30 CO. Lapworth—Recent Discoveries in Sweden. 
the shores of the Baltic retain their original horizontality, unaffected 
by those tremendous earth-movements which have so generally con- 
vulsed the Graptolite-bearing rocks of Britain. With ourselves, 
until very recently, the attempt to fix the specific succession of the 
Graptolites in time was looked upon by the vast majority of geolo- 
gists asa task of almost hopeless, if not wholly insuperable difficulty. 
Hven yet, among those whose special training has led them to look 
upon the apparent stratigraphy as all-in-all, it is practically denied 
that we possess unequivocal evidence that the Graptolites resembled 
the other great families of animals peopling the Proterozoic seas, in 
their subjection to that law of generic and specific progress and 
development in time to which we owe the successive and distinctive 
faunas that characterize our consecutive rock-formations. That any 
party of geologists, however influential, can long hold this indefen- 
sible and somewhat ridiculous opinion, is impossible. Nor, in all 
probability, would it ever have been adopted, but as a last and des- 
perate means of temporary relief from the otherwise unaccountable 
difficulties brought about by the inevitable clashing of the true 
paleontological data with the abundant ocular proofs of ascend- 
ing physical successions, in which the same faunas either re-appeared 
again and again unchanged, or underwent not a progressive, but a 
retrogressive modification. We are now beginning to acknowledge 
that it is not our paleontological, but our stratigraphical data that 
are at fault, and to admit the unreliability of apparent physical 
evidence in districts where the rocks are so frequently inverted and 
shattered as they are In many parts of Britain. However, even with 
us, as I have shown elsewhere, the unequivocal physical evidences 
demonstrate that the Graptolites are fully as reliable as other groups 
of fossils in the parallelism of synchronous deposits. Nevertheless, 
the distrust of paleeontological data founded upon the specific suc- 
cession of the Graptolitide in time has been so widely spread, and 
has had for so many years so apparently well-grounded an origin, 
that it is indeed gratifying to point to extra-British rocks—where 
perfectly parallel and consonant results with my own have been 
arrived at by authoritative scientific investigators among strata 
where the physical succession is indubitable. 
In the South of Sweden, as a rule, the Proterozoic strata 
are horizontal, and although occasionally interrupted for short dis- 
tances, the ascending succession of the consecutive rock-groups is 
perfectly clear and beyond question. Formations with us several 
thousands of feet in thickness are there represented by thin zones of 
only a few feet in vertical extent. Add to this the important fact 
that this miniature succession of deposits is so prolific in fossils that 
it suffers little or nothing in comparison with that of the enormous 
series of the Proterozoic strata of Britain, and the reliability and 
value of every new fact bearing upon the vertical distribution of the 
Swedish fossils, whether Graptolites or those of other families, is 
strikingly apparent. Among the modern earnest and conscientious 
students of these Swedish rocks we hear little or nothing of a belief 
in that supposed intertwining of the faunas of distinct formations, 
