The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Student's Elements of Geology
by Sir Charles Lyell

Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
the laws for your country before redistributing these files!!!

Please take a look at the important information in this header.
We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
electronic path open for the next readers.

Please do not remove this.

This should be the first thing seen when anyone opens the book.
Do not change or edit it without written permission.  The words
are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they
need about what they can legally do with the texts.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These Etexts Are Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
further information is included below, including for donations.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541

Title: The Student's Elements of Geology

Author: Sir Charles Lyell

Release Date: February, 2003  [Etext #3772]
[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
[The actual date this file first posted = 8/29/01]

Edition: 10

Language: English

The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Student's Elements of Geology
by Sir Charles Lyell
******This file should be named geogy10.txt or geogy10.zip******

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, geogy11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, geogy10a.txt

Produced by Sue Asscher  asschers@dingoblue.net.au

Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we usually do NOT keep any
of these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.

We are now trying to release all our books one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to send us error messages even years after
the official publication date.

Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.

Most people start at our sites at:
http://gutenberg.net
http://promo.net/pg


Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
can surf to them as follows, and just download by date; this is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03
or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03

Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90

Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour this year as we release fifty new Etext
files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 3000+
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.

At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 4,000 Etexts unless we
manage to get some real funding.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.

We need your donations more than ever!

As of July 12, 2001 contributions are only being solicited from people in:
Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho,
Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota,
Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North
Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota,
Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia,
Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

We have filed in about 45 states now, but these are the only ones
that have responded.

As the requirements for other states are met,
additions to this list will be made and fund raising
will begin in the additional states.  Please feel
free to ask to check the status of your state.

In answer to various questions we have received on this:

We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork
to legally request donations in all 50 states.  If
your state is not listed and you would like to know
if we have added it since the list you have, just ask.

While we cannot solicit donations from people in
states where we are not yet registered, we know
of no prohibition against accepting donations
from donors in these states who approach us with
an offer to donate.


International donations are accepted,
but we don't know ANYTHING about how
to make them tax-deductible, or
even if they CAN be made deductible,
and don't have the staff to handle it
even if there are ways.

All donations should be made to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109


The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541,
and has been approved as a 501(c)(3) organization by the US Internal
Revenue Service (IRS).  Donations are tax-deductible to the maximum
extent permitted by law.  As the requirements for other states are met,
additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the
additional states.

We need your donations more than ever!

You can get up to date donation information at:

http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html


***

If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .

Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.

We would prefer to send you information by email.


***


Example command-line FTP session:

ftp ftp.ibiblio.org
login: anonymous
password: your@login
cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
cd etext90 through etext99 or etext00 through etext02, etc.
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
GET GUTINDEX.??  [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]
GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]


**The Legal Small Print**


(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.

To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this etext,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word
     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
     let us know your plans and to work out the details.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.

The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com

[Portions of this header are copyright (C) 2001 by Michael S. Hart
and may be reprinted only when these Etexts are free of all fees.]
[Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales
of Project Gutenberg Etexts or other materials be they hardware or
software or any other related product without express permission.]

*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.07/27/01*END*











Produced by Sue Asscher  asschers@dingoblue.net.au





THE STUDENT'S ELEMENTS OF GEOLOGY.

BY SIR CHARLES LYELL, BART., F.R.S.,

AUTHOR OF "THE PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY," "THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN," ETC.


(FIGURE A. FROM BOTTOM TO TOP:
PRIMARY OR PALEOZOIC. Bronteus flabellifer.
SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC. Ammonites rhotomagensis.
TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC. Nummulites laevigata.)

(FIGURE B. Thecosmilia annularis.)


WITH MORE THAN 600 ILLUSTRATIONS ON WOOD.



PREFACE.

The LAST or sixth EDITION of my "Elements of Geology" was already out of print 
before the end of 1868, in which year I brought out the tenth edition of my 
"Principles of Geology."

In writing the last-mentioned work I had been called upon to pass in review 
almost all the leading points of speculation and controversy to which the rapid 
advance of the science had given rise, and when I proposed to bring out a new 
edition of the "Elements" I was strongly urged by my friends not to repeat these 
theoretical discussions, but to confine myself in the new treatise to those 
parts of the "Elements" which were most indispensable to a beginner. This was to 
revert, to a certain extent, to the original plan of the first edition; but I 
found, after omitting a great number of subjects, that the necessity of bringing 
up to the day those which remained, and adverting, however briefly, to new 
discoveries, made it most difficult to confine the proposed abridgment within 
moderate limits. Some chapters had to be entirely recast, some additional 
illustrations to be introduced, and figures of some organic remains to be 
replaced by new ones from specimens more perfect than those which had been at my 
command on former occasions. By these changes the work assumed a form so 
different from the sixth edition of the "Elements," that I resolved to give it a 
new title and call it the "Student's Elements of Geology."

In executing this task I have found it very difficult to meet the requirements 
of those who are entirely ignorant of the science. It is only the adept who has 
already overcome the first steps as an observer, and is familiar with many of 
the technical terms, who can profit by a brief and concise manual. Beginners 
wish for a short and cheap book in which they may find a full explanation of the 
leading facts and principles of Geology. Their wants, I fear, somewhat resemble 
those of the old woman in New England, who asked a bookseller to supply her with 
"the cheapest Bible in the largest possible print."

But notwithstanding the difficulty of reconciling brevity with the copiousness 
of illustration demanded by those who have not yet mastered the rudiments of the 
science, I have endeavoured to abridge the work in the manner above hinted at, 
so as to place it within the reach of many to whom it was before inaccessible.

CHARLES LYELL.

73 Harley Street, London,
December, 1870.


CONTENTS.


CHAPTER I.

ON THE DIFFERENT CLASSES OF ROCKS.

Geology defined.
Successive Formation of the Earth's Crust.
Classification of Rocks according to their Origin and Age.
Aqueous Rocks.
Their Stratification and imbedded Fossils.
Volcanic Rocks, with and without Cones and Craters.
Plutonic Rocks, and their Relation to the Volcanic.
Metamorphic Rocks, and their probable Origin.
The term Primitive, why erroneously applied to the Crystalline Formations.
Leading Division of the Work.


CHAPTER II.

AQUEOUS ROCKS-- THEIR COMPOSITION AND FORMS OF STRATIFICATION.

Mineral Composition of Strata.
Siliceous Rocks.
Argillaceous.
Calcareous.
Gypsum.
Forms of Stratification.
Original Horizontality.
Thinning out.
Diagonal Arrangement.
Ripple-mark.


CHAPTER III.

ARRANGEMENT OF FOSSILS IN STRATA-- FRESH-WATER AND MARINE.

Successive Deposition indicated by Fossils.
Limestones formed of Corals and Shells.
Proofs of gradual Increase of Strata derived from Fossils.
Serpula attached to Spatangus.
Wood bored by Teredina.
Tripoli formed of Infusoria.
Chalk derived principally from Organic Bodies.
Distinction of Fresh-water from Marine Formations.
Genera of Fresh-water and Land Shells.
Rules for recognising Marine Testacea.
Gyrogonite and Chara.
Fresh-water Fishes.
Alternation of Marine and Fresh-water Deposits.
Lym-Fiord.


CHAPTER IV.

CONSOLIDATION OF STRATA AND PETRIFACTION OF FOSSILS.

Chemical and Mechanical Deposits.
Cementing together of Particles.
Hardening by Exposure to Air.
Concretionary Nodules.
Consolidating Effects of Pressure.
Mineralization of Organic Remains.
Impressions and Casts: how formed.
Fossil Wood.
Goppert's Experiments.
Precipitation of Stony Matter most rapid where Putrefaction is going on.
Sources of Lime and Silex in Solution.


CHAPTER V.

ELEVATION OF STRATA ABOVE THE SEA.-- HORIZONTAL AND INCLINED STRATIFICATION.

Why the Position of Marine Strata, above the Level of the Sea, should be 
referred to the rising up of the Land, not to the going down of the Sea.
Strata of Deep-sea and Shallow-water Origin alternate.
Also Marine and Fresh-water Beds and old Land Surfaces.
Vertical, inclined, and folded Strata.
Anticlinal and Synclinal Curves.
Theories to explain Lateral Movements.
Creeps in Coal-mines.
Dip and Strike.
Structure of the Jura.
Various Forms of Outcrop.
Synclinal Strata forming Ridges.
Connection of Fracture and Flexure of Rocks.
Inverted Strata.
Faults described.
Superficial Signs of the same obliterated by Denudation.
Great Faults the Result of repeated Movements.
Arrangement and Direction of parallel Folds of Strata.
Unconformability.
Overlapping Strata.


CHAPTER VI.

DENUDATION.

Denudation defined.
Its Amount more than equal to the entire Mass of Stratified Deposits in the 
Earth's Crust.
Subaerial Denudation.
Action of the Wind.
Action of Running Water.
Alluvium defined.
Different Ages of Alluvium.
Denuding Power of Rivers affected by Rise or Fall of Land.
Littoral Denudation.
Inland Sea-Cliffs.
Escarpments.
Submarine Denudation.
Dogger-bank.
Newfoundland Bank.
Denuding Power of the Ocean during Emergence of Land.


CHAPTER VII.

JOINT ACTION OF DENUDATION, UPHEAVAL, AND SUBSIDENCE IN REMODELLING THE EARTH'S 
CRUST.

How we obtain an Insight at the Surface, of the Arrangement of Rocks at great 
Depths.
Why the Height of the successive Strata in a given Region is so disproportionate 
to their Thickness.
Computation of the average annual Amount of subaerial Denudation.
Antagonism of Volcanic Force to the Levelling Power of running Water.
How far the Transfer of Sediment from the Land to a neighbouring Sea-bottom may 
affect Subterranean Movements.
Permanence of Continental and Oceanic Areas.


CHAPTER VIII.

CHRONOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF ROCKS.

