INTRODUCTION. li 
liberty (very nearly resembling a pious fraud), which no man living has a right to take, 
under whatever views of expediency he may conceive himself to be acting*. 
I must not load this portion of the Introduction with any further references to personal 
labours, which my present limits do not permit me to fortify by sections, or illustrate by 
details. My statements have not been made in a spirit of self-praise, but of self-defence. 
Since I began the study of the British Paleeozoic rocks, I have (to the best of my knowledge) 
sought for truth and nothing else :—being ready, at every turn, to embrace it heartily, 
whether it made for my previous notions, or against them. After 1834, when I learnt, in 
the field, what were the “Lower Silurian” groups, and found that there was an unsolved 
difficulty in uniting them to my Upper Cambrian groups in an intelligible order of super- 
position, I did not give up my belief in the integrity and truthfulness of the lower sections 
of Siluria; but, on the contrary, I was ready to sacrifice my own sections to them; believing 
them (in spite of my own evidence, and almost with superstitious faith) to be right, on the 
authority of their author. I did this, be it remembered, while the evidence for his adopted 
order of superposition and nomenclature was exhibited, year by year, in every form of 
illustration, and without any hesitation or doubt, on his part, as to its physical truth. 
After I had again visited North Wales (in 1842), and found, on evidence no longer to 
be resisted, that my sections in North Wales were right in principle, and consequently that 
the Lower Silurian sections (from some great error of observation) were wrong in principle; 
I did not, even then, stickle for any exclusive system of nomenclature to magnify my own 
work at the cost of my fellow-labourer; but I was ready (under the name Cambro-Silurian) 
to admit into my true Upper Cambrian group his two misinterpreted “Lower Silurian” 
groups. Nor did I ever make a stand, as I had a full right to do, on the integrity of my 
own work, and on the nomenclature that was legitimately derived from it; till (without any 
word of warning) he had sponged out all my work in Wales, and claimed it as his own. 
And this was done, not by the establishment, but by the abandonment, of those sections 
which had formed the very basis of all his Silurian evidence; and on which, and on 
which alone, his published system of nomenclature had either truth or meaning. To have 
accepted this monstrous innovation would have been an abandonment of the cause both 
of historical and geological truth; and would have been, at the same time, a flagrant 
* In the early years of the Geological Society of London Mr Warburton was of invaluable assistance in condensing, 
correcting, and arranging the communications. At the time he became President, geology had made great adyances. 
while he had been employed, many years, in the duties of a Senator. He appears, however, rapidly to haye made himself 
master of the “Silurian System.” Important as that work is, it gives but a very narrow, one-sided, and imperfect 
view of that vast succession of phenomena which illustrate the physical and Paleontological history of our oldest rocks: 
and its lower groups are, as we now know, in a position which is incorrigibly erroneous. Mr Warburton might have 
ascertained all this, by an excursion, of no great toil, to one or two of the critical sections. But he seems to have thought 
that geology had found the level on which he stood, and from which it ought never to be moved: and he probably 
imagined (while remembering his early and successful labours in the Geological Society) that he was conferring upon me 
a great benefit, while he was quietly tampering with a nomenclature (proposed by myself in the spirit of a generous 
compromise), and blotting out all the indications of my hard labour in a field with which he was not at all acquainted from 
any personal labour of his own. 
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