President's Address. 



191 



obscure in their stratification, we must not regard them as 

 the oldest or deepest, but merely the oldest and deepest 

 with which we are at the present time acquainted. Finding 

 that the traces of life are year after year carried deeper and 

 deeper in the stratified rocks, and that in the older Silurians 

 and upper Cambrians (the Lingula flags) the number of dis- 

 covered organisms are also greatly augmented,* we are clearly 

 not in a position to dogmatise on fundamental strata or 

 primordial zones, and far less to regard any series of strata, 

 however altered and crystalline, as azoic and hypozoic. Even 

 where traces of life may be too obscure for the eye and 

 microscope of the palaeontologist, the tests of the chemist 

 may detect the presence of organic matter, or mineral pro- 

 ducts that could only result from the presence of organic 

 matter ; and thus we are clearly debarred from doing more 

 than merely placing provisionally the Cambrian and the 

 Laurentian strata as our oldest stratified and fossiliferous 

 systems. I say stratified and fossiliferous, for my own belief 

 is that life was coeval with the first-formed sediments ; and 

 that the meteoric and aqueous conditions that promoted the 

 formation of sediments were such as would permit, at the 

 same time, the development of vegetable and animal exist- 

 ences. Let us then accept provisionally the " Cambrian" 

 of Professor Sedgwick and the " Laurentian" of Sir William 

 Logan as separate and fossiliferous systems ; but let us dis- 

 card all ideas of "fundamental strata" and "primordial 

 zones," and at the same time let us abandon such terms as 

 azoic and hypozoic which are founded alone on the uncertain 

 and unsatisfactory basis of negative and uncertain evidence. 



Metamorphism. — The consideration of these older sedi- 

 ments brings us necessarily in contact with the subject of 

 metamorjjhism, and on this point it seems to me that modern 

 geology, under the sanction of high authority, is insensibly 

 drifting into error. And, in the first place, it may be 

 observed, that where any series of metamorphic strata have 

 a clearly defined position, that is, are sequentially connected 



* See the discoveries of Mr Hicks, in the so-called " primordial zone" or 

 Lingula flags, as noticed in the Journal of the London Geological Sod* ■ >/ !' r 

 August 18fi4. 



