VI 



Murchison 247 



As yet, however, no clue had heen found to their strati- 

 graphical sequence. Specimens from what are now known 

 as Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, and even Lower Car- 

 boniferous strata were all thrown together as coming from 

 the undefined region of the Greywacke or Transition rocks. 

 A task worthy of the best energy of the most accomplished 

 geologist lay open to any man bold enough to undertake 

 to introduce among these rocks the same stratigraphical 

 method which had reduced the Secondary and Tertiary 

 formations to such admirable order, and had furnished 

 the means of comparing and correlating these formations 

 from one region to another. This task was at last accom- 

 plished by two men, working independently of each other in 

 Wales and the border counties of England. Murchison and 

 Sedgwick carried the principles of Cuvier, Brongniart 

 and William Smith into the chaos of old Greywacke, and 

 succeeded in adding the Devonian, Silurian and Cambrian 

 chapters to the geological record, thus establishing a 

 definite order among the oldest fossiliferous formations, 

 and completing thereby Palaeozoic stratigraphy. 



Eoderick Impey Murchison (1792-1871) belonged to a 

 family that had lived for centuries among the wilds of the 

 north-western Highlands of Scotland and had taken part 

 in much of the rough life of that remote and savage region. 1 

 He was born in 1792, entered the army when he was only 

 fifteen years of age, and served for a time in the Peninsular 



rocks, with copious lists of fossils, will be found in the first edition of De la 

 Beche's Geological Manual (1831), p. 433, under the head of "Grauwacke 

 Group." But no attempt is there made to arrange the rocks strati- 

 graphically, and the fossil lists comprise organisms from all the older 

 Palaeozoic formations without discrimination of their horizon. 



1 The biographical details are taken from my Life of Sir Roderick I. 

 Murchison, 2 vols. 8vo, 1875. 



