PENGELLT — rOSSILS Or DEVON AXD COEJsWALL. 



27 



they are. But the adverse witnesses are by no means agreed amongst 

 themselves ; eight of them claim the rocks for the Silurian age, and 

 fifty-eight for the Carboniferous. Is there no way of silencing, and 

 yet satisfying, these doubtful characters ? No method of so inter- 

 preting their testimony but that of sacrificing the Devonian system 

 altogether ? Are they not so many arguments in favour of the gradual 

 passage of system into system ? So many difiiculties in the way of 

 a belief in catastrophes, by which I mean convulsion or other form 

 of violence (call it wliat you please) which, from time to time, shook 

 the very life out of the world, causing a series of universal and syn- 

 chronous depopulations of our planet ? May we not regard tliem as 

 so many tints intermediate, both in place and quality, between the 

 extreme bands of the rainbow, uniting them into one beautifully 

 graduated chromatic spectrum, so softly blending as to render it im- 

 possible to define the exact place of lines of demarcation, which, per- 

 haps, have not, and never would have been supposed to have, an ex- 

 istence, had not observers liastily generalized from the imperfect 

 evidence obtained during a period of colour blindness ? 



May we not regard them as just sixty-six pages in the old parish 

 register counecting three otherwise unconnected portions, and sliow- 

 ing that the population was not, during their time, cut olf sharply, 

 universally, and at once, whether by pestilence, war, or famine ; but 

 that the old inhabitants (jradually disappeared, and that many of 

 them remained amongst the new comers, discharging their accus- 

 tomed functions under the somewhat changed conditions ? 



But if the Devonshire rocks were handed over to the Carboniferous 

 or Silurian system, or divided between them, we should not be quit 

 of the doctrine that some of the forms of one period have, at least 

 in some instances, lived through it into the next ; for the opponents 

 of a Devonian period not only admit, but rest their case on the 

 alleged fact that Silurian and Carboniferous forms are found blended 

 together in Devonshire and elsewhere. 



When, nearly a quarter of a century ago, Mr. Lonsdale first sug- 

 gested that the fossils of South Devon, taken as a whole, exhibited a 

 peculiar character intermediate to those of the Silurian and Carboni- 

 ferous groups, he was perfectly aware that amongst them were forms 

 referable to each of these Faunas ; yet he made the suggestion, not- 

 withstanding the existence of a physical objection, subsequently 

 removed by Professor Sedgwick and Sir R. I. Murchison, who dis- 

 covered that the culmiferous or anthracite shales of North Devon 

 (superposed on the rocks we have been considering) " belonged to 

 the coal, and not, as preceding observers had imagined, to the tran- 

 sition (Silurian) period."* 



And what has been the effect of the progress of discovery and 

 nicer discrimination on this point? Has it increased or decreased 

 the evidence in favour of a Devonian period ? In 1846, Sir H. De la 

 Beche, discussing this question, gave a total of a hundred and ninety 

 species noticed in South Devon, which he thus disposed of: seventy- 



* Lyell's ' Manual,' 5th editiou, p. 424. 



