2l8 



NA TURE 



{July 7, 1887 



knowledge that all are workers in the same cause. Men 

 become more vividly conscious that though students of 

 Nature are excluded from the State recognition which is 

 extended to the Church, to medicine, and to the law, they 

 too are members of a great profession. They realize that, 

 though State rewards are given only to those who have 

 applied their knowledge to some directly useful end, in a 

 gathering of the profession of science the true leaders 

 are those who have wrested the deepest secrets from 

 Nature, careless whether they could be turned to gold 

 or no. 



A meeting held in great numbers and for a common 

 purpose may have an influence which many an apparently 

 more useful testimonial would lack. Prof. Tyndall has 

 done service in the cause of science which merited the 

 unique compliment he received. He would, we believe, 

 be the first to rejoice if in the future the Tyndall Dinner 

 was remembered not only as a tribute to his own work, but 

 as marking the beginning of a period in which the ranks of 

 science v/ere drawn closer together, and in which the further 

 organization of the investigation of Nature claimed and 

 received the attention which its importance demands. 



THE GEOLOGY OF ENGLAND AND WALES. 



The Geology of England and Wales. With Notes on the 

 Physical Features of the Country. By Horace B. Wood- 

 ward, F.G.S. Second Edition. (London: Philip and 

 Son, 1887.) 



THE student of physical geology has at least two large 

 English text-books, interesting, full, accurate, 

 judicial, and written by masters of the science ; but he who 

 would build on this foundation a knowledge of historical 

 and paltcontological geology is in a hirdercase, and finds 

 either a meagre outline containing little but a few mean- 

 ingless names of formations and fossil lists, or else an ill- 

 digested and formless mass of matter, derived from every- 

 where, but leading nowhere. Perhaps the time has not 

 yet come when stratigraphy can be treated from the 

 stand-point of inorganic evolution, so that fact may be 

 joined to his fact and an organized whole result. 



While, however, we wait for one who shall give us geology 

 in the form of the inorganic and organic evolution of the 

 globe, we must not omit to notice the labour of those 

 whose " work is to I'ecord the facts from which the 

 pleasanter deductions may be made." Mr. Woodward 

 has done wisely in republishing by subscription and in an 

 enlarged form his admirable book on the geology of 

 England and Wales — a veritable mine of facts, well 

 indexed and admirably supplied with references for the 

 advanced reader, forming a base-line for further study 

 and research, but complete in itself for the more ele- 

 mentary student and rendered interesting by the author's 

 fresh style, by his capital and apt illustrations, and by his 

 wonderful faculty of seizing upon the individuality of the 

 rock group he is describing and skilfully tracing its varia- 

 tions from place to place. This new edition is improved 

 by a larger and better map, undertaken by Mr. Goodchild, 

 by more free use of sections, illustrations, and fossil hsts, 

 and by the employment of local names with tables of 

 correlation. 



The author works his way upwards from the lowest 



rocks, but combines a geographical with a chronological 

 arrangement, and varies his method from system to 

 system in order to adapt it better to the rocks under con- 

 sideration. Just occasionally one meets with a slip in 

 method, as in the case of the Rhcetic rocks, where for no 

 apparent reason he has reversed his usual order and 

 treated the White Lias first. Where the mass of facts is 

 unusually great and somewhat barren of interest, the 

 author has introduced little helps and alleviations for which 

 the student will be truly grateful, — the character of the 

 hero of a system sketched in one graphic touch, the 

 origin of the name of a system or a fossil, or the dis- 

 cussion of the origin of some bed of palEeontological or 

 economic value {ijide pp. 24., 47, 84, 266, 670). 



It seems hard to criticise any points of detail in such 

 well-intentioned and well-executed work, but the indica- 

 tion of a few lines for improvement will perhaps show 

 better than anything else how little the author has left for 

 others to suggest. First, with regard to the map. This 

 is clearly engraved, and coloured with light but well- 

 contrasted tints ; every name on it suggests some fact 

 interesting from a geologist's point of view, and the effect 

 of the whole is pleasing. There is no special colour for 

 the Permian (not an unmixed advantage), and, oddly 

 enough, the Yorkshire coal-field is left uncoloured ; the 

 boundary is engraved, however, and the student can 

 easily fill in the colour for himself. A point has been 

 gained in using a distinctive colour for beds below 

 the Bala, but one lost in not using still another for the 

 lowest Cambrians. The igneous rock colours should 

 have been used less sparingly, and surely the Arenigs 

 and Snowdon deserve a volcanic tint as much as the 

 Borrowdales and the Cheviot rocks. We miss, too, the 

 north of England dikes and the Whinsill. 



The book opens with an introduction containing a 

 little history, a little cosmogony, and a few definitions. 

 The latter are hardly needed, and might have made room 

 for the accounts of the geology of different lines of rail- 

 way, which found a place in the first edition but have 

 been crowded out of this. A few words on the Palaeo- 

 zoic group are followed by an account of the Archaean 

 system, in which too little is said of the new class of work 

 amongst these rocks instituted by Prof. Lapworth, 

 while Prof Bonney's papers on the Bangor area are 

 almost passed over. The table on page 52 hardly makes 

 it quite clear that the Harlech group of St. David's is 

 divided into the Caerfai and Solva groups, of which the 

 former constitutes the Annelidian of Lapworth, and the 

 latter, together with the Menevian beds, the Para- 

 doxidiaft. On page 58 we find the time-worn section 

 across that part of the Longmynd which teaches nothing 

 of the succession of the Longmynd rocks ; this and 

 several other sections should have been orientated. On 

 page 60 the HoUybush sandstone is omitted from the 

 table of Shropshire Cambrians, and awkwardly placed on 

 page 65, while the Shineton shales are correlated with 

 the Dolgelly beds and Malvern black shales in the table, 

 though afterwards correctly placed with the Dictyonema 

 shales and Lower Tremadoc. A deceptive appearance of 

 unconformity in sections on page 89 might easily have 

 been removed, even if present in the original woodcut 

 It is good to see Mr. Lewis's name brought up v 



