209 



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 quota- 

 tion, from various well-known works on geology. Many of these 

 extracts, although in themselves admirable, appear in the book be- 

 fore 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 enormous 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, sometimes between the oolites and the 

 green-sand*. In one page the cornbrash and forest marble have 

 shifted places j in another the whole lower oolitic system is abso- 

 lutely inverted f. Again, at p. 247> we are told that the several beds 

 are given " as usual, in the ascending 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 bouleversement we find the Oxford clay, the 

 cornbrash, and the forest marble, twice shuffled under the great 

 oolite £. The goodly pile, Gentlemen, which many of you have 

 helped to rear, after years of labour, has been pulled down and re- 

 constructed : but with such unskilful hands that its inscriptions are 

 turned upside down 5 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 

 comparatively 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 secondary rocks are characterized by the sim- 

 plest forms of the animal kingdom. In another, we find fish enu- 

 merated 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 mountain lime- 

 stone is placed on the same parallel ; and, by a double blunder, is 

 described "as the lowest sepulchre of vertebral animals ||." 



In one page orthoceratites are brought near the order of corals. 

 In another, a coral is figured as an encrinite. In a third, the Steeple 

 Ashton caryophyllia (the characteristic fossil of the middle oolite), 

 is figured as a fossil of the inferior system. In a fourth, a caryo- 



* " New System of Geology." Compare pp. 133, 153 with pp. 137, 197. 



f "New System," pp. 187, 195. 



% Ibid. p. 253. 



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



|| "New System," pp. 175, 177, 187- 



