Palaeontology 317 



leisure hours enabled them to work out in detail the succession 

 of the rocks and the distribution of their organic remains. 

 The names attached to the formations and now in common 

 use throughout most of the world prove that England has 

 contributed most largely to the establishment of the sequence 

 of events in the earth's history and to laying the foundations 

 of a rational system of classification of the strata. 



Amongst the Tertiary rocks Sir Joseph Prestwich (1812- 

 1896) and Edward Forbes (1815-1854) traced the succession 

 of beds particularly in the London and Hampshire basins 

 and demonstrated the value of the now generally adopted 

 terms Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene and Eocene which Lyell 

 had first applied early in the last century. 



Much good work has been done by British Palaeonto- 

 logists apart from the collecting of fossils in the field, where 

 Palaeontology is the handmaid of Stratigraphy. 



For instance, Thomas Davidson (1817-1885) during the 

 last decades of the nineteenth century was examining and 

 comparing the Brachiopoda which played so large a part in 

 the life-history of the older rocks, while field geologists far 

 and near sent up to him the results of what their hammers 

 had yielded, thus supplying him with more and more material 

 and availing themselves of his every ready and untiring 

 help to discriminate between zones by means of their fossils. 



Edwards and Haime did the same for corals. J. W. Salter 

 (1820-1869) had established many of the recognized genera 

 of trilobites in the course of his investigations of the faunas 

 of the older rocks between the years 1840 and 1855. 

 McCoy's labours covered a wide field, but his chief work lay 

 amongst the fossils of the older rocks. To James de Carle 

 Sowerby (1787-1871) we owe many of the names of fossils 

 which have a cosmopolitan distribution. Sir Richard Owen's 

 (1804-1892) researches amongst fossil vertebrates gained him 

 the reputation which was due to his remarkable acumen and 

 minute knowledge of anatomy. 



While pointing out where, how, and why British geologists 

 were pressing on special research we must not forget those 

 who, having acquired wide and accurate knowledge of many 

 branches, have collected and sifted the evidence and given 

 the results of their labours in the form of text-books, and 



