Murchicon’s-@éliria. 877 
cently convinced ourselves, by clear and indisputable sections, 
that the lowest beds (Scandinavian) charged with anything like 
animals or vegetables, are the exact equivalents of the Lower Si- 
Inrian strata of the British Isles, and that these have been dis- 
tinetly formed out of, and rest upon, slaty and other rocks which 
had undergone crystallization before their particles were ground 
up and cemented together to compose the earliest beds in which 
organic life is traceable. ‘To the crystalline masses which pre-~ 
ceded that paleeozoic succession to which our remarks were mostly 
directed, we apply the term “ Azoic,” not meaning dogmatically 
to affirm, that nothing organic could have been in existence dur- 
ing those earlier deposits of sedimentary matter, but simply as ex- 
pressing the fact, that in as far as human researches have reached, 
no vestiges of living things have been found in them, so also from 
their nature they seem to have been formed under such accompany- 
ing conditions of intense heat and fusion, that it is hopeless to ex- 
pect to find in them traces of organization.” In the Siluria the au- 
thor seems to have partly abandoned this ground, since he speaks 
(p. 458) of the lowest sedimentary strata as being ‘almost entirely 
Azoic, the heat of the surface of those earlier periods having been, 
it is supposed, adverse to life.” He has also hesitated abont giv- 
ing the name of ‘“ Azoic” to his lowest rocks and has adopted the 
Welch rac | the Lower Silurian, while we regard 
the iaica og of an azoic system in other parts of 
48 
' Stconp Senms, Vol. XIX, No. 57—May, 1865. 
