JR. J. L. Guppij — West Indian Tertiary Fossils. 41 



beneath oceanic waters long ages after the mountains of Wales and 

 Cumberland first began to take form, and when therefore the prin- 

 cipal mountain-chains are but infants in age as compared with the 

 Snowdon of Wales and the Scafell of Cumberland, it is surely 

 illogical to assume that the great movements of elevation and de- 

 pression were confined to the earliest stages of Vulcanicity. ■ 



There is another statement made by Mr. Mallet which must strike 

 every working geologist. Geology, it is said, must make poor pro- 

 gress, " until all who profess to be geologists shall have learnt that, 

 to make sound progress, they must first become mathematicians, 

 physicists, and chemists." Now no one will deny that geology 

 derives very material assistance from every other branch of science, 

 the students of science forming together one great mutual help 

 society ; but to affirm that "sound progress" can only be made by 

 the geologist when he becomes mathematician, physicist, and chemist, 

 is to withhold any hope of progression from the many, and confine it 

 wholly to those few comprehensive minds which arise but seldom on 

 the intellectual horizon. One of the great charms of natural science 

 is the way in which it developes the powers of observation, and of 

 reasoning logically on such observation, and it gives a noble in- 

 dependence of thought which trusts to nature, and cares not for 

 human authority merely as such. Surely many, if not most of our 

 leading geologists, who have made our science to progress so rapidly, 

 were neither mathematicians, physicists, nor chemists, much less all 

 three together ; but they have been and are careful observers, loving 

 students of nature, ever willing and anxious to receive help from the 

 mathematician, the physicist, and the chemist, but not willing to allow 

 these scientists to pervert ascertained facts in order to accommodate 

 them to their own special modes of thinking. For example, we may 

 suppose the case of a mathematician desirous of advancing the science 

 of geology by some new theory worked out by such abstruse mathe- 

 matical reasoning that the simple field-geologist could not follow 

 the line of argument ; and if the latter has reason to suppose that 

 the facts upon which the argument is based be correct, he feels 

 bound to acquiesce in the result. Should, however, the geologist 

 find that the mathematician resolutely refused to believe evidence on 

 some special point founded on the careful observation of nature — 

 such as the production of striae on rock-surfaces by ancient glacial 

 action — the geologist might well hesitate to accept the mathematical 

 conclusions upon some other subject at the basis of which accurate 

 observational powers should have been employed. 



VI. — Supplement to the Paper on West Indian Tertiary Fossils. 1 

 By R. J. Lechmere Gtjppy, F.L.S., F.G.S., etc. 



THE descriptions of two of the species enumerated in my paper 

 on the Tertiary Fossils of the West Indies having been acci- 

 dentally omitted, the defect is now supplied. 



1 See the Geol. Mag. Decade II. Vol. I. (October Number), 1874, p. 433. 



