He pictures the uncritical work of the earlier writers on fossil botany, until August Schink (1868-91) made a great reform in this science; and Zittel declares that "now the author of a paper on any department" of fossil botany "is expected to have a sound knowledge" of the systematic botany of recent forms. But he adds: "It cannot be said that palaeozoology (the science of fossil animals) has yet arrived at this desirable standpoint." But he justifies this charge of want of confidence by saying: "Comparatively few individuals have such a thorough grasp of zoological and geological knowledge as to enable them to treat palaeontological researches worthily, and there has accumulated a dead weight of stratigraphical-palaeontological literature wherein the fossil remains of animals are named and pigeon-holed solely as an additional ticket of the age of a rock-deposit, with a willful disregard of the much more difficult problem of their relationships in the long chain of existence. "The terminology which has been introduced in the innumerable monographs of special fossil faunas in the majority of cases makes only the slenderest pretext of any connection with recent systematic zoology; if there is a difficulty, then stratigraphical arguments are made the basis of a solution. Zoological students are, as a rule, too actively engaged and keenly interested in building up new observations to attempt to spell through the arbitrary palaeontological conclusions arrived at by many stratigraphers, or to revise their labors from a zoological point of view."[38]