Aqueous, Plutonic, volcanic, and metamorphic Rocks considered chronologically.
Terms Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary; Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Cainozoic 
explained.
On the different Ages of the aqueous Rocks.
Three principal Tests of relative Age: Superposition, Mineral Character, and 
Fossils.
Change of Mineral Character and Fossils in the same continuous Formation.
Proofs that distinct Species of Animals and Plants have lived at successive 
Periods.
Distinct Provinces of indigenous Species.
Great Extent of single Provinces.
Similar Laws prevailed at successive Geological Periods.
Relative Importance of mineral and palaeontological Characters.
Test of Age by included Fragments.
Frequent Absence of Strata of intervening Periods.
Tabular Views of fossiliferous Strata.


CHAPTER IX.

CLASSIFICATION OF TERTIARY FORMATIONS.

Order of Succession of Sedimentary Formations.
Frequent Unconformability of Strata.
Imperfection of the Record.
Defectiveness of the Monuments greater in Proportion to their Antiquity.
Reasons for studying the newer Groups first.
Nomenclature of Formations.
Detached Tertiary Formations scattered over Europe.
Value of the Shell-bearing Mollusca in Classification.
Classification of Tertiary Strata.
Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene Terms explained.


CHAPTER X.

RECENT AND POST-PLIOCENE PERIODS.

Recent and Post-pliocene Periods.
Terms defined.
Formations of the Recent Period.
Modern littoral Deposits containing Works of Art near Naples.
Danish Peat and Shell-mounds.
Swiss Lake-dwellings.
Periods of Stone, Bronze, and Iron.
Post-pliocene Formations.
Coexistence of Man with extinct Mammalia.
Reindeer Period of South of France.
Alluvial Deposits of Paleolithic Age.
Higher and Lower-level Valley-gravels.
Loess or Inundation-mud of the Nile, Rhine, etc.
Origin of Caverns.
Remains of Man and extinct Quadrupeds in Cavern Deposits.
Cave of Kirkdale.
Australian Cave-breccias.
Geographical Relationship of the Provinces of living Vertebrata and those of 
extinct Post-pliocene Species.
Extinct struthious Birds of New Zealand.
Climate of the Post-pliocene Period.
Comparative Longevity of Species in the Mammalia and Testacea.
Teeth of Recent and Post-pliocene Mammalia.


CHAPTER XI.

POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD, CONTINUED.-- GLACIAL CONDITIONS.

Geographical Distribution, Form, and Characters of Glacial Drift.
Fundamental Rocks, polished, grooved, and scratched.
Abrading and striating Action of Glaciers.
Moraines, Erratic Blocks, and "Roches Moutonnees."
Alpine Blocks on the Jura.
Continental Ice of Greenland.
Ancient Centres of the Dispersion of Erratics.
Transportation of Drift by floating Icebergs.
Bed of the Sea furrowed and polished by the running aground of floating Ice-
islands.


CHAPTER XII.

POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD, CONTINUED.-- GLACIAL CONDITIONS, CONCLUDED.

Glaciation of Scandinavia and Russia.
Glaciation of Scotland.
Mammoth in Scotch Till.
Marine Shells in Scotch Glacial Drift.
Their Arctic Character.
Rarity of Organic Remains in Glacial Deposits.
Contorted Strata in Drift.
Glaciation of Wales, England, and Ireland.
Marine Shells of Moel Tryfaen.
Erratics near Chichester.
Glacial Formations of North America.
Many Species of Testacea and Quadrupeds survived the Glacial Cold.
Connection of the Predominance of Lakes with Glacial Action.
Action of Ice in preventing the silting up of Lake-basins.
Absence of Lakes in the Caucasus.
Equatorial Lakes of Africa.


CHAPTER XIII.

PLIOCENE PERIOD.

Glacial Formations of Pliocene Age.
Bridlington Beds.
Glacial Drifts of Ireland.
Drift of Norfolk Cliffs.
Cromer Forest-bed.
Aldeby and Chillesford Beds.
Norwich Crag.
Older Pliocene Strata.
Red Crag of Suffolk.
Coprolitic Bed of Red Crag.
White or Coralline Crag.
Relative Age, Origin, and Climate of the Crag Deposits.
Antwerp Crag.
Newer Pliocene Strata of Sicily.
Newer Pliocene Strata of the Upper Val d'Arno.
Older Pliocene of Italy.
Subapennine Strata.
Older Pliocene Flora of Italy.


CHAPTER XIV.

MIOCENE PERIOD.-- UPPER MIOCENE.

Upper Miocene Strata of France.
faluns of Touraine.
Tropical Climate implied by Testacea.
Proportion of recent Species of Shells.
faluns more ancient than the Suffolk Crag.
Upper Miocene of Bordeaux and the South of France.
Upper Miocene of Oeningen, in Switzerland.
Plants of the Upper Fresh-water Molasse.
Fossil Fruit and Flowers as well as Leaves.
Insects of the Upper Molasse.
Middle or Marine Molasse of Switzerland.
Upper Miocene Beds of the Bolderberg, in Belgium.
Vienna Basin.
Upper Miocene of Italy and Greece.
Upper Miocene of India; Siwalik Hills.
Older Pliocene and Miocene of the United States.


CHAPTER XV.

LOWER MIOCENE.

Lower Miocene Strata of France.
Line between Miocene and Eocene.
Lacustrine Strata of Auvergne.
Fossil Mammalia of the Limagne d'Auvergne.
Lower Molasse of Switzerland.
Dense Conglomerates and Proofs of Subsidence.
Flora of the Lower Molasse.
American Character of the Flora.
Theory of a Miocene Atlantis.
Lower Miocene of Belgium.
Rupelian Clay of Hermsdorf near Berlin.
Mayence Basin.
Lower Miocene of Croatia.
Oligocene Strata of Beyrich.
Lower Miocene of Italy.
Lower Miocene of England.
Hempstead Beds.
Bovey Tracey Lignites in Devonshire.
Isle of Mull Leaf-Beds.
Arctic Miocene Flora.
Disco Island.
Lower Miocene of United States.
Fossils of Nebraska.


CHAPTER XVI.

EOCENE FORMATIONS.

Eocene Areas of North of Europe.
Table of English and French Eocene Strata.
Upper Eocene of England.
Bembridge Beds.
Osborne or St. Helen's Beds.
Headon Series.
Fossils of the Barton Sands and Clays.
Middle Eocene of England.
Shells, Nummulites, Fish and Reptiles of the Bracklesham Beds and Bagshot Sands.
Plants of Alum Bay and Bournemouth.
Lower Eocene of England.
London Clay Fossils.
Woolwich and Reading Beds formerly called "Plastic Clay."
Fluviatile Beds underlying Deep-sea Strata.
Thanet Sands.
Upper Eocene Strata of France.
Gypseous Series of Montmartre and Extinct Quadrupeds.
Fossil Footprints in Paris Gypsum.
Imperfection of the Record.
Calcaire Silicieux.
Gres de Beauchamp.
Calcaire Grossier.
Miliolite Limestone.
Soissonnais Sands.
Lower Eocene of France.
Nummulitic Formations of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Eocene Strata in the United States.
Gigantic Cetacean.


CHAPTER XVII.

UPPER CRETACEOUS GROUP.

Lapse of Time between Cretaceous and Eocene Periods.
Table of successive Cretaceous Formations.
Maestricht Beds.
Pisolitic Limestone of France.
Chalk of Faxoe.
Geographical Extent and Origin of the White Chalk.
Chalky Matter now forming in the Bed of the Atlantic.
Marked Difference between the Cretaceous and existing Fauna.
Chalk-flints.
Pot-stones of Horstead.
Vitreous Sponges in the Chalk.
Isolated Blocks of Foreign Rocks in the White Chalk supposed to be ice-borne.
Distinctness of Mineral Character in contemporaneous Rocks of the Cretaceous 
Epoch.
Fossils of the White Chalk.
Lower White Chalk without Flints.
Chalk Marl and its Fossils.
Chloritic Series or Upper Greensand.
Coprolite Bed near Cambridge.
Fossils of the Chloritic Series.
Gault.
Connection between Upper and Lower Cretaceous Strata.
Blackdown Beds.
Flora of the Upper Cretaceous Period.
Hippurite Limestone.
Cretaceous Rocks in the United States.


CHAPTER XVIII.

LOWER CRETACEOUS OR NEOCOMIAN FORMATION.

Classification of marine and fresh-water Strata.
Upper Neocomian.
Folkestone and Hythe Beds.
Atherfield Clay.
Similarity of Conditions causing Reappearance of Species after short Intervals.
Upper Speeton Clay.
Middle Neocomian.
Tealby Series.
Middle Speeton Clay.
Lower Neocomian.
Lower Speeton Clay.
Wealden Formation.
Fresh-water Character of the Wealden.
Weald Clay.
Hastings Sands.
Punfield Beds of Purbeck, Dorsetshire.
Fossil Shells and Fish of the Wealden.
Area of the Wealden.
Flora of the Wealden.


CHAPTER XIX.

JURASSIC GROUP.-- PURBECK BEDS AND OOLITE.

The Purbeck Beds a Member of the Jurassic Group.
Subdivisions of that Group.
Physical Geography of the Oolite in England and France.
Upper Oolite.
Purbeck Beds.
New Genera of fossil Mammalia in the Middle Purbeck of Dorsetshire.
Dirt-bed or ancient Soil.
Fossils of the Purbeck Beds.
Portland Stone and Fossils.
Kimmeridge Clay.
Lithographic Stone of Solenhofen.
Archaeopteryx.
Middle Oolite.
Coral Rag.
Nerinaea Limestone.
Oxford Clay, Ammonites and Belemnites.
Kelloway Rock.
Lower, or Bath, Oolite.
Great Plants of the Oolite.
Oolite and Bradford Clay.
Stonesfield Slate.
Fossil Mammalia.
Fuller's Earth.
Inferior Oolite and Fossils.
Northamptonshire Slates.
Yorkshire Oolitic Coal-field.
Brora Coal.
Palaeontological Relations of the several Subdivisions of the Oolitic group.


CHAPTER XX.

JURASSIC GROUP-- CONTINUED.-- LIAS.

Mineral Character of Lias.
Numerous successive Zones in the Lias, marked by distinct Fossils, without 
Unconformity in the Stratification, or Change in the Mineral Character of the 
Deposits.
Gryphite Limestone.
Shells of the Lias.
Fish of the Lias.
Reptiles of the Lias.
Ichthyosaur and Plesiosaur.
Marine Reptile of the Galapagos Islands.
Sudden Destruction and Burial of Fossil Animals in Lias.
Fluvio-marine Beds in Gloucestershire, and Insect Limestone.
Fossil Plants.
The origin of the Oolite and Lias, and of alternating Calcareous and 
Argillaceous Formations.


