The Cretaceous Epoch

Abstract

THE President of the Linnean Society having been good enough to credit me, in the interesting address which has just appeared in NATURE, with the doctrine that the formation of chalk has been going on continuously over some part of the North Atlantic sea-bed from the Cretaceous epoch to the present time, I feel it due to my friend and colleague, Prof. Wyville Thomson, to disclaim most explicitly the merit of having originated this doctrine, which entirely belongs to him. I regret that the form in which it was promulgated in my report of the Lightning expedition should have led to this misapprehension; but that form was adopted at my friend's express desire; and I have on every occasion (as in my recent lecture at the Royal Institution) spoken of the idea as exclusively his. Whilst myself fully accepting and advocating it, I am the more anxious that there should be no mistake in this matter, as it seems to me that the idea is one which must exert so important an influence on the future course of geological inquiry that its introduction will be one of the landmarks in the history of the science.