INTRODUCTION. Ixxi 
or paleontological. The sentence quoted proves to demonstration that my objection (and 
I may add the repeated objections of Professor Phillips) to the word System (as applied 
to the Silurian groups) had been right, that the Silurian nomenclature was in abeyance, 
and that it must be considerably modified in order to bring it into any conformity with 
a true geographical nomenclature, and with the paleontological evidence of more com- 
plete sections. 
“When the author states ‘that we both clung to the hope that the Cambrian groups 
would offer a sufficiency of new forms to characterize an inferior system, I can only reply, 
that the hope to which he clung was not derived from anything I had ever said or written; 
and that I had not, in 1842 and 1843, the shadow of a hope that any new system of 
animal life, any group of new forms marking ‘an inferior system,’ would be found among 
the Lower Cambrian groups: I had constantly expressed, and repeatedly published, @ directly 
contrary opinion®.” 
Had I acted in a controversial spirit, I should have then answered (as I am now doing) 
the above quotation from the President’s Anniversary Address. I contented myself, in a 
Paper read before the Geological Society, four months afterwards, with an indirect and 
amicable refutation of the passage, so far as it misrepresented my well-grounded hopes and 
anticipations. It is the policy of my opponent to represent me as if in error about the 
Cambrian fossils. Now in the above quotation the error is exclusively his own; and how 
he could have fallen into it appears to me almost incredible, after what took place between 
us in 1834. 
The subsequent discoveries respecting the Cambrian sections and fossils, by no means 
sanctioned the audacious incorporation of Cambria into Siluria; but they did prove that 
the Lower Silurian groups had been greatly misplaced, and that the “Silurian System” 
(even though its groups had not been misplaced in the sections) was without any pale- 
ontological base. 
In short, my opponent, after the publication of a Paper on the Bala limestone, by 
Mr Sharpe, (Proceedings, Vol. Iv. p. 10,) must I think have suspected that there was some 
great error in his own sections, and perhaps also in mine. ‘To profit by the errors, whoever 
might have made them, he shifted his ground; and the shift would have been fair had 
he been the only workman in the field. But without acknowledging the possibility of great 
mistakes on his own part, he was quite ready to throw the whole blame of them upon me. 
and to deal with me as if I had been the blunderer; and while meditating his aggression 
on Cambria, he imputed to me opinions respecting the Cambrian fossils which I had neither 
published nor ever entertained. 
2. The reader may perhaps think the preceding comment both harsh and unjust 
towards my friend; and I should think so too, but for another fact which self-defence 
and the plain truth of history compel me next to notice. In his Paper on the Bala 
* See the Fifth Letter on the Lake District, J. Hudson, Kendal, 1853, and Philosophical Magazine, December, 1854. 
