6 C. Lapicorth — Classification of the Lower Palosozoic Rocks. 



the fact that the revered founder of his school was unfairly deprived 

 of the natural fruits of the labours of a lifetime by the overwhelming 

 forces of influence and circumstance ; and he chivalrously devotes 

 all his energies to the task of overturning history to the extent of 

 bringing back matters to the point they would have reached, had 

 the relative position of Sedgwick and Murchison been reversed. To 

 this paramount consideration everything else is sacrificed. The 

 Silurian is cut down so as to include the Upper Division only of 

 Murchison's original System ; while all the fossiliferous beds below 

 are assigned to the Cambrian. That in this way he commits pre- 

 cisely the same scientific error as the Murchisonian, never seems to 

 occur to his imagination. That every fact adduced in support of 

 Sedgwick's claim to the rocks of the Second fauna can be met by one 

 in Murchison's favour equally cogent, is forgotten. That ever}' error 

 committed by the latter to the destruction of his claims can be 

 paralleled by one equally fatal to those of his opponent, is similarly 

 ignored. He has long since convinced himself of the fact that the 

 Silurian, as he restricts it, is quite large enough to form a system by 

 itself, and that its fauna is grand enough and special enough to 

 characterize one ; but we never find him carry out this argument to 

 its legitimate conclusion — that, if so, his own Cambrian is not one, 

 but two systems, whose individuality he is, by his own principles, 

 equally compelled to recognize. He seeks in all kinds of out-of-the- 

 way spots for evidences of local unconformities between the Balas 

 and the Llandoveries to satisfy his stratigraphical conscience that 

 there is sometimes an actual physical break between them ; when, 

 without leaving his closet, he could assure himself of the fact that 

 the two systems of the so-called Lower and Upper Silurian am 

 already known to be stratigraphically concordant nearly all over the 

 world. Where this argument fails, we find him insisting upon the! 

 presence of conglomerates and upon the sudden change in the cha- 

 racter of the organic remains. But each and all the principles of 

 classification implied in these distinctions are violated in his own 

 procedure. The grandest zoological breaks in the whole Lower 

 Palaeozoic Series (those between the Olenus beds and the Arenicjs 

 of Britain, and between the Canadian and Trentonian of North 

 America), and the thickest and most persistent conglomerates that 

 antedate those of the Old Bed Sandstone (viz. those of the Lower 

 Girvan and Quebec Groups), all occur in the very heart of his own 

 Cambrian System. Yet of these we hear little or nothing, but all 

 the strata between the Archean and the Llandovery are piled up into 

 a single system, for the sole reason that they happen to occur in 

 association in the mountain-area of North Wales, and were very 

 naturally lumped together by the first scientific man who con- 

 scientiously studied them. 



The Lyellian is certainly more politic than his excited neighbours, 

 but, from a common-sense point of view, his disinterested procedure 

 is equally unfair. To him, the fact that Murchison described the 

 Upper and Lower Silurian Bocks in his original Silurian System in 

 such a way that they can, to a certain extent, be recognized and 