CHAPTER XXI.

TRIAS, OR NEW RED SANDSTONE GROUP.

Beds of Passage between the Lias and Trias, Rhaetic Beds.
Triassic Mammifer.
Triple Division of the Trias.
Keuper, or Upper Trias of England.
Reptiles of the Upper Trias.
Foot-prints in the Bunter formation in England.
Dolomitic Conglomerate of Bristol.
Origin of Red Sandstone and Rock-salt.
Precipitation of Salt from inland Lakes and Lagoons.
Trias of Germany.
Keuper.
St. Cassian and Hallstadt Beds.
Peculiarity of their Fauna.
Muschelkalk and its Fossils.
Trias of the United States.
Fossil Foot-prints of Birds and Reptiles in the Valley of the Connecticut.
Triassic Mammifer of North Carolina.
Triassic Coal-field of Richmond, Virginia.
Low Grade of early Mammals favourable to the Theory of Progressive Development.


CHAPTER XXII.

PERMIAN OR MAGNESIAN LIMESTONE GROUP.

Line of Separation between Mesozoic and Palaeozoic Rocks.
Distinctness of Triassic and Permian Fossils.
Term Permian.
Thickness of calcareous and sedimentary Rocks in North of England.
Upper, Middle, and Lower Permian.
Marine Shells and Corals of the English Magnesian Limestone.
Reptiles and Fish of Permian Marl-slate.
Foot-prints of Reptiles.
Angular Breccias in Lower Permian.
Permian Rocks of the Continent.
Zechstein and Rothliegendes of Thuringia.
Permian Flora.
Its generic Affinity to the Carboniferous.


CHAPTER XXIII.

THE COAL OR CARBONIFEROUS GROUP.

Principal Subdivisions of the Carboniferous Group.
Different Thickness of the sedimentary and calcareous Members in Scotland and 
the South of England.
Coal-measures.
Terrestrial Nature of the Growth of Coal.
Erect fossil Trees.
Uniting of many Coal-seams into one thick Bed.
Purity of the Coal explained.
Conversion of Coal into Anthracite.
Origin of Clay-ironstone.
Marine and brackish-water Strata in Coal.
Fossil Insects.
Batrachian Reptiles.
Labyrinthodont Foot-prints in Coal-measures.
Nova Scotia Coal-measures with successive Growths of erect fossil Trees.
Similarity of American and European Coal.
Air-breathers of the American Coal.
Changes of Condition of Land and Sea indicated by the Carboniferous Strata of 
Nova Scotia.


CHAPTER XXIV.

FLORA AND FAUNA OF THE CARBONIFEROUS PERIOD.

Vegetation of the Coal Period.
Ferns, Lycopodiaceae, Equisetaceae, Sigillariae, Stigmariae, Coniferae.
Angiosperms.
Climate of the Coal Period.
Mountain Limestone.
Marine Fauna of the Carboniferous Period.
Corals.
Bryozoa, Crinoidea.
Mollusca.
Great Number of fossil Fish.
Foraminifera.


CHAPTER XXV.

DEVONIAN OR OLD RED SANDSTONE GROUP.

Classification of the Old Red Sandstone in Scotland and in Devonshire.
Upper Old Red Sandstone in Scotland, with Fish and Plants.
Middle Old Red Sandstone.
Classification of the Ichthyolites of the Old Red, and their Relation to Living 
Types.
Lower Old Red Sandstone, with Cephalaspis and Pterygotus.
Marine or Devonian Type of Old Red Sandstone.
Table of Devonian Series.
Upper Devonian Rocks and Fossils.
Middle.
Lower.
Eifel Limestone of Germany.
Devonian of Russia.
Devonian Strata of the United States and Canada.
Devonian Plants and Insects of Canada.


CHAPTER XXVI.

SILURIAN GROUP.

Classification of the Silurian Rocks.
Ludlow Formation and Fossils.
Bone-bed of the Upper Ludlow.
Lower Ludlow Shales with Pentamerus.
Oldest known Remains of fossil Fish.
Table of the progressive Discovery of Vertebrata in older Rocks.
Wenlock Formation, Corals, Cystideans and Trilobites.
Llandovery Group or Beds of Passage.
Lower Silurian Rocks.
Caradoc and Bala Beds.
Brachiopoda.
Trilobites.
Cystideae.
Graptolites.
Llandeilo Flags.
Arenig or Stiper-stones Group.
Foreign Silurian Equivalents in Europe.
Silurian Strata of the United States.
Canadian Equivalents.
Amount of specific Agreement of Fossils with those of Europe.


CHAPTER XXVII.

CAMBRIAN AND LAURENTIAN GROUPS.

Classification of the Cambrian Group, and its Equivalent in Bohemia.
Upper Cambrian Rocks.
Tremadoc Slates and their Fossils.
Lingula Flags.
Lower Cambrian Rocks.
Menevian Beds.
Longmynd Group.
Harlech Grits with large Trilobites.
Llanberis Slates.
Cambrian Rocks of Bohemia.
Primordial Zone of Barrande.
Metamorphosis of Trilobites.
Cambrian Rocks of Sweden and Norway.
Cambrian Rocks of the United States and Canada.
Potsdam Sandstone.
Huronian Series.
Laurentian Group, upper and lower.
Eozoon Canadense, oldest known Fossil.
Fundamental Gneiss of Scotland.


CHAPTER XXVIII.

VOLCANIC ROCKS.

External Form, Structure, and Origin of Volcanic Mountains.
Cones and Craters.
Hypothesis of "Elevation Craters" considered.
Trap Rocks.
Name whence derived.
Minerals most abundant in Volcanic Rocks.
Table of the Analysis of Minerals in the Volcanic and Hypogene Rocks.
Similar Minerals in Meteorites.
Theory of Isomorphism.
Basaltic Rocks.
Trachytic Rocks.
Special Forms of Structure.
The columnar and globular Forms.
Trap Dikes and Veins.
Alteration of Rocks by volcanic Dikes.
Conversion of Chalk into Marble.
Intrusion of Trap between Strata.
Relation of trappean Rocks to the Products of active Volcanoes.


CHAPTER XXIX.

ON THE AGES OF VOLCANIC ROCKS.

Tests of relative Age of Volcanic Rocks.
Why ancient and modern Rocks can not be identical.
Tests by Superposition and intrusion.
Test by Alteration of Rocks in Contact.
Test by Organic Remains.
Test of Age by Mineral Character.
Test by Included Fragments.
Recent and Post-pliocene volcanic Rocks.
Vesuvius, Auvergne, Puy de Come, and Puy de Pariou.
Newer Pliocene volcanic Rocks.
Cyclopean Isles, Etna, Dikes of Palagonia, Madeira.
Older Pliocene volcanic Rocks.
Italy.
Pliocene Volcanoes of the Eifel.
Trass.


CHAPTER XXX.

AGE OF VOLCANIC ROCKS-- CONTINUED.

Volcanic Rocks of the Upper Miocene Period.
Madeira.
Grand Canary.
Azores.
Lower Miocene Volcanic Rocks.
Isle of Mull.
Staffa and Antrim.
The Eifel.
Upper and Lower Miocene Volcanic Rocks of Auvergne.
Hill of Gergovia.
Eocene Volcanic Rocks of Monte Bolca.
Trap of Cretaceous Period.
Oolitic Period.
Triassic Period.
Permian Period.
Carboniferous Period.
Erect Trees buried in Volcanic Ash in the Island of Arran.
Old Red Sandstone Period.
Silurian Period.
Cambrian Period.
Laurentian Volcanic Rocks.


CHAPTER XXXI.

PLUTONIC ROCKS.

General Aspect of Plutonic Rocks.
Granite and its Varieties.
Decomposing into Spherical Masses.
Rude columnar Structure.
Graphic Granite.
Mutual Penetration of Crystals of Quartz and Feldspar.
Glass Cavities in Quartz of Granite.
Porphyritic, talcose, and syenitic Granite.
Schorlrock and Eurite.
Syenite.
Connection of the Granites and Syenites with the Volcanic Rocks.
Analogy in Composition of Trachyte and Granite.
Granite Veins in Glen Tilt, Cape of Good Hope, and Cornwall.
Metalliferous Veins in Strata near their Junction with Granite.
Quartz Veins.
Exposure of Plutonic Rocks at the surface due to Denudation.


CHAPTER XXXII.

ON THE DIFFERENT AGES OF THE PLUTONIC ROCKS.

Difficulty in ascertaining the precise Age of a Plutonic Rock.
Test of Age by Relative Position.
Test by Intrusion and Alteration.
Test by Mineral Composition.
Test by included Fragments.
Recent and Pliocene Plutonic Rocks, why invisible.
Miocene Syenite of the Isle of Skye.
Eocene Plutonic Rocks in the Andes.
Granite altering Cretaceous Rocks.
Granite altering Lias in the Alps and in Skye.
Granite of Dartmoor altering Carboniferous Strata.
Granite of the Old Red Sandstone Period.
Syenite altering Silurian Strata in Norway.
Blending of the same with Gneiss.
Most ancient Plutonic Rocks.
Granite protruded in a solid Form.


CHAPTER XXXIII.

METAMORPHIC ROCKS.

General Character of Metamorphic Rocks.
Gneiss.
Hornblende-schist.
Serpentine.
Mica-schist.
Clay-slate.
Quartzite.
Chlorite-schist.
Metamorphic Limestone.
Origin of the metamorphic Strata.
Their Stratification.
Fossiliferous Strata near intrusive Masses of Granite converted into Rocks 
identical with different Members of the metamorphic Series.
Arguments hence derived as to the Nature of Plutonic Action.
Hydrothermal Action, or the Influence of Steam and Gases in producing 
Metamorphism.
Objections to the metamorphic Theory considered.


CHAPTER XXXIV.

METAMORPHIC ROCKS-- CONTINUED.

