XXVili PREFACE. 
They were, at the time, in the closest daily communication; and it is also true that Murchison’s 
expansion of his Silurian colours over all the older rocks of Wales, and Warburton’s strange 
mangling of our Papers and Sections, took place very nearly at the same time; namely, just 
after our Communications to the Geological Society respecting the work done in 1842—43 had 
been completed. 
With all the faults of the Reductions it was obvious that Mr Warburton had laboured 
hard at my Papers and Sections; and perhaps done his best to put them into a sys- 
tematic form; and on that account I was willing, after I got over my first sorrow (and it 
was a very great sorrow, to endure the loss of perhaps the best two years’ labours of my 
Geological life), to excuse some of his blunders, and to overlook the overbearing manner 
in which he had treated me. The case seemed without remedy, and I made no further 
movement in connection with it; and the matter would probably have passed away without 
any further notice from myself, had I not after the lapse of about 7 years received that 
information from Mr Knipe to which I have alluded in a former page (supra, p. xxvi). By 
that information I was at once convinced that I should be wanting in moral courage, 
and fail in doing what the truth of history required of me, if I did not claim my right 
position, as the first interpreter of the Cambrian Sections. And with these feelings I recorded 
in a Paper, read before the Geological Society in the year 1852, the result of a new 
examination of my original Papers, and a condensed abstract of what I had written connected 
with a previous controversy with Sir R. I. Murchison; and upon these historical details 
an argument was built which appeared to me incontrovertible’. 
While writing under such circumstances some little excess of temper might I think 
have been expected. But in my present judgment, formed after a re-examination made in 
the calmness and serenity of old age, there was no want of temper in my Paper. It was 
full of matter, and I think fairly argued. It was, however, very il received by the Geolo- 
gical Society; and all who took a part in the proceedings of the evening seemed to make 
it a point of honour to maintain every position which had been claimed in the works of 
Murchison. A week or two after the reading of this Paper I received a formal notifi- 
cation from the Secretary of the Geological Society, that the Council had passed a decree 
to extrude my Paper absolutely from their Quarterly Journal. They soon, however, found 
that this suppression of my Paper was impossible; for the new Volume, containing the 
offending Paper, had found its way partially before the public, and I had received the usual 
Author’s presentation copies of my Paper. 
* Murchison had previously claimed the Bala Group as Silurian, against which I entered my protest; and after 
some discussion I offered a compromise: viz. that of calling the Bala Group—Cambro-Silurian. This compromise was rejected 
by Murchison, and was afterwards withdrawn by myself. 
