188 H, HICKS ON CAMBRIAN CONGLOMERATES IN 
1881, and revised, as stated therein, after the appearance of our 
papers, contains not only the same statements in regard to these 
so-called igneous masses and the strata surrounding them, but a 
charge is there made that we arrived at our conclusions “on purely 
theoretical grounds,” and additional details are therefore given in 
support of the statements made in the previous edition. Moreover 
the present Director General of the Geological Survey, in his 
paper on the St. David’s area in Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. for August 
last, especially casts doubt on the value of the evidence adduced 
from conglomerates, and even quotes some of those in Anglesey in 
support of his view. He further reproduces his predecessor’s (Sir 
A. Ramsay’s) statement that there are no rocks of Pre-Cambrian age 
‘“‘in any part of the Principality.” 
Certainly the present Director General, in the paper referred to 
above, at p. 262, says—‘‘It should be clearly understood that the 
conclusions to which I have come refer solely to that | the St. Dayvid’s | 
district, and that, in the meantime, I offer no opinion regarding other 
so-called Pre-Cambrian areas in the Principality ;” but most persons 
I think will agree that it is undoubtedly clear, from the paragraphs 
in his conclusions at pages 292 and 293, that his remarks throughout 
are intended to have a far more general application. At p. 292 he 
says—‘“ But the same treatment which Dr. Hicks meted out to them 
in the St. David's area, he has consistently continued in his subsequent 
excursions over Wales. Having apparently convinced himself—on 
what grounds I have endeavoured to show—that the rocks coloured 
on the Survey Maps as felstone or quartz porphyry must belong to 
his ‘ Arvonian’ group (that is to say, are not intrusive in the Cambrian 
or Lower Silurian strata, but prominences of Pre-Cambrian age), he. 
has proceeded to apply this conviction to the Geological Survey maps 
all over Wales. With the most complete disregard of the evidence 
by which the officers of the Survey were led to regard certain rocks 
as intrusive, he simply turns the felstones, syenites, &c., into meta- 
morphic and voleanic Pre-Cambrian masses.” In a footnote to this 
paragraph he also» says—“‘It will be a work of some labour to 
follow Dr. Hicks in his rapid traverses of Wales, with the view of 
testing his corrections of the work of his predecessors. Mr. Peach 
and I had time to visit a few of the areas he has renamed, and always 
with the same result.” To show that it is absolutely necessary, in 
my own self-defence, that I should lay all possible evidence before 
the Society in regard to all the areas, to prove that I did not arrive 
at conclusions at variance with the views of the Geological Survey 
in the hasty and careless manner attributed to me in the above 
quotations, I need only quote one further paragraph, which con- 
cludes the first part of his paper :—‘“ This was not the style in which 
the Survey Maps were constructed; nor is it the style in which 
they should be corrected. The intrusive character and comparatively 
late origin of the eruptive rocks were deliberately asserted by my 
colleagues after prolonged examination. Had this view been erro- 
neous, it ought to have been disproved by a detailed review of the 
evidence on which it was based. J have gone fully into the asser- 