Definition of slaty Cleavage and Joints.
Supposed Causes of these Structures.
Crystalline Theory of Cleavage.
Mechanical Theory of Cleavage.
Condensation and Elongation of slate Rocks by lateral Pressure.
Lamination of some volcanic Rocks due to Motion.
Whether the Foliation of the crystalline Schists be usually parallel with the 
original Planes of Stratification.
Examples in Norway and Scotland.
Causes of Irregularity in the Planes of Foliation.


CHAPTER XXXV.

ON THE DIFFERENT AGES OF THE METAMORPHIC ROCKS.

Difficulty of ascertaining the Age of metamorphic Strata.
Metamorphic Strata of Eocene date in the Alps of Switzerland and Savoy.
Limestone and Shale of Carrara.
Metamorphic Strata of older date than the Silurian and Cambrian Rocks.
Order of Succession in metamorphic Rocks.
Uniformity of mineral Character.
Supposed Azoic Period.
Connection between the Absence of Organic Remains and the Scarcity of calcareous 
Matter in metamorphic Rocks.


CHAPTER XXXVI.

MINERAL VEINS.

Different Kinds of mineral Veins.
Ordinary metalliferous Veins or Lodes.
Their frequent Coincidence with Faults.
Proofs that they originated in Fissures in solid Rock.
Veins shifting other Veins.
Polishing of their Walls or "Slicken sides."
Shells and Pebbles in Lodes.
Evidence of the successive Enlargement and Reopening of veins.
Examples in Cornwall and in Auvergne.
Dimensions of Veins.
Why some alternately swell out and contract.
Filling of Lodes by Sublimation from below.
Supposed relative Age of the precious Metals.
Copper and lead Veins in Ireland older than Cornish Tin.
Lead Vein in Lias, Glamorganshire.
Gold in Russia, California, and Australia.
Connection of hot Springs and mineral Veins.


INDEX. 

...


STUDENT'S ELEMENTS OF GEOLOGY.


CHAPTER I.

ON THE DIFFERENT CLASSES OF ROCKS.

Geology defined.
Successive Formation of the Earth's Crust.
Classification of Rocks according to their Origin and Age.
Aqueous Rocks.
Their Stratification and imbedded Fossils.
Volcanic Rocks, with and without Cones and Craters.
Plutonic Rocks, and their Relation to the Volcanic.
Metamorphic Rocks, and their probable Origin.
The term Primitive, why erroneously applied to the Crystalline Formations.
Leading Division of the Work.

Of what materials is the earth composed, and in what manner are these materials 
arranged? These are the first inquiries with which Geology is occupied, a 
science which derives its name from the Greek ge, the earth, and logos, a 
discourse. Previously to experience we might have imagined that investigations 
of this kind would relate exclusively to the mineral kingdom, and to the various 
rocks, soils, and metals, which occur upon the surface of the earth, or at 
various depths beneath it. But, in pursuing such researches, we soon find 
ourselves led on to consider the successive changes which have taken place in 
the former state of the earth's surface and interior, and the causes which have 
given rise to these changes; and, what is still more singular and unexpected, we 
soon become engaged in researches into the history of the animate creation, or 
of the various tribes of animals and plants which have, at different periods of 
the past, inhabited the globe.

All are aware that the solid parts of the earth consist of distinct substances, 
such as clay, chalk, sand, limestone, coal, slate, granite, and the like; but 
previously to observation it is commonly imagined that all these had remained 
from the first in the state in which we now see them-- that they were created in 
their present form, and in their present position. The geologist soon comes to a 
different conclusion, discovering proofs that the external parts of the earth 
were not all produced in the beginning of things in the state in which we now 
behold them, nor in an instant of time. On the contrary, he can show that they 
have acquired their actual configuration and condition gradually, under a great 
variety of circumstances, and at successive periods, during each of which 
distinct races of living beings have flourished on the land and in the waters, 
the remains of these creatures still lying buried in the crust of the earth.

By the "earth's crust," is meant that small portion of the exterior of our 
planet which is accessible to human observation. It comprises not merely all of 
which the structure is laid open in mountain precipices, or in cliffs 
overhanging a river or the sea, or whatever the miner may reveal in artificial 
excavations; but the whole of that outer covering of the planet on which we are 
enabled to reason by observations made at or near the surface. These reasonings 
may extend to a depth of several miles, perhaps ten miles; and even then it may 
be said, that such a thickness is no more than 1/400 part of the distance from 
the surface to the centre. The remark is just: but although the dimensions of 
such a crust are, in truth, insignificant when compared to the entire globe, yet 
they are vast, and of magnificent extent in relation to man, and to the organic 
beings which people our globe. Referring to this standard of magnitude, the 
geologist may admire the ample limits of his domain, and admit, at the same 
time, that not only the exterior of the planet, but the entire earth, is but an 
atom in the midst of the countless worlds surveyed by the astronomer.

The materials of this crust are not thrown together confusedly; but distinct 
mineral masses, called rocks, are found to occupy definite spaces, and to 
exhibit a certain order of arrangement. The term ROCK is applied indifferently 
by geologists to all these substances, whether they be soft or stony, for clay 
and sand are included in the term, and some have even brought peat under this 
denomination. Our old writers endeavoured to avoid offering such violence to our 
language, by speaking of the component materials of the earth as consisting of 
rocks and SOILS. But there is often so insensible a passage from a soft and 
incoherent state to that of stone, that geologists of all countries have found 
it indispensable to have one technical term to include both, and in this sense 
we find ROCHE applied in French, ROCCA in Italian, and FELSART in German. The 
beginner, however, must constantly bear in mind that the term rock by no means 
implies that a mineral mass is in an indurated or stony condition.

The most natural and convenient mode of classifying the various rocks which 
compose the earth's crust, is to refer, in the first place, to their origin, and 
in the second to their relative age. I shall therefore begin by endeavouring 
briefly to explain to the student how all rocks may be divided into four great 
classes by reference to their different origin, or, in other words, by reference 
to the different circumstances and causes by which they have been produced.

The first two divisions, which will at once be understood as natural, are the 
aqueous and volcanic, or the products of watery and those of igneous action at 
or near the surface.

AQUEOUS ROCKS.

The aqueous rocks, sometimes called the sedimentary, or fossiliferous, cover a 
larger part of the earth's surface than any others. They consist chiefly of 
mechanical deposits (pebbles, sand, and mud), but are partly of chemical and 
some of them of organic origin, especially the limestones. These rocks are 
STRATIFIED, or divided into distinct layers, or strata. The term STRATUM means 
simply a bed, or any thing spread out or STREWED over a given surface; and we 
infer that these strata have been generally spread out by the action of water, 
from what we daily see taking place near the mouths of rivers, or on the land 
during temporary inundations. For, whenever a running stream charged with mud or 
sand, has its velocity checked, as when it enters a lake or sea, or overflows a 
plain, the sediment, previously held in suspension by the motion of the water, 
sinks, by its own gravity to the bottom. In this manner layers of mud and sand 
are thrown down one upon another.

If we drain a lake which has been fed by a small stream, we frequently find at 
the bottom a series of deposits, disposed with considerable regularity, one 
above the other; the uppermost, perhaps, may be a stratum of peat, next below a 
more dense and solid variety of the same material; still lower a bed of shell-
marl, alternating with peat or sand, and then other beds of marl, divided by 
layers of clay. Now, if a second pit be sunk through the same continuous 
lacustrine FORMATION at some distance from the first, nearly the same series of 
beds is commonly met with, yet with slight variations; some, for example, of the 
layers of sand, clay, or marl, may be wanting, one or more of them having 
thinned out and given place to others, or sometimes one of the masses first 
examined is observed to increase in thickness to the exclusion of other beds.

The term "FORMATION," which I have used in the above explanation, expresses in 
geology any assemblage of rocks which have some character in common, whether of 
origin, age, or composition. Thus we speak of stratified and unstratified, 
fresh-water and marine, aqueous and volcanic, ancient and modern, metalliferous 
and non-metalliferous formations.

In the estuaries of large rivers, such as the Ganges and the Mississippi, we may 
observe, at low water, phenomena analogous to those of the drained lakes above 
mentioned, but on a grander scale, and extending over areas several hundred 
miles in length and breadth. When the periodical inundations subside, the river 
hollows out a channel to the depth of many yards through horizontal beds of clay 
and sand, the ends of which are seen exposed in perpendicular cliffs. These beds 
vary in their mineral composition, or colour, or in the fineness or coarseness 
of their particles, and some of them are occasionally characterised by 
containing drift-wood. At the junction of the river and the sea, especially in 
lagoons nearly separated by sand-bars from the ocean, deposits are often formed 
in which brackish and salt-water shells are included.

In Egypt, where the Nile is always adding to its delta by filling up part of the 
Mediterranean with mud, the newly deposited sediment is STRATIFIED, the thin 
layer thrown down in one season differing slightly in colour from that of a 
previous year, and being separable from it, as has been observed in excavations 
at Cairo and other places. (See "Principles of Geology" by the Author Index 
"Nile" "Rivers" etc.)

When beds of sand, clay, and marl, containing shells and vegetable matter, are 
found arranged in a similar manner in the interior of the earth, we ascribe to 
them a similar origin; and the more we examine their characters in minute 
detail, the more exact do we find the resemblance. Thus, for example, at various 
heights and depths in the earth, and often far from seas, lakes, and rivers, we 
meet with layers of rounded pebbles composed of flint, limestone, granite, or 
other rocks, resembling the shingles of a sea-beach or the gravel in a torrent's 
bed. Such layers of pebbles frequently alternate with others formed of sand or 
fine sediment, just as we may see in the channel of a river descending from 
hills bordering a coast, where the current sweeps down at one season coarse sand 
and gravel, while at another, when the waters are low and less rapid, fine mud 
and sand alone are carried seaward. (See Figure 7 Chapter 2.)

