THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 115 
parting scientific knowledge. The Curiosity Shop lately es- 
tablished at Dundurn by the City Fathers will hardly fill the 
bill, but the public, I am informed, may obtain there some in- 
teresting wrinkles regarding the natural history of this district. 
The catalogue of this Museum (eagerly expected) may yet im- 
mortalize the Ambitious City. 
When the late Sir W. Dawson figured on the chain of life 
a petrified butterfly from the United States Eocene, he could 
not have known the Silurian rocks of Canada _ contained 
“Moths” in a similar state of preservation. To designate a 
crustacean thus may be pardonable, when we recollect that a 
high dignitary of the Church of England not many years since 
expressed the opinion that the Mollusca (shell fish) and crea- 
tures called Trilobites were much alike, and both appear to 
have fed on stony matters. While we can point to-day to many 
Geologists in “holy orders,” not the less true are the following 
words of the famous English philosopher, Herbert Spencer, in 
his article on “ Education”: ‘ What we call civilization could 
“never have arisen but for what we call SCIENCE, and yet this 
“science, which in place of the most degrading conception of 
“things, has given. us some insight into the grandeurs of crea- 
“tion, is written against by our theologians and frowned upon 
“from our pulpits.” While the churches here display il- 
concealed hostility to what they are pleased to refer to “as false 
scientific teaching” occasionally, need we be surprised to find 
lavmen in the city papers urging the Canadian Jegislators to 
employ men to explore for coal (anthracite and bituminous) in 
the Silurian rocks of Ontario. It seems doubtful whether a 
writer knows the articles referred to are simply “ mineral- 
ized vegetable matter,’ the product of old forests, swamps, 
etc.; that such did not exist when our limestones, etc., were de- 
posited ; that subsequently rocks known, as “the Devonian for- 
mation,” with an estimated thickness of 15,235 feet were laid 
down in which no coal has ever been found; that the true coal- 
bearing beds, “the carboniferom,” follow in succession. Its 
maximum thickness can hardly be less than 24,100 feet, includ- 
ing “the Permian group” of Murchison, which is now looked 
