ABSTRACT
Hence it remains to test by the facts of the rocks the assumption that all over the earth the fossils invariably occur in the particular order in which they were first found in a few corners of Western Europe by the founders of the science. To begin then at the beginning, let us try to find out how we can fix on the rocks which are absolutely the oldest on the globe. On the blending of these two assumptions, the latter essentially absurd, and the former long ago disproved by the facts of the rocks, has been built up the towering structure of a complete “phylogenic series” from the Cambrian to the Pleistocene. “A stratum of one era may rest upon any stratum in the whole of the series below it,—the Coal-measures on either the Archaean, Silurian, or Devonian strata; and the Jurassic, Cretaceous, or Tertiary on any one of the earlier rocks, the intermediate being wanting.