If a stratified arrangement, and the rounded form of pebbles, are alone 
sufficient to lead us to the conclusion that certain rocks originated under 
water, this opinion is farther confirmed by the distinct and independent 
evidence of FOSSILS, so abundantly included in the earth's crust. By a FOSSIL is 
meant any body, or the traces of the existence of any body, whether animal or 
vegetable, which has been buried in the earth by natural causes. Now the remains 
of animals, especially of aquatic species, are found almost everywhere imbedded 
in stratified rocks, and sometimes, in the case of limestone, they are in such 
abundance as to constitute the entire mass of the rock itself. Shells and corals 
are the most frequent, and with them are often associated the bones and teeth of 
fishes, fragments of wood, impressions of leaves, and other organic substances. 
Fossil shells, of forms such as now abound in the sea, are met with far inland, 
both near the surface, and at great depths below it. They occur at all heights 
above the level of the ocean, having been observed at elevations of more than 
8000 feet in the Pyrenees, 10,000 in the Alps, 13,000 in the Andes, and above 
18,000 feet in the Himalaya. (Colonel R.J. Strachey found oolitic fossils 18,400 
feet high in the Himalaya.)

These shells belong mostly to marine testacea, but in some places exclusively to 
forms characteristic of lakes and rivers. Hence it is concluded that some 
ancient strata were deposited at the bottom of the sea, and others in lakes and 
estuaries.

We have now pointed out one great class of rocks, which, however they may vary 
in mineral composition, colour, grain, or other characters, external and 
internal, may nevertheless be grouped together as having a common origin. They 
have all been formed under water, in the same manner as modern accumulations of 
sand, mud, shingle, banks of shells, reefs of coral, and the like, and are all 
characterised by stratification or fossils, or by both.

VOLCANIC ROCKS.

The division of rocks which we may next consider are the volcanic, or those 
which have been produced at or near the surface whether in ancient or modern 
times, not by water, but by the action of fire or subterranean heat. These rocks 
are for the most part unstratified, and are devoid of fossils. They are more 
partially distributed than aqueous formations, at least in respect to horizontal 
extension. Among those parts of Europe where they exhibit characters not to be 
mistaken, I may mention not only Sicily and the country round Naples, but 
Auvergne, Velay, and Vivarais, now the departments of Puy de Dome, Haute Loire, 
and Ardeche, towards the centre and south of France, in which are several 
hundred conical hills having the forms of modern volcanoes, with craters more or 
less perfect on many of their summits. These cones are composed moreover of 
lava, sand, and ashes, similar to those of active volcanoes. Streams of lava may 
sometimes be traced from the cones into the adjoining valleys, where they have 
choked up the ancient channels of rivers with solid rock, in the same manner as 
some modern flows of lava in Iceland have been known to do, the rivers either 
flowing beneath or cutting out a narrow passage on one side of the lava. 
Although none of these French volcanoes have been in activity within the period 
of history or tradition, their forms are often very perfect. Some, however, have 
been compared to the mere skeletons of volcanoes, the rains and torrents having 
washed their sides, and removed all the loose sand and scoriae, leaving only the 
harder and more solid materials. By this erosion, and by earthquakes, their 
internal structure has occasionally been laid open to view, in fissures and 
ravines; and we then behold not only many successive beds and masses of porous 
lava, sand, and scoriae, but also perpendicular walls, or DIKES, as they are 
called, of volcanic rock, which have burst through the other materials. Such 
dikes are also observed in the structure of Vesuvius, Etna, and other active 
volcanoes. They have been formed by the pouring of melted matter, whether from 
above or below, into open fissures, and they commonly traverse deposits of 
VOLCANIC TUFF, a substance produced by the showering down from the air, or 
incumbent waters, of sand and cinders, first shot up from the interior of the 
earth by the explosions of volcanic gases.

Besides the parts of France above alluded to, there are other countries, as the 
north of Spain, the south of Sicily, the Tuscan territory of Italy, the lower 
Rhenish provinces, and Hungary, where spent volcanoes may be seen, still 
preserving in many cases a conical form, and having craters and often lava-
streams connected with them.

There are also other rocks in England, Scotland, Ireland, and almost every 
country in Europe, which we infer to be of igneous origin, although they do not 
form hills with cones and craters. Thus, for example, we feel assured that the 
rock of Staffa, and that of the Giant's Causeway, called basalt, is volcanic, 
because it agrees in its columnar structure and mineral composition with streams 
of lava which we know to have flowed from the craters of volcanoes. We find also 
similar basaltic and other igneous rocks associated with beds of TUFF in various 
parts of the British Isles, and forming DIKES, such as have been spoken of; and 
some of the strata through which these dikes cut are occasionally altered at the 
point of contact, as if they had been exposed to the intense heat of melted 
matter.

The absence of cones and craters, and long narrow streams of superficial lava, 
in England and many other countries, is principally to be attributed to the 
eruptions having been submarine, just as a considerable proportion of volcanoes 
in our own times burst out beneath the sea. But this question must be enlarged 
upon more fully in the chapters on Igneous Rocks, in which it will also be 
shown, that as different sedimentary formations, containing each their 
characteristic fossils, have been deposited at successive periods, so also 
volcanic sand and scoriae have been thrown out, and lavas have flowed over the 
land or bed of the sea, at many different epochs, or have been injected into 
fissures; so that the igneous as well as the aqueous rocks may be classed as a 
chronological series of monuments, throwing light on a succession of events in 
the history of the earth.

PLUTONIC ROCKS (GRANITE ETC).

We have now pointed out the existence of two distinct orders of mineral masses, 
the aqueous and the volcanic: but if we examine a large portion of a continent, 
especially if it contain within it a lofty mountain range, we rarely fail to 
discover two other classes of rocks, very distinct from either of those above 
alluded to, and which we can neither assimilate to deposits such as are now 
accumulated in lakes or seas, nor to those generated by ordinary volcanic 
action. The members of both these divisions of rocks agree in being highly 
crystalline and destitute of organic remains. The rocks of one division have 
been called Plutonic, comprehending all the granites and certain porphyries, 
which are nearly allied in some of their characters to volcanic formations. The 
members of the other class are stratified and often slaty, and have been called 
by some the CRYSTALLINE SCHISTS, in which group are included gneiss, micaceous-
schist (or mica-slate), hornblende-schist, statuary marble, the finer kinds of 
roofing slate, and other rocks afterwards to be described.

As it is admitted that nothing strictly analogous to these crystalline 
productions can now be seen in the progress of formation on the earth's surface, 
it will naturally be asked, on what data we can find a place for them in a 
system of classification founded on the origin of rocks. I can not, in reply to 
this question, pretend to give the student, in a few words, an intelligible 
account of the long chain of facts and reasonings from which geologists have 
been led to infer the nature of the rocks in question. The result, however, may 
be briefly stated. All the various kinds of granites which constitute the 
Plutonic family are supposed to be of igneous or aqueo-igneous origin, and to 
have been formed under great pressure, at a considerable depth in the earth, or 
sometimes, perhaps, under a certain weight of incumbent ocean. Like the lava of 
volcanoes, they have been melted, and afterwards cooled and crystallised, but 
with extreme slowness, and under conditions very different from those of bodies 
cooling in the open air. Hence they differ from the volcanic rocks, not only by 
their more crystalline texture, but also by the absence of tuffs and breccias, 
which are the products of eruptions at the earth's surface, or beneath seas of 
inconsiderable depth. They differ also by the absence of pores or cellular 
cavities, to which the expansion of the entangled gases gives rise in ordinary 
lava.

METAMORPHIC, OR STRATIFIED CRYSTALLINE ROCKS.

The fourth and last great division of rocks are the crystalline strata and 
slates, or schists, called gneiss, mica-schist, clay-slate, chlorite-schist, 
marble, and the like, the origin of which is more doubtful than that of the 
other three classes. They contain no pebbles, or sand, or scoriae, or angular 
pieces of imbedded stone, and no traces of organic bodies, and they are often as 
crystalline as granite, yet are divided into beds, corresponding in form and 
arrangement to those of sedimentary formations, and are therefore said to be 
stratified. The beds sometimes consist of an alternation of substances varying 
in colour, composition, and thickness, precisely as we see in stratified 
fossiliferous deposits. According to the Huttonian theory, which I adopt as the 
most probable, and which will be afterwards more fully explained, the materials 
of these strata were originally deposited from water in the usual form of 
sediment, but they were subsequently so altered by subterranean heat, as to 
assume a new texture. It is demonstrable, in some cases at least, that such a 
complete conversion has actually taken place, fossiliferous strata having 
exchanged an earthy for a highly crystalline texture for a distance of a quarter 
of a mile from their contact with granite. In some cases, dark limestones, 
replete with shells and corals, have been turned into white statuary marble; and 
hard clays, containing vegetable or other remains, into slates called mica-
schist or hornblende-schist, every vestige of the organic bodies having been 
obliterated.

Although we are in a great degree ignorant of the precise nature of the 
influence exerted in these cases, yet it evidently bears some analogy to that 
which volcanic heat and gases are known to produce; and the action may be 
conveniently called Plutonic, because it appears to have been developed in those 
regions where Plutonic rocks are generated, and under similar circumstances of 
pressure and depth in the earth. Intensely heated water or steam permeating 
stratified masses under great pressure have no doubt played their part in 
producing the crystalline texture and other changes, and it is clear that the 
transforming influence has often pervaded entire mountain masses of strata.

In accordance with the hypothesis above alluded to, I proposed in the first 
edition of the Principles of Geology (1833) the term "Metamorphic" for the 
altered strata, a term derived from meta, trans, and morphe, forma.

Hence there are four great classes of rocks considered in reference to their 
origin-- the aqueous, the volcanic, the Plutonic, and the metamorphic. In the 
course of this work it will be shown that portions of each of these four 
distinct classes have originated at many successive periods. They have all been 
produced contemporaneously, and may even now be in the progress of formation on 
a large scale. It is not true, as was formerly supposed, that all granites, 
together with the crystalline or metamorphic strata, were first formed, and 
therefore entitled to be called "primitive," and that the aqueous and volcanic 
rocks were afterwards superimposed, and should, therefore, rank as secondary in 
the order of time. This idea was adopted in the infancy of the science, when all 
formations, whether stratified or unstratified, earthy or crystalline, with or 
without fossils, were alike regarded as of aqueous origin. At that period it was 
naturally argued that the foundation must be older than the superstructure; but 
it was afterwards discovered that this opinion was by no means in every instance 
a legitimate deduction from facts; for the inferior parts of the earth's crust 
have often been modified, and even entirely changed, by the influence of 
volcanic and other subterranean causes, while superimposed formations have not 
been in the slightest degree altered. In other words, the destroying and 
renovating processes have given birth to new rocks below, while those above, 
whether crystalline or fossiliferous, have remained in their ancient condition. 
Even in cities, such as Venice and Amsterdam, it cannot be laid down as 
universally true that the upper parts of each edifice, whether of brick or 
marble, are more modern than the foundations on which they rest, for these often 
consist of wooden piles, which may have rotted and been replaced one after the 
other, without the least injury to the buildings above; meanwhile, these may 
have required scarcely any repair, and may have been constantly inhabited. So it 
is with the habitable surface of our globe, in its relation to large masses of 
rock immediately below; it may continue the same for ages, while subjacent 
materials, at a great depth, are passing from a solid to a fluid state, and then 
reconsolidating, so as to acquire a new texture.

