190 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
travel, the institution of Government surveys by the differ- 
ent nations of Europe, the States of America, and our wide 
colonial possessions, are every year adding immensely to our 
geological stores ; while every new addition enables us to 
arrive at sounder conclusions than could be derived from the 
limited data supplied by our own little islands. But while 
all this is satisfactory for the present, and encouraging for 
the future, there are still many points requiring immediate 
and careful consideration, and to some of these I would now 
direct the attention of our Society. 
Fundamental Strata. — Premising that all demonstrable 
geology commences with the oldest stratified rocks, the 
question naturally occurs, Where and what are these oldest 
strata ? We have traced life down to the Cambrian grits 
and slates, but beyond these lie the more crystallised gneiss, 
quartz rocks, and granitoid schists of the Northern Hebrides. 
Shall we, with Sir Koderick Murchison, designate these the 
fundamental gneiss," and seeking their equivalent in the 
Laurentian schists of Sir William Logan, regard them as the 
earliest and oldest of our stratified system ? Even in these 
Laurentian strata, metamorphosed and crystalline as they 
are, Sir William Logan and his assistants, and more recently 
Principal Dawson, have detected traces of lowly organisa- 
tion,* and in some portions more metamorphosed than 
others, more traces may yet be discovered. Time was, and 
that within the memory of most of us, when the lower 
Cambrians were considered as azoic ; but now that life has 
been carried downward into an older and deeper system, 
true philosophy requires that we discard in the meantime all 
ideas of "fundamental rocks" and " primordial zones," and 
leave the beginning of our stratified systems, like the origin 
of life, an undetermined, though not a hopelessly determin- 
able problem. We may admit into our tabulations the 
Cambrian and Laurentian as well-defined and fossiliferous 
systems ; but dealing with rocks so metamorphosed and 
*■ A foraminiferal organism, Eozob'n Canadense, occurring among the ser- 
pentinous limestones in large sessile patches, after the manner of Carpenteria 
and Polytrema. The same organism has been more recently detected in the 
Connemara marbles of Ireland. 
