THE ARCHEAN: KOTE II. 187 
to be here considered is that of priority, and, inasmuch as it is 
conceded that the term "Azoic" had been employed by ]\Iur- 
chison in 1845 for rock masses which he conceived to be sub- 
Silurian in Scandinavia, and of which the parallelism with the 
rocks of Foster and Whitney had not been established ; and 
that, therefore, this application of the terra was at least as un- 
authorized as was that of " Laurentian " by Logan (which had 
" been previously proposed by an eminent authority for a group 
at the other end of the geological series"); that the term Azoic 
has no right to monopolize a sequence of measures, which, to say 
the least, it is not certain that the word describes. Even if it be 
granted that the supposed recognition of fossil forms in these 
measures is erroneous, the assumption of the important charac- 
teristic of absence of life for rocks, which, according to Whitney 
and Wadsworth, — " did not show by their character that life 
could not have existed at the time of their deposition " — would 
be to do violence to all those principles of inductive research 
which Profs. Whitney and Wadsworth insist should be con- 
sidered of paramount importance in geological study. On the 
other hand, the acceptation of a name of general significance, 
like Archean, for all the Pre-Cambrian rocks, while not begging 
the question of the existence of life, leaves it free for the local 
worker or the Government survey to adopt subdivisions as broad 
as investigation can justify. If workers at once agree that no 
final classification can be attempted while the whole subject is in 
the chaotic state of a preliminary examination, there should be 
no objection to a temporary grouping of objects together, even 
although one characteristic of one of the groups should here- 
after be found to resemble one of the characteristics of another 
above it. 
JSTOTE II. 
In the report prepared before the Berlin Congress by the Eng- 
lish sub-committee on Archean (Pre-Cambrian) rocks, Mr. 
Aveline doubted the existence of any Pre-Cambrian rocks in 
England or Wales, and thought that the Laurentian rocks of 
Scotland, which he had never seen, were, probably, the only Pre- 
Cambrian rocks in Great Britain. 
Dr. Callaway classified these rocks upwards into (a.) Hebridian, 
probably including the Malvern gneiss ; (b.) Dimetian, probably 
