548 Geological Society/: Anniversary Address, 1842. 



bearing the marks of having been gnawed by teeth ; in short, con- 

 firming in a very remai'kable manner the inhabited cave theory 

 propounded by Dr. Buckland. Mr. M'^Enery's collection of the 

 bones of British cavern quadrupeds, which is one of high merit, 

 will, I understand, be soon disposed of to the public ; and I trust 

 that part of it at least will find a resting-place in our great national 

 collection at the British Museum. 



Paleozoic Geology. 



silurian devonian carboniferous. 



It was long after a true principle of classification, founded on the 

 succession of organic life, had been applied to the tertiary and 

 secondary rocks, that the same method was used to work out the 

 order of the oldest strata in which the remains of animals have been 

 discovered. INly own efforts, dii-ected for several years to this end, 

 have been so distinctly recognized by those whom I now address, 

 as establishing a step by which the relative age of the older fossili- 

 ferous strata has been subsequently developed, that I ought to apolo- 

 gise for offering, on this occasion, even the shortest historical sketch 

 of the process by which we have arrived at our present palaeozoic 

 classification. Some statement seems, however, to be called for, 

 now that the subject is passing into many hands and into various 

 countries. Having satisfied myself, after a labour of eight years, 

 that I had amassed all the materials requisite to establish the ex- 

 istence of a sequence of rocks distinct from the Old Red Sand- 

 stone and Carboniferous Limestone, and having applied local names 

 to each of the ancient formations so situated, I was strongly urged 

 by many scientific friends, both at home and abroad, to jjropose 

 some genei'al name for the whole group. I fixed upon the ancient 

 geographical term " Silurian," which was approved of, and has 

 since been adopted, not merely in my own country, but in the most 

 distant parts of Europe and in Amei'ica*. No sooner, however, 

 had it been proposed, than another seemed requisite to charac- 

 terize the older slaty rocks, on which the newly-named Silurian 

 system reposed. For these an eminent continental geologist sug- 

 gested, in a letter to myself, the classical Avord " Hercynian," de- 

 rived from the Hartz mountains, where the rocks might be pre- 

 sumed, from their antique aspect and mineral character, to be of re- 

 moter age than the soft argillaceous Silurian types of Britain. 

 Alive, however, to the danger of mingling assumptions, drawn from 

 lithological structure, witli proofs derived from unequivocal suc- 

 cession of organic remains, and knowing that in our own country 

 there was, in fact, a vast mass of slaty rocks on which the Silurian 

 strata reposed, and which my friend Professor Sedgwick had long 

 studied, I urged him in describing these rocks M'hich he had made 

 his own, to fix on a general British geographical name. He then 



* When Ostorius, the Roman general, conquered Caractacus, he boasted 

 that he had blotted out the very name of Silures from the face of the caj'th. 

 A British geologist had, therefore, some pride in restoring to currency the 

 word Silurian, as connected with great glory in the annals of his country. 



