xxxu 



Obituary Notices of Felloivs deceased. 



his deductions to the test in the baffling ground of Girvan and Ballantrae. 

 He succeeded in proving that the Moffat Shales — a black, fine-grained, deep- 

 water, deposit, some 300 feet thick — reiaresented in full the thousands of feet 

 of ashes, grits, greywackes, and slates of Upper Llandeilo, Bala, and Llandovery 

 ages in Wales and England : That, in their thin beds, foot by foot and some- 

 times inch by inch, distinct graptolitic faunas vpere embedded, succeeding one 

 another in an unvarying order, comparable in part at least, to their succession 

 in much thicker masses elsewhere : That the shale bands themselves were 

 the highest part of a series of rocks underlying the Silurian greywackes of the 

 Uplands, brought to the surface in narrow anticlines, which were generally 

 inverted and always complicated by faulting: That this region, instead of 

 possessing a simple ascending sequence, as had been supposed, was really one 

 of intense plication and convolution, so much disturbed that anticlines had 

 been mistaken for synclines, to the effect that the apparent succession was 

 upside down : And that there existed here mountain structure of the same 

 type and order as was being worked out in the Alps. 



In the Girvan region he found confirmation for all his conclusions, using 

 the graptolites that he discovered here, too, as his clue, and mapping the 

 difficult country as faithfully as before ; and thus he set in order a group of 

 rocks very much thicker than at Moffat, and containing faunas of trilobites 

 and shells intercalated among his graptolite zones. 



By this time he had worked out the life sequence of about half of the 

 Lower Paleozoic rocks, dividing their history into a dated zonal calendar so 

 soundly constructed that events all over the world have been found to fit 

 into it. The same results could have been worked out years before, in 

 half-a-dozen easier regions, where the sequence was laid out in simple order, 

 had it but occurred to any observer that such minute work was either 

 necessary or desirable, and had any geologist tested organism after organism 

 until he hit upon those which best served his purpose. Lapworth effected it 

 in a region where there was not a single straightforward section, among traps 

 and pitfalls innumerable, and where the rocks were as often on their heads as 

 on their heels. Well justified was the note of triumph in .his words : " Zonal 

 work is probably destined to effect in the history of geological research a 

 revolution as great and an advance as rapid as those brought about by the 

 use of the microscope in the history of biology." 



He recognised the debt he owed to the graptolites for his success, and he 

 was not the man to leave a debt unpaid. He made a careful study of all 

 that was known, or to be known by his own researches, of their biological 

 characters and geological distribution. He arranged his holidays so that he 

 could collect them all over the country, examined those sent him from 

 other areas, whether in Britain or Overseas, classified them afresh and 

 described a host of new forms, and finally established some twenty zones 

 in his own district and outside, which he found were not only of world-wide 

 extent, but so exact that in several instances he was able to correct errors 

 into which local observers in Wales and America had been led by delusive 



