PREFACE. eae 
The Council, however, repeated their blow in another form; and they passed a Resolution 
whereby I was forbidden to bring before them any Paper involving the Classification 
and Nomenclature of our older Paleozoic rocks. I thought that a Resolution, so unwise 
and so deeply injurious to myself, could never be sternly acted on; and would perhaps 
soon be forgotten. But experience taught me the contrary. It was acted upon with stern 
severity; and I was, after the expiration of about two years, compelled to withdraw from 
the Meetings of the Society; which I could not attend with any proper regard to my own 
honour while such a personal stigma was allowed by its Council to remain on my name. 
I ought at the moment to have struck my name from its lists; but I could not bear 
the thought of taking a final leave of a Society, which for many years was almost my 
home in London, and in which I had spent many of the happiest hours of my life, and 
formed some of my most cherished friendships”. 
The attempt. to suppress my Paper, which had been subject to all previous formalities 
of Reference, and had actually passed through the Press, was a personal stigma unexampled, 
I believe, in the history of any other Philosophical Society in London. 
More than twenty years have, I believe, passed away since the bitter Resolution of the 
Council was recorded in the books of the Geological Society, and most of my opponents 
have been removed by the hand of death from the gocd and evil of this world. But 
there is still a Council of the Geological Society, far removed from the feelings of irritation 
(whether just or unjust) which produced the stern censure of the Paper to which I have 
alluded; and I venture to challenge them, though now in a feeble voice, to re-peruse my 
old Paper and to produce from it a single paragraph or sentence which was unfit for me 
to write, or for the Council to read, and in any way justified the condemnation that had 
been passed upon it. 
It is to me a thought full of melancholy, and of misgiving for the cause of honest 
truth, when I find that some of our best Geologists are even now vainly contriving, by 
buttresses and underpinnings, to lend support to the lower sections of the Silurian System ; 
which were untrue to nature from the beginning, both in their whole conception and in 
the elaboration of their details: and doing this while they turn their faces away from 
* After the attacks alluded to above, I continued occasionally to attend the Meetings of the Geological Society, and 
read one or two papers before them on different subjects. I did however twice trespass on the forbidden ground of Paleozoic 
Nomenclature. My first offending paper was arrested by the President (Professor Forbes was, I think, that evening in the 
Chair) as touching on forbidden matter. Lastly in October, 1854, a paper, of which I was the author, was partially read 
before the Society; but an essential part of it was not read that evening. When this came to my knowledge I withdrew 
the paper; and it was afterwards published (I think in extenso) in the Philosophical Magazine and Annals of Philosophy. 
This led the President, Mr Hamilton, into a severe comment, to which I replied in the above-named Journal; and so 
ended for ever a personal connection with the Geological Society, which ought to have ended two years sooner, 
