Ixvi INTRODUCTION. 
This over-ambitious aim was followed with all the energy of a bold hunter who, while 
he pursues his game to the death, little thinks of his neighbours’ fences, or that he is 
trampling their crops under his horse’s hoofs. One who adopts a daring scheme of philo- 
sophy often has, for a while, a great advantage over another who is pursuing truth by the 
secure and sober steps of inductive logic. For men hate to be dangling in doubt; and one who 
offers to the enquiring mind an apparent resting-place, is sure of immediate favour. A 
bold generalization, ratified by a technical name, may have the promise of some endurance. 
For when a man has accepted a technical name, he never readily submits to the humili- 
ation of parting with it: and he will often cling to names with more tenacity than he 
clings to principles; which he never perhaps examined for himself, or, it may be, never 
thoroughly comprehended. Half the wrangling in the world of science has arisen from 
premature generalizations, embodied in a premature nomenclature. 
The Silurian nomenclature was first accepted because all English and Foreign Geologists 
believed (and, so far as regarded the two lower groups, believed erroneously) that the 
Silurian sections were true to nature; and consequently, that the subordinate fossils were 
arranged also in a true descending order. Now, although the sections were wrong, the 
palzontological sequence was true to nature: and for this simple reason, that the greater 
part of the so-called “Lower Silurian” species were (by a great mistake in the “Lower 
Silurian Sections”) taken from their true place, which was in some cases thousands of feet 
below the May Hill Sandstone, and catalogued as the fossils of two groups which were 
placed (by a great physical error) immediately under the Wenlock group. To a foreign 
paleontologist, or to any one unacquainted with the true physical structure of England, 
the sequence indicated by the fossil evidence seemed therefore to give a very high sanction 
to the supposed truth of the “Lower Silurian Sections,” and the nomenclature that was 
derived from them. 
The descending paleontological sequence in America, and on the continent of Europe, was 
proved to be the same, or nearly the same, with that given in the so-called “Silurian 
System.” Therefore it was naturally concluded that the Silurian groups must be in a true 
physical arrangement, and that the Silurian nomenclature was justified by its evidence. 
But how was the Silurian kingdom to be upheld when its foundations were not only 
shaken, but overturned, and when the first principles of its constitution were found to be 
devoid of a true geological sanction? After a manifesto which acknowledged a great 
mistake, but blinked the truth by very unfairly throwing the blame of the mistake on 
myself, it was upheld by a despotic act of usurpation, carried into effect without my 
knowledge or participation, without any respect to historical justice, and without any 
regard to geographical propriety. All rocks below the Old Red Sandstone were to be one 
System, and that System was to be Silurian! 
When this scheme was accepted, in great ignorance of the true bearing of the facts 
on which alone it could be entitled to acceptance (and let me remark, by the way, that 
apart from all other evidence, no one could have any just conception of the true bearing 
