308 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION C. 



anomalous and confusing. To expect this would pre-suppose that 

 organic development went on at a corresponding rate with time, 

 no matter how the local environment was conditioned. This 

 would be expecting too much, and hence I am of opinion that 

 even homotaxial relationships, based upon relative biological 

 progression, must be received with the greatest caution when 

 dealing with the comparison of rocks of widely separated regions. 

 However unpleasant it may be to relinquish convenient time- 

 honoured methods, it must be allowed that in science as in morals, 

 the desire to have them true is preferable to the desire to have 

 them sustained. In science as in religion, our reverence for the 

 great names of a past age exerts a powerful enslaving influence, 

 tending almost as powerfully to induce us to bolster up une- 

 liminated error, as to sustain and expand the great truths wliich 

 were originally unfolded. If on the one hand, as recently 

 pointed out hj Prof. Judd, there is danger that impatience 

 at the rate of progress of geological knowledge, leads many 

 to attempt " to cut the tangled skein of research by hasty and 

 ill-considered speculation," there is an equal, if not a greater 

 danger, with others, to become enslaved to time honoured generali- 

 zations based originally upon limited observation ; a tendency 

 moreover which often causes many to overlook the express limita- 

 tions of the earlier authorities. 



Generalisations which may be of much value within certain 

 limits, (may be absolutely false, and widely misleading, when 

 applied beyond the limits originally ordained. Thus, as pointed 

 out thirty-four years ago by Sir Roderick Murchison,* " however, 

 certain distinctions may be clear and good in typical tracts of 

 Siluria and Wales, thei'e are many parts even of the British Isles, 

 and numberless foreign localities, where separation into the forma- 

 tion of Llandeilo and Caradoc is absolutely impracticable either 

 by mineral distinctions or by dislocations," and accordingly he 

 announced his conviction then — a conviction, by the way, of the 

 fullest signification to Australian geologists — ^" that in many 

 regions of the earth,the geologist will find it impossible to classify 

 by the means of such smaller divisions." 



If these facts be duly weighed we may well ask : — Of what 

 value is any classification of Australian rocks which follows too 

 slavishly the nomenclature of the sub-divisions of great Periods or 

 Systems as adopted in Europe upon the mere evidence of two or 

 three genera whose association in the rocks of a particular horizon 

 in Europe has been proved to be only of local value ? 



It is also of the greatest significance that Prof. Judd admits 

 this in his recent interesting articles in " Nature."! He distinctly 

 affirms that recent knowledge indicates that "attempts to establish 

 a univei'sal system of nomenclature or classification of sedimentary 



♦Siluria, p. 51. 



t The Relations between Geologj- and the Biological Sciences, Nature, March 1, 1888. 



