92 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
The places I have mentioned are accessible to the tourist ; who, if he 
has to use a little extra exertion in reaching them, will assuredly 
consider himself well repaid for having done so. 
THE COMMON POSSILS OF THE BRITISH EOCKS, 
By S. J. Mackie, Esq., F.G.S., F.S.A., &c., &c. 
CUAPTETt ir. 
The Rocks — their Order and their Teachings. 
{Conlinuid from page 64.) 
The unstratified Plutonic rocks are considered to form, as we have 
intimated, the common base of the stratified beds all over the globe. 
"With them, however, we have little to do in this place. Our labours 
commence with the stratified, and we should even have excluded the so- 
called " Azoic," had not that term been recently subjected to con- 
siderable restriction by the discovery of organic remains in some of its 
members ; and, as it is still likely, by further researches, to be totally 
absorbed into the PalsBozoic system, we append an ideal section 
representing the sequence of formation of the most ancient groups of 
fossiliferous rocks, with the relative position of those primordial con- 
glomerates, flags, and schists in which as yet no organic remains have 
been found. Whether, at the vastly remote period at which those 
isolated masses, still ranked as Azoic, were formed, the advent of life had 
really not taken place on our planet, or whether those masses are the 
few remnants of a still older stage of bur world than any presented to 
us by the recognised series of fossiliferous rocks, has yet to be determined 
by the investigations of geologists — but in their massiveness and their 
vast age they must ever be regarded with veneration and wonder. 
The ordinary diagrams or ideal vertical sections of the superposition 
of the rocks have engendered to a great extent unnatural and erroneous 
ideas of proper sequence, and has led to a prevalent impression that 
the strata were deposited horizontally over each other, like books stacked 
into a pile. Such, however, is far from the case ; the simile would be 
