Retrospective Criticisin. 465 
Phillips’s, not mine. J/ya intermédia, “in the London clay, Bognor 
rocks.” Sowerby, Min. Conch., vol.i. p.173. If this be incorrect, the 
mistake is Mr. Sowerby’s. T. E. next ventures upon the most extraordi- 
nary assertion, that pl. iv., designated, by Dr, Ure, “ shells of the cornbrash 
and upper oolite,” is intended to include the fossils from the chalk marl to 
the cornbrash! Alas! Sir, this excuse will avail nothing, unless every reader 
had the ingenuity of T. E., and could discover the author’s intentions in 
spite of his blunders. It happens, too, most unfortunately, that the well- 
known tertiary shells Rostellaria macréptera (not Protellaria, as your 
printer had it by mistake) and Turritélla condidea are in the group; so 
that a still further stretch of the imagination is requisite to reconcile the 
discrepancy, and the reader must take pl. iv., not as the author has named 
it, but as exhibiting figures of the “shells of the cornbrash and upper 
oolites,” and tertiary formations inclusive! T. E, asks for my authority : 
I again quote Sowerby, Min. Conch., vol.1. p. 109., for Turritélla condidea ; 
and the same work, vol. ii. p. 177., for Rostellaria macréptera. Your 
excellent correspondent, the author of the admirable work alluded to, can 
correct me if my inferences are erroneous. But I feel, Sir, I may have 
ventured too far: a Cambridge man, who has an opportunity of attending 
the lectures of Professor Sedgewick, must be right, and the authorities upon 
which my remarks are founded may be wrong, or, what is more probable, 
have been misunderstood by me. It may, after all, be not an important 
error to invert the order of superposition of the strata; it may be right to 
declare that a formation is marine, and contains marine shells, &c., and 
group it with a series of marine deposits, and afterwards describe the fresh- 
water and terrestrial remains with which it abounds. It may be unimport- 
ant to figure, as the characteristic shells of one group of strata, shells that 
occur only in another. But if it be so, it must be allowed that geology is 
still, what it was formerly asserted to be, a science of paradoxes. — H, 
January 28. 1830. 
Dr, Ure’s Geology. (p. 90.) — Having admitted more than one apology for 
this work, we think it necessary to give the following statement respecting it 
from Professor Sedgewick’s Address delivered to the Geological Society at 
ther Annual General Meeting on Feb. 19. 1830. : — 
“IT should have been well content to have ended with these general 
censures; but during the past year there has been sent forth, by one of 
our own body, ‘ A New System of Geology, in which the great revolutions 
of the earth and of animated nature are reconciled at once to modern 
science and to sacred history ;’ and to this title [ will venture to add, in 
which the worst violations of philosophic rule, by the daring union of things 
incongruous, have been adopted by the author from others, and at the 
same time decorated by new fantasies of his own. I shall not stop to 
combat the bold and unauthorised hypothesis, that all the successive form= 
ations of the old schistose rocks were called into being simultaneously, 
by a fiat of Creative Power, anterior to the existence of creatures possessing 
life; nor shall I urge that, among these primitive creations of the author, 
are mountain masses of rock formed by mechanical degradation from rocks 
which preceded, and beds of organic remains, placed there, if we may 
believe his system, in mere mockery of our senses; neither shall I detain 
you by dwelling upon the errors and contradictions which are scattered 
through the early pages of his volume. On this part of the ‘ New System’ 
all criticism is uncalled for here; for it soars far above us and our lowly 
contemplations. Its character is written, and its very physiognomy ap- 
pears, in that dignified and oracular censure which he himself has quoted 
from the works of Bacon: ‘ Tanto magis.heec vanitas inhibenda venit et 
coercenda, quia ex divinorum et humanorum male-sana admixtione, non 
solum educitur philosophia phantastica, sed etiam religio heretica.’—‘ This 
vanity merits castigation and reproof; the more as, from the mischievous 
