684 Ancient Rock Inscriptions on the Lake of the Woods. (July, 
the end. Progress will be hindered if these systems are allowed 
to cramp and fetter us. If preconceived notions of what should 
be are suffered to blind our eyes to what really zs, our palzon- 
tology would itself become a fossil, as dead as the trilobites of 
palzozoic days. Our subdivision of the geological column into 
Hamilton, Chemung, Catskill, &c., or even into Cambrian, Silu- 
rian and Devonian, &c., is simply a device to assist memory and 
classification, not to represent actual and separate creations. And 
with every new discovery we must expect to see the lines and 
planes that separate these imaginary groups and systems become 
less and less clear until they are fused into a whole whose parts 
shade into one another like the colors of the rainbow. Nature is 
larger than our systems, and our knowledge of fossil nature must 
some day outgrow our artificial “canons of paleontology.” But 
in all such cases nature cannot be warped to our “ canons,” our 
“canons” on the contrary must bend to the facts of nature. 
The writer cannot conclude without, superfluous as it may 
seem, adding a word to express his sense of the value of the 
labors of Professor James Hall in American paleontology. He 
has laid broad and deep foundations for future workers. How 
numerous or industrious soever they may be, they must always 
acknowledge that they are building over his beginnings. That 
some errors should creep into work so great and varied is to be 
expected. But compared with the grand whole, they are insig- 
nificant, In pointing out and correcting a few of these errors 
in the foregoing pages, nothing is farther from the writer’s wish 
an to seem to depreciate Professor Hall’s labors. The facts 
and misstatements here criticised are mainly details—mere spots 
on the face of the sun—but for that reason the more worthy of 
attention and scrutiny. 
+O: 
ANCIENT ROCK INSCRIPTIONS ON THE LAKE OF 
THE WOODS. 
BY A. C. LAWSON, M.A. 
WV HILE prosecuting a geological survey of the Lake of the 
Woods last summer, I observed upon the rocks, at two 
_ places not far distant from each other on the shores of the lake, 
_ ancient inscriptions which may be of some interest to those who 
: are F engaged | in gathering up and weaving together the scattered 
