Let us make an arbitrary decision (by a show of hands if necessary) to define the base of every stratigraphical unit in a selected section. This may be called the 'Principle of the Golden Spike'. Then stratigraphical nomenclature can be forgotten and we can get on with the real work of stratigraphy, which is correlation and interpretation.

Sedimentation in the past has often been very rapid indeed and very spasmodic. This may be called the 'Phenomenon of the Catastrophic Nature of the Stratigraphical Record'.

Palaeontologists cannot live by uniformitarianism alone. This may be termed the 'Phenomenon of the Fallibility of the Fossil Record'.

Though the theories of plate tectonics now provide us with a modus operandi, they still seem to me to be a periodic phenomenon. Nothing is world-wide, but everything is episodic. In other words, the history of anyone part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.