And yet, as we have seen, it is precisely such a charge as this that Spencer and Huxley bring against the modern phase of the doctrine of successive ages based on the succession of life idea. Werner, from observations "limited to a small district," constructed his scheme of exact chronological sequence, basing it entirely upon the mineral or mechanical character of his "suites." And hundreds of enthusiastic followers long declared that the rocks everywhere conformed to this classification, even so great an observer as von Humboldt thinking that the rocks which he examined in Central and South America fully confirmed Werner's chronological arrangement. But such notions to-day only cause a smile of pity, for it is now well known that, take the world over, =the rocks do not occur= as Werner imagined, though, as Geikie says, he and his disciples were as certain of the matter "as if they had been present at the formation of the earth's crust." Besides, as already pointed out, we moderns ought now to have pretty well assimilated the idea that while one kind of mineral or rock was forming in one locality, =a totally different kind of deposit= may have been in process of formation in another spot some distance off =at the very same time=, and we cannot imagine a time in the past when this principle would not hold good. But in a precisely similar way the idea of a time value was, as we shall see, transferred from the mechanical and mineral character of the rocks to their fossil contents; and from observations again "limited to a small district," William Smith and Cuvier conceived the idea that the fossils occurred =only= in a certain order; that only certain fossils lived at a certain time; that, for example, while Trilobites were living and dying in one locality, Nummulites or Mammals positively were not living and dying in another locality, though in any system of clear thinking this latter notion is just as irrational as that of Werner. Hence Spencer is compelled to say, "though the onion-coat hypothesis is dead, its spirit is still traceable, under a transcendental form, even in the conclusions of its antagonists." The two cases are exactly parallel; only it has taken us nearly a hundred years, it seems, to find out that the fossils do not follow the prearranged order of Smith and Cuvier any better than the rocks and minerals do the scheme of Werner. If hundreds of geologists still seem to think that the fossils in general agree with the standard order, we must remember how many sharp observers said the same thing for decades about Werner's scheme. The taint of heredity will always come out sooner or later; and both of these schemes exhibit very strongly the family history of the whole tribe of Cosmogonies, viz., =the facts refuse to certify that they are of sound mind=.