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 liypozoic. 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 7uineral 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 
metamorphism, 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 Society/ fdr 
August 1864. 
