Ixx INTRODUCTION. 
System was honoured with the highest distinction the Royal Society bestows.” I was then 
on the “Committee of Recommendations,” and I urged his claims with every argument I 
could adduce: and had my voice been followed, he would have received the Gold Medal 
a year sooner than it was awarded to him. 1 stated in the Committee that a great and 
difficult step had been taken by him, which, during many by-gone years, I had tried in 
vain to take. That it was the greatest movement in advance that had been effected since 
I had a right to call myself a geologist; and that it was entitled to the immediate and 
highest distinction that the Royal Society could award. On this score, then, let no one 
hereafter utter a petulant and unmerited sneer against my conduct in the present controversy. 
5. The author of “Siluria” pointed out to the Association, that if my Tabular View 
were accepted, he must lose his honour by seeing a new name given to large tracts of Europe 
which had been coloured and described as Silurian. What had that to do with the question 
in debate? Absolutely nothing, while we were discussing the proper classification of British 
rocks on British evidence. His views were so one-sided that he seemed incapable of seeing 
that, while on my scheme I actually gave his Silurian colours as large a surface as they 
occupied on his original map, he was obliterating every memorial of my work in a great 
and intricate country which I had analysed correctly, and he had not; and of which he 
had absolutely mistaken the physical relations after he had, quite unconsciously to himself, 
overstepped his own physical and paleontological base—the May Hill Sandstone. 
Leaving the British Association, and the two days’ discussion that took place before 
it, I will address myself to one or two statements which my friend made the groundwork 
of his first aggression, and which I can only meet by a direct and unequivocal denial. 
1. In his Anniversary Address to the Geological Society in 1843 (at the very time 
he was, quite unknown to myself, meditating no less a change in his Silurian map than 
the incorporation of Cambria into Siluria) he wrote as follows: “We were both aware, and 
the point i; fully commented upon in my own work (Si/. Syst. p. 308), that the Bala 
limestone fossils agreed with the Lower Silurian; but, depending upon Professor Sedgwick’s 
conviction that there were other and inferior masses also fossiliferous, we both clung to 
the hope that such strata when thoroughly explored would offer a sufficiency of new forms to 
characterize a new System.” 
I think it best to quote my own reply to this passage, as it appears in a fifth letter 
on the Lake District, dated June, 1853. It is as follows:—“In omission. and commission, 
the passage above quoted is a virtual misstatement of the facts. The author does not 
inform the reader that he had himself consented in 1834 to put the Bala limestone in my 
Upper Cambrian group.—Because it had a sufficiency of new forms to mark a new system? 
By no means; but because it was the base of a great physical group which he himself 
had excluded from his own system in South Wales, and over which he had (erroneously, 
as was afterwards made out by other observers) placed his Llandeilo group. Nor does he 
tell the reader that I had, from the first, strenuously opposed the word System when 
applied to the (collective) Silurian groups; because they had no well-defined base, either physical 
