Ixxxii INTRODUCTION. 
submitted to him. In like manner, I think I could demonstrate that some of the pictorial 
sections, adduced by the author as critical evidence in confirmation of his general views of 
classification, are erroncously interpreted; and that, when rightly interpreted, they make 
directly against himself. But while I forbear any further discussion on this point, I con- 
fidently affirm—that I have not yet seen so much as one single unambiguous section in 
which we rise from the true Cambrian to the true Silurian rocks (using the words Cambrian 
and Silurian in the sense given to them in the Tabular View) without a discordant junction, 
or a discordant succession of the contiguous groups. 
Two extracts more and I will close this Introduction. (1) “The region of Siluria, as 
geologists now admit, afforded the key by which the fossiliferous strata of the North-western 
tracts of England (¢.¢. the whole cluster of the Lake Mountains) were brought into order, 
and had their right places assigned to them*.” On this point I have a right to speak 
with some confidence. The statement is unintentionally, but not less directly, contrary to fact. 
There is no great difficulty in the sections of the Lake district so far as regards superpo- 
sition: and I first correctly identified the Coniston limestone with that of Bala, and therefore 
(when the nomenclature had been agreed upon) called it Cambrian. About the highest 
groups there was neither sectional nor paleontological difficulty—they were obviously on 
the parallel of the Upper Silurian rocks. But how were the upper and lower groups to be 
united in a continuous section? ‘The Silurian key was first applied to this purpose in 1842 
and it led me wrong; by leading me to regard the Coniston limestone as Caradoc sandstone : 
and it led me wrong for this one reason :—viz. because I then believed that the so-called Lower 
Silurian groups had been placed correctly on the general scale, by the author of the 
“Silurian System+.” The Silurian key led me wrong; as Mr Sharpe, and Mr Bowman, 
and the author of the “Silurian System” himself, had been led wrong by it, in their inter- 
pretation of some of the Berwyn Sections. We were all inevitably led wrong while ignorant 
of the true place of the May Hill Sandstone; while believing in the truth of the Lower 
Silurian groups; and while we were deceived, in certain sections, by a seemingly concordant 
succession between the highest Cambrian and the lowest Silurian rocks. But the error of 
interpretation, so far as regarded the Cumbrian Mountains, had been corrected by myself, in 
a paper read before the Geological Society, (and afterwards printed in their Quarterly 
Journal) full two years before the publication of “Siluria.”. When the Silurian key was 
rejected, the Coniston limestone again found its right place as a Cambrian rock: and after 
the establishment of the May Hill Sandstone, the “Coniston grits” (which had long been 
regarded by myself as a puzzling and anomalous group) found their natural place as the 
equivalents of the May Hill Sandstone. These facts were laid before the Geological Society 
in 1852, and were published by myself, in detail, in a separate work}. Is it possible that 
* Stluria, Chap. vil. p. 146. 
} Letters on the Lake District (J. Hudson, Kendal). They were written in the spring of 1842, before I had revisited 
North Wales, after my previous visit of 1834. 
{ Third Edition of the Letters on the Lake District, 1853. 