As all the crystalline rocks may, in some respects, be viewed as belonging to 
one great family, whether they be stratified or unstratified, metamorphic or 
Plutonic, it will often be convenient to speak of them by one common name. It 
being now ascertained, as above stated, that they are of very different ages, 
sometimes newer than the strata called secondary, the terms primitive and 
primary which were formerly used for the whole must be abandoned, as they would 
imply a manifest contradiction. It is indispensable, therefore, to find a new 
name, one which must not be of chronological import, and must express, on the 
one hand, some peculiarity equally attributable to granite and gneiss (to the 
Plutonic as well as the ALTERED rocks), and, on the other, must have reference 
to characters in which those rocks differ, both from the volcanic and from the 
UNALTERED sedimentary strata. I proposed in the Principles of Geology (first 
edition volume 3) the term "hypogene" for this purpose, derived from upo, under, 
and ginomai, to be, or to be born; a word implying the theory that granite, 
gneiss, and the other crystalline formations are alike NETHERFORMED rocks, or 
rocks which have not assumed their present form and structure at the surface. 
They occupy the lowest place in the order of superposition. Even in regions such 
as the Alps, where some masses of granite and gneiss can be shown to be of 
comparatively modern date, belonging, for example, to the period hereafter to be 
described as tertiary, they are still UNDERLYING rocks. They never repose on the 
volcanic or trappean formations, nor on strata containing organic remains. They 
are HYPOGENE, as "being under" all the rest.

From what has now been said, the reader will understand that each of the four 
great classes of rocks may be studied under two distinct points of view; first, 
they may be studied simply as mineral masses deriving their origin from 
particular causes, and having a certain composition, form, and position in the 
earth's crust, or other characters both positive and negative, such as the 
presence or absence of organic remains. In the second place, the rocks of each 
class may be viewed as a grand chronological series of monuments, attesting a 
succession of events in the former history of the globe and its living 
inhabitants.

I shall accordingly proceed to treat of each family of rocks; first, in 
reference to those characters which are not chronological, and then in 
particular relation to the several periods when they were formed.


CHAPTER II.

AQUEOUS ROCKS.-- THEIR COMPOSITION AND FORMS OF STRATIFICATION.

Mineral Composition of Strata.
Siliceous Rocks.
Argillaceous.
Calcareous.
Gypsum.
Forms of Stratification.
Original Horizontality.
Thinning out.
Diagonal Arrangement.
Ripple-mark.

In pursuance of the arrangement explained in the last chapter, we shall begin by 
examining the aqueous or sedimentary rocks, which are for the most part 
distinctly stratified, and contain fossils. We may first study them with 
reference to their mineral composition, external appearance, position, mode of 
origin, organic contents, and other characters which belong to them as aqueous 
formations, independently of their age, and we may afterwards consider them 
chronologically or with reference to the successive geological periods when they 
originated.

I have already given an outline of the data which led to the belief that the 
stratified and fossiliferous rocks were originally deposited under water; but, 
before entering into a more detailed investigation, it will be desirable to say 
something of the ordinary materials of which such strata are composed. These may 
be said to belong principally to three divisions, the siliceous, the 
argillaceous, and the calcareous, which are formed respectively of flint, clay, 
and carbonate of lime. Of these, the siliceous are chiefly made up of sand or 
flinty grains; the argillaceous, or clayey, of a mixture of siliceous matter 
with a certain proportion, about a fourth in weight, of aluminous earth; and, 
lastly, the calcareous rocks, or limestones, of carbonic acid and lime.

SILICEOUS AND ARENACEOUS ROCKS.

To speak first of the sandy division: beds of loose sand are frequently met 
with, of which the grains consist entirely of silex, which term comprehends all 
purely siliceous minerals, as quartz and common flint. Quartz is silex in its 
purest form. Flint usually contains some admixture of alumina and oxide of iron. 
The siliceous grains in sand are usually rounded, as if by the action of running 
water. Sandstone is an aggregate of such grains, which often cohere together 
without any visible cement, but more commonly are bound together by a slight 
quantity of siliceous or calcareous matter, or by oxide of iron or clay.

Pure siliceous rocks may be known by not effervescing when a drop of nitric, 
sulphuric or other acid is applied to them, or by the grains not being readily 
scratched or broken by ordinary pressure. In nature there is every intermediate 
gradation, from perfectly loose sand to the hardest sandstone. In MICACEOUS 
SANDSTONES mica is very abundant; and the thin silvery plates into which that 
mineral divides are often arranged in layers parallel to the planes of 
stratification, giving a slaty or laminated texture to the rock.

When sandstone is coarse-grained, it is usually called GRIT. If the grains are 
rounded, and large enough to be called pebbles, it becomes a CONGLOMERATE or 
PUDDING-STONE, which may consist of pieces of one or of many different kinds of 
rock. A conglomerate, therefore, is simply gravel bound together by cement.

ARGILLACEOUS ROCKS.

Clay, strictly speaking, is a mixture of silex or flint with a large proportion, 
usually about one fourth, of alumina, or argil; but in common language, any 
earth which possesses sufficient ductility, when kneaded up with water, to be 
fashioned like paste by the hand, or by the potter's lathe, is called a CLAY; 
and such clays vary greatly in their composition, and are, in general, nothing 
more than mud derived from the decomposition or wearing down of rocks. The 
purest clay found in nature is porcelain clay, or kaolin, which results from the 
decomposition of a rock composed of feldspar and quartz, and it is almost always 
mixed with quartz. The kaolin of China consists of 71.15 parts of silex, 15.86 
of alumine, 1.92 of lime, and 6.73 of water (W. Phillips Mineralogy page 33.); 
but other porcelain clays differ materially, that of Cornwall being composed, 
according to Boase, of nearly equal parts of silica and alumine, with 1 per cent 
of magnesia. (Phil. Mag. volume 10 1837.) SHALE has also the property, like 
clay, of becoming plastic in water: it is a more solid form of clay, or 
argillaceous matter, condensed by pressure. It always divides into laminae more 
or less regular.

One general character of all argillaceous rocks is to give out a peculiar, 
earthy odour when breathed upon, which is a test of the presence of alumine, 
although it does not belong to pure alumine, but, apparently, to the combination 
of that substance with oxide of iron. (See W. Phillips Mineralogy "Alumine.")

CALCAREOUS ROCKS.

This division comprehends those rocks which, like chalk, are composed chiefly of 
lime and carbonic acid. Shells and corals are also formed of the same elements, 
with the addition of animal matter. To obtain pure lime it is necessary to 
calcine these calcareous substances, that is to say, to expose them to heat of 
sufficient intensity to drive off the carbonic acid, and other volatile matter. 
White chalk is sometimes pure carbonate of lime; and this rock, although usually 
in a soft and earthy state, is occasionally sufficiently solid to be used for 
building, and even passes into a COMPACT stone, or a stone of which the separate 
parts are so minute as not to be distinguishable from each other by the naked 
eye.

Many limestones are made up entirely of minute fragments of shells and coral, or 
of calcareous sand cemented together. These last might be called "calcareous 
sandstones;" but that term is more properly applied to a rock in which the 
grains are partly calcareous and partly siliceous, or to quartzose sandstones, 
having a cement of carbonate of lime.

The variety of limestone called OOLITE is composed of numerous small egg-like 
grains, resembling the roe of a fish, each of which has usually a small fragment 
of sand as a nucleus, around which concentric layers of calcareous matter have 
accumulated.

Any limestone which is sufficiently hard to take a fine polish is called MARBLE. 
Many of these are fossiliferous; but statuary marble, which is also called 
saccharoid limestone, as having a texture resembling that of loaf-sugar, is 
devoid of fossils, and is in many cases a member of the metamorphic series.

SILICEOUS LIMESTONE is an intimate mixture of carbonate of lime and flint, and 
is harder in proportion as the flinty matter predominates.

The presence of carbonate of lime in a rock may be ascertained by applying to 
the surface a small drop of diluted sulphuric, nitric, or muriatic acid, or 
strong vinegar; for the lime, having a greater chemical affinity for any one of 
these acids than for the carbonic, unites immediately with them to form new 
compounds, thereby becoming a sulphate, nitrate or muriate of lime. The carbonic 
acid, when thus liberated from its union with the lime, escapes in a gaseous 
form, and froths up or effervesces as it makes its way in small bubbles through 
the drop of liquid. This effervescence is brisk or feeble in proportion as the 
limestone is pure or impure, or, in other words, according to the quantity of 
foreign matter mixed with the carbonate of lime. Without the aid of this test, 
the most experienced eye can not always detect the presence of carbonate of lime 
in rocks.

The above-mentioned three classes of rocks, the siliceous, argillaceous, and 
calcareous, pass continually into each other, and rarely occur in a perfectly 
separate and pure form. Thus it is an exception to the general rule to meet with 
a limestone as pure as ordinary white chalk, or with clay as aluminous as that 
used in Cornwall for porcelain, or with sand so entirely composed of siliceous 
grains as the white sand of Alum Bay, in the Isle of Wight, employed in the 
manufacture of glass, or sandstone so pure as the grit of Fontainebleau, used 
for pavement in France. More commonly we find sand and clay, or clay and marl, 
intermixed in the same mass. When the sand and clay are each in considerable 
quantity, the mixture is called LOAM. If there is much calcareous matter in clay 
it is called MARL; but this term has unfortunately been used so vaguely, as 
often to be very ambiguous. It has been applied to substances in which there is 
no lime; as, to that red loam usually called red marl in certain parts of 
England. Agriculturists were in the habit of calling any soil a marl which, like 
true marl, fell to pieces readily on exposure to the air. Hence arose the 
confusion of using this name for soils which, consisting of loam, were easily 
worked by the plough, though devoid of lime.

