120 The Rev. D. Williams's Proofs that the Devonian 



age of the carboniferous series*." I earnestly invite and en- 

 treat Mr. Lonsdale to adduce the proofs in opposition to an 

 array of structural lacts which I purpose to detail in the course 

 of this communication. I can well anticipate that the results 

 of six years' patient and cautious and rigid investigation of the 

 structure of Devon and Cornwall by myself will go for nothing, 

 or that the great facts I have already announced, or am now 

 about to advert to, will be considered at present as not worth 

 refuting. The hidifferent arbitration between Mr. Lonsdale's 

 proofs and mine, I confidently leave to free and just and 

 generous minds hereafter, when geology, under happier au- 

 spices and in whiter days, shall be something more than a mere 

 conventional thing of arbitrai-y and false hypotheses of facts 

 perverted to dprio7-i views, or forced and tortured to artificial 

 adaptations ; till then I patiently bide my time ; and having 

 discharged a duty I owe to truth, it will be indiffei'ent to me 

 whatever pleasantries of identification may be indulged in or 

 received. The twenty-mile diameter of the Devon and Cornwall 

 beds may be designated as Old Red or New Red, or Oolite 

 or Chalk, for aught I care, for either would be equally true. 



The meaning of that remarkable hypothesis is sufficiently 

 obvious. Professor Sedgwick and Mr, Murchison assume 

 the Silurian and Cambrian deposits to be the base-line of 

 geology as a system, that therefore all the formations of the 

 earth must conform, somehow or other, to this arrangement, 

 and that the several circumferential zones or systems are ca- 

 pable of being determined over the different regions of the 

 earth by their organic remains. We thus attain, by another 

 process of calculation, by another road, as it were, to the doc- 

 trine of universal formations of Werner. It comes recom- 

 mended to us by so much convenience, so much simplicity ; 

 it offers such a facility of comprehending what would other- 

 wise appear the most abstruse problems, that it seems a pity 

 nature should ever have been permitted to cast stumbling- 

 blocks or other occasions of falling along such a royal road to 

 knowledge. The argument carried out to its necessary con- 

 sequences, and fairly represented in all its collateral relations, 

 involves, however, many startling propositions, which I must 

 not now dwell upon ; but it is right we should know whether 

 we are required to believe that there have been as many final 

 and universal suspensions of animal life succeeded by as many 

 new creations as there are systems, because if such be not 

 implied, we may reasonably suppose that when or wherever 

 the bed of a sea or ocean became dry land, the creatures 



* Gcol. Trans. 2nd series, vol. v. part iii, p. 723. 



