Werner classified the rocks according to their mineral characters, but when the fossils were taken as the prime test of age, the "original nomenclature of periods and formations" kept alive the original idea of complete envelopes encircling the whole globe one outside each other like the coats of an onion. So that now, instead of Werner's successive ages of sandstone making or limestone making, and successive suites of these rocks, we have successive ages of various types of life, with successive systems or "groups of formations which everywhere succeed each other in a given order; and are severally everywhere of the same age. Though it may not be asserted that these successive systems are universal, yet it seems to be tacitly assumed that they are so.... Though, probably, no competent geologist would contend that the European classification of strata is applicable to the globe as a whole; yet most, if not all geologists, write as though it were so." Spencer then goes on to show how dogmatic and unscientific it is to say that when the Carboniferous flora, for example, existed in some localities, this type of life and this only must have enveloped the world. "Now this belief," he says, "that geologic 'systems' are universal, is quite as untenable as the other. It is just as absurd when considered _a priori_: and it is equally inconsistent with the facts," for all such systems of similar life-forms must in olden time have been of merely "local origin," just as they are now. In other words, we have no scientific knowledge of a time in the past when there were not zoological provinces and zones as there are to-day, one type of life existing in one locality, while another and totally different type existed somewhere else. Then, after quoting from Lyell a strong protest against the old fancy that only certain types of sandstone and marls were made at certain epochs, he proceeds: "Nevertheless, while in this and numerous passages of like implication, Sir C. Lyell protests against the bias here illustrated, he seems himself not completely free from it. Though he utterly rejects the old hypothesis that all over the earth the same continuous strata lie upon each other in regular order, like the coats of an onion, he still writes as though geologic 'systems' do thus succeed each other. A reader of his 'Manual' would certainly suppose him to believe, that the Primary epoch ended, and the Secondary epoch commenced, all over the world at the same time.... =Must we not say that though the onion-coat hypothesis is dead, its spirit is tractable, under a transcendental form, even in the conclusions of its antagonists.=" Spencer then examines at considerable length the kindred idea that the same or similar species "lived in all parts of the earth at the same time." "This theory," he says, "is scarcely more tenable than the other."