MARL SLATE bears the same relation to marl which shale bears to clay, being a 
calcareous shale. It is very abundant in some countries, as in the Swiss Alps. 
Argillaceous or marly limestone is also of common occurrence.

There are few other kinds of rock which enter so largely into the composition of 
sedimentary strata as to make it necessary to dwell here on their characters. I 
may, however, mention two others-- magnesian limestone or dolomite, and gypsum. 
MAGNESIAN LIMESTONE is composed of carbonate of lime and carbonate of magnesia; 
the proportion of the latter amounting in some cases to nearly one half. It 
effervesces much more slowly and feebly with acids than common limestone. In 
England this rock is generally of a yellowish colour; but it varies greatly in 
mineralogical character, passing from an earthy state to a white compact stone 
of great hardness. DOLOMITE, so common in many parts of Germany and France, is 
also a variety of magnesian limestone, usually of a granular texture.

Gypsum is a rock composed of sulphuric acid, lime, and water. It is usually a 
soft whitish-yellow rock, with a texture resembling that of loaf-sugar, but 
sometimes it is entirely composed of lenticular crystals. It is insoluble in 
acids, and does not effervesce like chalk and dolomite, because it does not 
contain carbonic acid gas, or fixed air, the lime being already combined with 
sulphuric acid, for which it has a stronger affinity than for any other. 
Anhydrous gypsum is a rare variety, into which water does not enter as a 
component part. GYPSEOUS MARL is a mixture of gypsum and marl. ALABASTER is a 
granular and compact variety of gypsum found in masses large enough to be used 
in sculpture and architecture. It is sometimes a pure snow-white substance, as 
that of Volterra in Tuscany, well known as being carved for works of art in 
Florence and Leghorn. It is a softer stone than marble, and more easily wrought.

FORMS OF STRATIFICATION.

A series of strata sometimes consists of one of the above rocks, sometimes of 
two or more in alternating beds.

Thus, in the coal districts of England, for example, we often pass through 
several beds of sandstone, some of finer, others of coarser grain, some white, 
others of a dark colour, and below these, layers of shale and sandstone or beds 
of shale, divisible into leaf-like laminae, and containing beautiful impressions 
of plants. Then again we meet with beds of pure and impure coal, alternating 
with shales and sandstones, and underneath the whole, perhaps, are calcareous 
strata, or beds of limestone, filled with corals and marine shells, each bed 
distinguishable from another by certain fossils, or by the abundance of 
particular species of shells or zoophytes.

This alternation of different kinds of rock produces the most distinct 
stratification; and we often find beds of limestone and marl, conglomerate and 
sandstone, sand and clay, recurring again and again, in nearly regular order, 
throughout a series of many hundred strata. The causes which may produce these 
phenomena are various, and have been fully discussed in my treatise on the 
modern changes of the earth's surface. (Consult Index to Principles of Geology, 
"Stratification" "Currents" "Deltas" "Water" etc.) It is there seen that rivers 
flowing into lakes and seas are charged with sediment, varying in quantity, 
composition, colour, and grain according to the seasons; the waters are 
sometimes flooded and rapid, at other periods low and feeble; different 
tributaries, also, draining peculiar countries and soils, and therefore charged 
with peculiar sediment, are swollen at distinct periods. It was also shown that 
the waves of the sea and currents undermine the cliffs during wintry storms, and 
sweep away the materials into the deep, after which a season of tranquillity 
succeeds, when nothing but the finest mud is spread by the movements of the 
ocean over the same submarine area.

It is not the object of the present work to give a description of these 
operations, repeated as they are, year after year, and century after century; 
but I may suggest an explanation of the manner in which some micaceous 
sandstones have originated, namely, those in which we see innumerable thin 
layers of mica dividing layers of fine quartzose sand. I observed the same 
arrangement of materials in recent mud deposited in the estuary of Laroche St. 
Bernard in Brittany, at the mouth of the Loire. The surrounding rocks are of 
gneiss, which, by its waste, supplies the mud: when this dries at low water, it 
is found to consist of brown laminated clay, divided by thin seams of mica. The 
separation of the mica in this case, or in that of micaceous sandstones, may be 
thus understood. If we take a handful of quartzose sand, mixed with mica, and 
throw it into a clear running stream, we see the materials immediately sorted by 
the water, the grains of quartz falling almost directly to the bottom, while the 
plates of mica take a much longer time to reach the bottom, and are carried 
farther down the stream. At the first instant the water is turbid, but 
immediately after the flat surfaces of the plates of mica are seen all alone, 
reflecting a silvery light, as they descend slowly, to form a distinct micaceous 
lamina. The mica is the heavier mineral of the two; but it remains a longer time 
suspended in the fluid, owing to its greater extent of surface. It is easy, 
therefore, to perceive that where such mud is acted upon by a river or tidal 
current, the thin plates of mica will be carried farther, and not deposited in 
the same places as the grains of quartz; and since the force and velocity of the 
stream varies from time to time, layers of mica or of sand will be thrown down 
successively on the same area.

ORIGINAL HORIZONTALITY.

It is said generally that the upper and under surfaces of strata, or the "planes 
of stratification," are parallel. Although this is not strictly true, they make 
an approach to parallelism, for the same reason that sediment is usually 
deposited at first in nearly horizontal layers. Such an arrangement can by no 
means be attributed to an original evenness or horizontality in the bed of the 
sea: for it is ascertained that in those places where no matter has been 
recently deposited, the bottom of the ocean is often as uneven as that of the 
dry land, having in like manner its hills, valleys, and ravines. Yet if the sea 
should go down, or be removed from near the mouth of a large river where a delta 
has been forming, we should see extensive plains of mud and sand laid dry, 
which, to the eye, would appear perfectly level, although, in reality, they 
would slope gently from the land towards the sea.

This tendency in newly-formed strata to assume a horizontal position arises 
principally from the motion of the water, which forces along particles of sand 
or mud at the bottom, and causes them to settle in hollows or depressions where 
they are less exposed to the force of a current than when they are resting on 
elevated points. The velocity of the current and the motion of the superficial 
waves diminish from the surface downward, and are least in those depressions 
where the water is deepest.

(FIGURE 1. Layers of sand and ashes on uneven ground.)

A good illustration of the principle here alluded to may be sometimes seen in 
the neighbourhood of a volcano, when a section, whether natural or artificial, 
has laid open to view a succession of various-coloured layers of sand and ashes, 
which have fallen in showers upon uneven ground. Thus let A B (Figure 1) be two 
ridges, with an intervening valley. These original inequalities of the surface 
have been gradually effaced by beds of sand and ashes c, d, e, the surface at e 
being quite level. It will be seen that, although the materials of the first 
layers have accommodated themselves in a great degree to the shape of the ground 
A B, yet each bed is thickest at the bottom. At first a great many particles 
would be carried by their own gravity down the steep sides of A and B, and 
others would afterwards be blown by the wind as they fell off the ridges, and 
would settle in the hollow, which would thus become more and more effaced as the 
strata accumulated from c to e. Now, water in motion can exert this levelling 
power on similar materials more easily than air, for almost all stones lose in 
water more than a third of the weight which they have in air, the specific 
gravity of rocks being in general as 2 1/2 when compared to that of water, which 
is estimated at 1. But the buoyancy of sand or mud would be still greater in the 
sea, as the density of salt-water exceeds that of fresh.

(FIGURE 2. Section of strata of sandstone, grit, and conglomerate.)

Yet, however uniform and horizontal may be the surface of new deposits in 
general, there are still many disturbing causes, such as eddies in the water, 
and currents moving first in one and then in another direction, which frequently 
cause irregularities. We may sometimes follow a bed of limestone, shale, or 
sandstone, for a distance of many hundred yards continuously; but we generally 
find at length that each individual stratum thins out, and allows the beds which 
were previously above and below it to meet. If the materials are coarse, as in 
grits and conglomerates, the same beds can rarely be traced many yards without 
varying in size, and often coming to an end abruptly. (See Figure 2.)

DIAGONAL OR CROSS STRATIFICATION.

(FIGURE 3. Section of sand at Sandy Hill, near Biggleswade, Bedfordshire. Height 
20 feet. (Green-sand formation.))

(FIGURE 4. Layers of sediment on a bank.)

(FIGURE 5. Nearly horizontal layers of sediment over sloping strata.)

(FIGURE 6. Cliff between mismer and Dunwich.)

There is also another phenomenon of frequent occurrence. We find a series of 
larger strata, each of which is composed of a number of minor layers placed 
obliquely to the general planes of stratification. To this diagonal arrangement 
the name of "false or cross bedding" has been given. Thus in the section (Figure 
3) we see seven or eight large beds of loose sand, yellow and brown, and the 
lines a, b, c mark some of the principal planes of stratification, which are 
nearly horizontal. But the greater part of the subordinate laminae do not 
conform to these planes, but have often a steep slope, the inclination being 
sometimes towards opposite points of the compass. When the sand is loose and 
incoherent, as in the case here represented, the deviation from parallelism of 
the slanting laminae can not possibly be accounted for by any rearrangement of 
the particles acquired during the consolidation of the rock. In what manner, 
then, can such irregularities be due to original deposition? We must suppose 
that at the bottom of the sea, as well as in the beds of rivers, the motions of 
waves, currents, and eddies often cause mud, sand, and gravel to be thrown down 
in heaps on particular spots, instead of being spread out uniformly over a wide 
area. Sometimes, when banks are thus formed, currents may cut passages through 
them, just as a river forms its bed. Suppose the bank A (Figure 4) to be thus 
formed with a steep sloping side, and, the water being in a tranquil state, the 
layer of sediment No. 1 is thrown down upon it, conforming nearly to its 
surface. Afterwards the other layers, 2, 3, 4, may be deposited in succession, 
so that the bank B C D is formed. If the current then increases in velocity, it 
may cut away the upper portion of this mass down to the dotted line e, and 
deposit the materials thus removed farther on, so as to form the layers 5, 6, 7, 
8. We have now the bank B, C, D, E (Figure 5), of which the surface is almost 
level, and on which the nearly horizontal layers, 9, 10, 11, may then 
accumulate. It was shown in Figure 3 that the diagonal layers of successive 
strata may sometimes have an opposite slope. This is well seen in some cliffs of 
loose sand on the Suffolk coast. A portion of one of these is represented in 
Figure 6, where the layers, of which there are about six in the thickness of an 
inch, are composed of quartzose grains. This arrangement may have been due to 
the altered direction of the tides and currents in the same place.

