44 



THE 



GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE. 



NEW SERIES. DECADE II. VOL. VI. 



No. I.— JANUARY, 1879. 



OBIG-IUAL ABTICLES. 



I. — On the Tripartite Classification of the Lower 



Paleozoic Bocks. 



By Charles Lapwokth, F.G-.S. 



i Y those accustomed to the hopeless confusion of the GreywackS 

 of the earlier geologists, the publication of Murchison's grand 

 work on the " Silurian System " was hailed with feelings of the 

 most profound relief and satisfaction. His clear and brilliant pre- 

 sentation of the physical and pakeontological proofs of an orderly 

 sequence among the Palaeozoic Eocks below the Old Eed Sandstone, 

 as originally set forth in all their force and harmony in his magni- 

 ficent volumes, naturally astonished and dazzled the majority of 

 his scientific contemporaries, and secured for his nomenclature of 

 these ancient deposits an almost universal acceptance. His subse- 

 quent abuse of this advantage to strengthen and consolidate his own 

 system at the expense of that of his equally-illustrious co-worker — 

 the less fortunate but more cautious Sedgwick — was a gallant but 

 unscrupulous defence of this original nomenclature, which by that 

 time he must have felt himself almost powerless to disturb. His 

 later extension downward of the limits of his System, till it 

 embraced all the rocks between the supposed Azoics and the Old Eed 

 Sandstone — though, in a measure, forced upon him from without — 

 ought perhaps to be regarded in part as a very natural return to 

 the ideas of his early teachers, who had always held the practical 

 unity of the rocks of the Transitional period. In this way, however, 

 Murchison unwittingly destroyed many of the most beneficial results 

 of his own labours ; in a sense, spending his old age in the attempted 

 re-erection of the very edifice it had been the pride of his manhood 

 to destroy — the early years of his scientific career being devoted to 

 the worthy task of proving the marvellous variety of the Lower 

 Palaeozoics ; his later years to demonstrating their integrity, unity, 

 and indivisibility. 



At the present day it would be wholly superfluous to enter upon 

 the discussion of the vexed question of the respective claims of 

 Sedgwick and Murchison to the Middle and Lowest Divisions of the 

 Lower Palaeozoic Eocks. We may, however, without fear of contra- 

 diction, concede to Sedgwick the credit of having been the first to 



DECADE II. — VOL. VI. — NO. I. 1 



