1897] NEW SCHEME OF GEOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT 325 
are dealing with what I would call parochial geology, but a term 
which ought to have no place in a general scheme in which the 
progressive history of a life province is to be illustrated. If there 
is a hiatus and a gap here, it must be in the evidence and not in the 
actual story. It is the imperfection of the geological record and not 
the occurrence of a real unconformability in two successive stages 
of the history of a life-province which is the infirmity of our 
inquiry, and we disguise and distort the picture utterly by painting 
it as we do. 
The ideal arrangement of our beds ought to correspond with their 
history in time as marked, not by their accidental sequence in any 
particular spot, but by the successive phases of their life contents. 
The land surface of the Palaearctic zoological province of to-day 
must have been in geographical contact and continuity with a corre- 
sponding land surface yesterday, and so on to the beginning of time. 
A succession of land bridges must have connected the present 
land surfaces with those of the primitive world by a perfectly un- 
broken chain, unless we postulate the complete periodic destruction 
of land faunas and their re-creation ; and similarly with the marine 
faunas. This being so, unconformability and break ought to entirely 
disappear from our series. If we find signs that a marine sub- 
mergence intervened between two stages of sub-aerial history of 
some locality and caused a breach between them, we must, neverthe- 
less, conclude that these two stages were connected geographically 
at some point or points by a third one affording us the intermediate 
chapter, and it is along these bridges that we ought distinctly to 
travel. This seems to me to open up an entirely different mode of 
arranging and studying our beds to that usually current in text- 
books, one more consonant with modern zoological and palaeontologi- 
cal notions. 
Our first step, as I have said, is to entirely separate the sub- 
marine and the sub-aerial beds from one another, and to range them 
in two series. Secondly, to arrange the beds, not according to their 
vertical distribution in one or more spots, but according to their con- 
tinuity in regard to conditions of deposition. This will lead us along 
some unexpected and some not infertile lines of inquiry. Once we 
grasp this notion we shall cease to attach much, if any, value to the 
accepted generic terms of stratigraphical geology—the primary, 
secondary, tertiary beds, etc. In our own country, no doubt, the 
beds are separated by great gaps, represented fairly by their names, 
and if we are studying English geology only, the nomenclature and 
classification are justified ; but these gaps cannot have existed every- 
where, unless we are to reverse all our modern teaching. The story 
of biological development must have been quite continuous, and the 
book in which it was recorded must have contained a continuous 
