Surely these words exhibit the "phylogenic series" in all its native, unscientific deformity. It is =because= the Coal-measures, the Permian, and the Triassic, are necessarily "extremely deficient records" of the total life-forms then in the world, that I am writing this chapter, and this book. But it seems like perverseness to plead about the imperfection of the record, and yet refuse the =evidently complementary= deposits when they are presented. If, as this illustrious author says, "The seas had not been depopulated," what would he have us think they were doing? Were they forming no deposits all these intervening ages that the Carboniferous, Permian, and Triassic were being piled up? Were the fishes and invertebrates all immortalized for these ages, or were they, when old and full of days translated to some supermundane sphere, thus escaping deposit in the rocks? Did the elements continue in the _status quo_ all these uncounted millions of years? and if so, how did they receive notice that the Triassic period was at last ended, and that it was time for them to begin work again? I do not like to appear trivial; but these questions serve to expose the folly of taking diverse, local, and partial deposits, and attaching a chronological value to each of them separately, and then pleading in a piteous, helpless way about the imperfection of the record. And yet I cannot promise to present a tithe of the possible evidence, because of two serious handicaps. First, the ordinary literature of the science is silent and meagre enough in all conscience, even though the bare fact may be recorded that a "genus" of the Cambrian or Silurian is "closely allied" to some genus now living. It may be even admitted that "according to some it is not genetically distinct from the modern genus" so-and-so; but the authors =never descend below the "genus,"= and in most cases forget to tell us whether or not it occurs in other "later" formations, though of course the presumption is that it does not, but has skipped all the intervening ages, or it would hardly be named as a characteristic type of the formation in which it occurs. But this disadvantage, serious though it be, is scarcely worth speaking of when we remember the significant words of a well-known authority already quoted: "Some geologists make it a point to give a new name to all forms found in the Palaeozoic rocks, i.e. a name different from those of modern species." Or Zittel's confession that: