No one can doubt that the earth’s crust, so far as it has been deciphered by man, presents us with a record, imperfect though it be, of the past. Whether, however, the known and admitted imperfections of its records, geological and palæontological, are sufficiently trustworthy to account satisfactorily for the lack of direct evidence recognizable in some modern hypotheses, may be a matter of individual opinion, but there can be little doubt that they are sufficiently extensive to throw the balance of evidence decisively in favor of some theory of continuity, as opposed to any theory of intermittent and occasional action, which some writers have strenuously and intelligently advocated. No marks of mighty and general convulsions of nature exist, as the seeming breaks which divide the grand series of stratified rocks into numerous isolated formations would indicate. They are simply indications of the imperfection of our knowledge. Science will never, in all probability, point to a complete series of deposits, or to a complete succession of life, which shall link one geological period to another. But that such deposits and such an unbroken succession must have existed at one time we may well feel sure, and stand ready to believe that nowhere in the long series of fossiliferous rocks has there been a total break, but that there has inevitably been a complete continuity of life, as well as a more or less complete continuity of sedimentation from the Laurentian period to the present day. One generation, speaking figuratively, hands on the lamp of life to the next, and each system of rocks is the direct offspring of its predecessor in time. Though it is apparent that there has not been continuity in any given area, still the geological chain could not have been snapped at one point and taken up again at a totally different one. Hence we arrive at the conviction that in geology, as in other sciences, continuity is the fundamental law, and that the lines of demarcation between the great formations are but gaps in our own knowledge.