266 
PROFESSOR LAPWORTH, F.R.S. 
Dec., 1891. 
key to the natural arrangement of the rocks of the Southern 
Uplands of Scotland, and his conclusions were published in 
his lengthy papers of the “Moffat Series,” the “ Girvan 
Successions,” “ Ballantrae Rocks,” &c. Although his general 
conclusions were very different from those previously held, 
and were not received for many years by all parties, they now 
appear to be universally accepted. 
In the most complicated and puzzling country of the 
North-west Highlands, his accounts of the facts, and his 
theories of their interpretation, as given in his papers on the 
“ Secret of the Highlands, &c.,” were at first very heretical and 
unpopular, but as similar ideas were independently arrived at 
by the officers of the Geological Survey, they have nowadays 
found their way into our geological text books, and mark an 
accepted stage in the development of the study of the geology 
of that extraordinarily difficult region. 
The important family of fossils known as the Graptolites 
used formerly to be almost wholly neglected in working out the 
ancient rock-formation where they are very abundant and 
widely distributed. Lapworth shewed, in several papers on 
the subject, that they could be reduced to order like other 
groups of the invertebrate animals, and that once properly 
classified they were of the utmost value for the purposes of 
the working geologist. His classification of these fossils, and 
his explanations of their use in geology, will be found 
employed of late years in the text books and publications 
dealing with this subject in Britain and abroad. 
In the West of England Professor Lapworth has for some 
years been busied in working out the natural arrangement of 
the older rocks and fossils of Shropshire and elsewhere, and 
it appears, from such results as have been already pub¬ 
lished, that the supposed confusion and complication in that 
district will also disappear when the facts are out and the 
maps completed. 
In our own district, Midland geologists will recollect how 
Lapworth and his geological friends and students discovered 
Cambrian rocks and fossils at Nuneaton and elsewhere, in 
rocks which used before that time to be considered to be 
carboniferous. This led to quite a fresh geological interpre¬ 
tation of deeper parts of the underground structure of our 
neighbourhood ; and of late years these discoveries have been 
confirmed and extended by the Geological Survey, and 
inserted upon the local geological map. 
In 1888, Professor Lapworth discovered a new group of 
fossils in some of the very oldest of the Shropshire rocks, 
a whole formation below where fossils of such a highly 
organised character were previously known to occur in 
