CHAPTER III 



THE LITERATURE OF HISTORICAL GEOLOGY 



IT is believed that some information as to the principal geological 

 publications and as to the facilities for ascertaining what has been 

 published about any particular system or series of beds would be 

 useful to the student. 



During the first half of the last century, and indeed up to 

 about the year 1860, publications on stratigraphical geology were 

 comparatively few, and it was possible for any geologist to have a 

 fair acquaintance with all that had been written on the subject ; 

 but as time went on the number of workers increased, and more 

 numerous additions were made every year to our knowledge of 

 British rocks and fossils, as well as of their equivalents in other 

 countries. 



Every year added a volume to the publications of the Geological 

 Societies of London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, and other 

 centres, to the volumes of the Palaeontographical Society and of 

 the Geological Magazine. The Geological Survey also have issued 

 a long succession of maps and memoirs, most of which have appeared 

 within the last forty years. 



At the present day, therefore, it is almost impossible for any one 

 to make himself acquainted with all that has been written on the 

 stratified rocks of Great Britain, and quite impossible to have at the 

 same time a good knowledge of the fossils which they contain. 

 Consequently in these branches of geology, as in the case of other 

 sciences, the tendency is toward the specialising of knowledge. 

 After the student has acquired a certain amount of knowledge about 

 the successive geological systems and their characteristic fossils he 

 probably becomes specially interested in one of them, or in the 

 rocks which occur in some particular district, and then he wishes 

 to know in what books and memoirs accounts of that series of rocks 

 or of that particular district have appeared. 



The descriptive parts of this volume contain only the more 



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