466 Retrospective Criticism, 



admixture of divine and human things, there is compounded at once a 

 fantastical philosophy and a heretical religion.' 



" All these things, gentlemen, I shall pass over : but the author has 

 stood forward as the popular expositor of the present state of secondary ; 

 of that very portion of our science which has for so many years employed 

 the best efforts of our Society. This part of the work appears not to con- 

 tain one original fact, or the result of one original investigation ; and of 

 this we do not complain. We have, however, a right to look to it for 

 information, which shall not repeat exploded errors, but shall make a near 

 approach to the level of recent observations. But is this the case in the 

 work before us ? Unquestionably not. All the old errors in the arrange- 

 ment of the English strata, between the chalk and the oolites, are un- 

 accountably repeated; errors which have been corrected since 1824 in our 

 transactions^ in English and Scotch philosophical journals, and in various 

 independent works of natural history, and have excited, during the last five 

 or six years, more discussions in this room than have arisen out of any 

 other part of secondary geology. Other antiquated errors, of like kind, 

 have found a place of refuge in the pages of this * New System.' 



" But let us pass over what may be, perhaps, only regarded as errors of 

 omission, and see how the author has employed the materials before him. 

 The best part of his narrative is made up of successive extracts, often taken 

 word for word, yet without the marks of quotation, from various well- 

 known works on geology. Many of these extracts, although in themselves 

 admirable, appear in the book before us but as disjointed fragments, in the 

 arrangement of which the author has but ill performed the humble duties 

 of a compiler ; for, in the chapter on secondary formations, we find enor- 

 mous faults and dislocations, of which there is neither any written record, 

 nor any archetype in the book of nature. Thus we find the lias some- 

 times below the oolites and the green sand. * In one page, the cornbrash 

 and forest marble have shifted places ; in another the whole lower oolite 

 System is absolutely inverted, f Again, at p. 247., we are told that the 

 several beds are given, * as usual, in the ascendifig order ; ' yet, in this very 

 page the inferior members of the lower oolites are copied, word for word, 

 from another book, and are in the descending order. On the next leaf, the 

 same error is repeated in a still worse form ; and within four pages of this 

 last bouleversementy we find the Oxford clay, the corn-brash, and the forest 

 marble twice shuffled under the great oolite. J The goodly pile, gentle- 

 men, which many of you have helped to rear, after years of labour, has 

 been pulled down and reconstructed, but with such unskilful hands that its 

 inscriptions are turned upside down ; its sculptured figures have their heads 

 to the ground, and their heels to the heavens ; and the whole fabric, amid 

 the fantastic ornaments by which it is degraded, has lost all the beauty and 

 the harmony of its old proportions. 



" So much has been written in illustration of the zoological history of 

 our several formations, that the labour of a compiler is now made com- 

 paratively easy. Yet, in the distribution of organic remains, given in the 

 * New System,' there is such a complication of errors as nearly baffles all 

 attempts at description. In one place we are told that the lower second- 

 ary rocks are characterised by the simplest forms of the animal kingdom : 

 in another, we find fish enumerated among the fossils of the transition (or 

 submedial) strata. § In one place, our magnesian limestone is properly 

 identified with the first flotz limestone of Werner : in another, our moun- 



New System of Geology. Compare p. 133. 153. with p. 137. 197. 



Ibid.,p. 187. 195. 



Ibid., p. 253. 



Compare Introduction, p.xlix. and p. 143. 



