. What we want to do if we are to do justice to the great 
fact of the continuity of life, is to keep the two stories entirely 
apart, and to do so if possible by using a nomenclature which shall 
not be misleading. 
If then we are to retain the present geological nomenclature and 
arrangement for the beds of the pan-Arctic or hol-Arctic region where 
a common fauna now prevails, we ought to apply an entirely 
different nomenclature to the arrangement of the beds in the 
Neotropical, the South American, the Indo-African, the Australian, 
the Indonesian, and the New Zealand provinces. We may then 
indulge in theories and systems of homotaxis without any danger, 
and we shall always be sure that we are measuring the horizon we . 
are dealing with by a fixed and not by an unstable barometer. 
This is the first parable I wish to preach. 