(FIGURE 7. Section from Monte Calvo to the sea by the valley of the Magnan, near 
Nice.
A. Dolomite and sandstone. (Green-sand formation?)
a, b, d. Beds of gravel and sand.
c. Fine marl and sand of Ste. Madeleine, with marine (Pliocene) shells.)

The description above given of the slanting position of the minor layers 
constituting a single stratum is in certain cases applicable on a much grander 
scale to masses several hundred feet thick, and many miles in extent. A fine 
example may be seen at the base of the Maritime Alps near Nice. The mountains 
here terminate abruptly in the sea, so that a depth of one hundred fathoms is 
often found within a stone's throw of the beach, and sometimes a depth of 3000 
feet within half a mile. But at certain points, strata of sand, marl, or 
conglomerate intervene between the shore and the mountains, as in the section 
(Figure 7), where a vast succession of slanting beds of gravel and sand may be 
traced from the sea to Monte Calvo, a distance of no less than nine miles in a 
straight line. The dip of these beds is remarkably uniform, being always 
southward or towards the Mediterranean, at an angle of about 25 degrees. They 
are exposed to view in nearly vertical precipices, varying from 200 to 600 feet 
in height, which bound the valley through which the river Magnan flows. 
Although, in a general view, the strata appear to be parallel and uniform, they 
are nevertheless found, when examined closely, to be wedge-shaped, and to thin 
out when followed for a few hundred feet or yards, so that we may suppose them 
to have been thrown down originally upon the side of a steep bank where a river 
or Alpine torrent discharged itself into a deep and tranquil sea, and formed a 
delta, which advanced gradually from the base of Monte Calvo to a distance of 
nine miles from the original shore. If subsequently this part of the Alps and 
bed of the sea were raised 700 feet, the delta may have emerged, a deep channel 
may then have been cut through it by the river, and the coast may at the same 
time have acquired its present configuration.

(FIGURE 8. Slab of ripple-marked (New Red) sandstone from Cheshire.)

It is well known that the torrents and streams which now descend from the Alpine 
declivities to the shore, bring down annually, when the snow melts, vast 
quantities of shingle and sand, and then, as they subside, fine mud, while in 
summer they are nearly or entirely dry; so that it may be safely assumed that 
deposits like those of the valley of the Magnan, consisting of coarse gravel 
alternating with fine sediment, are still in progress at many points, as, for 
instance, at the mouth of the Var. They must advance upon the Mediterranean in 
the form of great shoals terminating in a steep talus; such being the original 
mode of accumulation of all coarse materials conveyed into deep water, 
especially where they are composed in great part of pebbles, which can not be 
transported to indefinite distances by currents of moderate velocity. By 
inattention to facts and inferences of this kind, a very exaggerated estimate 
has sometimes been made of the supposed depth of the ancient ocean. There can be 
no doubt, for example, that the strata a, Figure 7, or those nearest to Monte 
Calvo, are older than those indicated by b, and these again were formed before 
c; but the vertical depth of gravel and sand in any one place can not be proved 
to amount even to 1000 feet, although it may perhaps be much greater, yet 
probably never exceeding at any point 3000 or 4000 feet. But were we to assume 
that all the strata were once horizontal, and that their present dip or 
inclination was due to subsequent movements, we should then be forced to 
conclude that a sea several miles deep had been filled up with alternate layers 
of mud and pebbles thrown down one upon another.

In the locality now under consideration, situated a few miles to the west of 
Nice, there are many geological data, the details of which can not be given in 
this place, all leading to the opinion that, when the deposit of the Magnan was 
formed, the shape and outline of the Alpine declivities and the shore greatly 
resembled what we now behold at many points in the neighbourhood. That the beds 
a, b, c, d are of comparatively modern date is proved by this fact, that in 
seams of loamy marl intervening between the pebbly beds are fossil shells, half 
of which belong to species now living in the Mediterranean.

RIPPLE-MARK.

The ripple-mark, so common on the surface of sandstones of all ages (see Figure 
8), and which is so often seen on the sea-shore at low tide, seems to originate 
in the drifting of materials along the bottom of the water, in a manner very 
similar to that which may explain the inclined layers above described. This 
ripple is not entirely confined to the beach between high and low water mark, 
but is also produced on sands which are constantly covered by water. Similar 
undulating ridges and furrows may also be sometimes seen on the surface of drift 
snow and blown sand.

The ripple-mark is usually an indication of a sea-beach, or of water from six to 
ten feet deep, for the agitation caused by waves even during storms extends to a 
very slight depth. To this rule, however, there are some exceptions, and recent 
ripple-marks have been observed at the depth of 60 or 70 feet. It has also been 
ascertained that currents or large bodies of water in motion may disturb mud and 
sand at the depth of 300 or even 450 feet. (Darwin Volcanic Islands page 134.) 
Beach ripple, however, may usually be distinguished from current ripple by 
frequent changes in its direction. In a slab of sandstone, not more than an inch 
thick, the furrows or ridges of an ancient ripple may often be seen in several 
successive laminae to run towards different points of the compass.


CHAPTER III.

ARRANGEMENT OF FOSSILS IN STRATA.-- FRESH-WATER AND MARINE FOSSILS.

Successive Deposition indicated by Fossils.
Limestones formed of Corals and Shells.
Proofs of gradual Increase of Strata derived from Fossils.
Serpula attached to Spatangus.
Wood bored by Teredina.
Tripoli formed of Infusoria.
Chalk derived principally from Organic Bodies.
Distinction of Fresh-water from Marine Formations.
Genera of Fresh-water and Land Shells.
Rules for recognising Marine Testacea.
Gyrogonite and Chara.
Fresh-water Fishes.
Alternation of Marine and Fresh-water Deposits.
Lym-Fiord.

Having in the last chapter considered the forms of stratification so far as they 
are determined by the arrangement of inorganic matter, we may now turn our 
attention to the manner in which organic remains are distributed through 
stratified deposits. We should often be unable to detect any signs of 
stratification or of successive deposition, if particular kinds of fossils did 
not occur here and there at certain depths in the mass. At one level, for 
example, univalve shells of some one or more species predominate; at another, 
bivalve shells; and at a third, corals; while in some formations we find layers 
of vegetable matter, commonly derived from land plants, separating strata.

It may appear inconceivable to a beginner how mountains, several thousand feet 
thick, can have become full of fossils from top to bottom; but the difficulty is 
removed, when he reflects on the origin of stratification, as explained in the 
last chapter, and allows sufficient time for the accumulation of sediment. He 
must never lose sight of the fact that, during the process of deposition, each 
separate layer was once the uppermost, and immediately in contact with the water 
in which aquatic animals lived. Each stratum, in fact, however far it may now 
lie beneath the surface, was once in the state of shingle, or loose sand or soft 
mud at the bottom of the sea, in which shells and other bodies easily became 
enveloped.

RATE OF DEPOSITION INDICATED BY FOSSILS.

By attending to the nature of these remains, we are often enabled to determine 
whether the deposition was slow or rapid, whether it took place in a deep or 
shallow sea, near the shore or far from land, and whether the water was salt, 
brackish, or fresh. Some limestones consist almost exclusively of corals, and in 
many cases it is evident that the present position of each fossil zoophyte has 
been determined by the manner in which it grew originally. The axis of the 
coral, for example, if its natural growth is erect, still remains at right 
angles to the plane of stratification. If the stratum be now horizontal, the 
round spherical heads of certain species continue uppermost, and their points of 
attachment are directed downward. This arrangement is sometimes repeated 
throughout a great succession of strata. From what we know of the growth of 
similar zoophytes in modern reefs, we infer that the rate of increase was 
extremely slow, and some of the fossils must have flourished for ages like 
forest-trees, before they attained so large a size. During these ages, the water 
must have been clear and transparent, for such corals can not live in turbid 
water.

(FIGURE 9. Fossil Gryphaea, covered both on the outside and inside with fossil 
Serpulae.)

In like manner, when we see thousands of full-grown shells dispersed everywhere 
throughout a long series of strata, we can not doubt that time was required for 
the multiplication of successive generations; and the evidence of slow 
accumulation is rendered more striking from the proofs, so often discovered, of 
fossil bodies having lain for a time on the floor of the ocean after death 
before they were imbedded in sediment. Nothing, for example, is more common than 
to see fossil oysters in clay, with Serpulae, or barnacles (acorn-shells), or 
corals, and other creatures, attached to the inside of the valves, so that the 
mollusk was certainly not buried in argillaceous mud the moment it died. There 
must have been an interval during which it was still surrounded with clear 
water, when the creatures whose remains now adhere to it grew from an embryonic 
to a mature state. Attached shells which are merely external, like some of the 
Serpulae (a) in Figure 9, may often have grown upon an oyster or other shell 
while the animal within was still living; but if they are found on the inside, 
it could only happen after the death of the inhabitant of the shell which 
affords the support. Thus, in Figure 9, it will be seen that two Serpulae have 
grown on the interior, one of them exactly on the place where the adductor 
muscle of the Gryphaea (a kind of oyster) was fixed.

(FIGURE 10. Serpula attached to a fossil Micraster from the Chalk.)

(FIGURE 11. Recent Spatangus with the spines removed from one side.
b. Spine and tubercles, natural size.
a. The same magnified.)

Some fossil shells, even if simply attached to the OUTSIDE of others, bear full 
testimony to the conclusion above alluded to, namely, that an interval elapsed 
between the death of the creature to whose shell they adhere, and the burial of 
the same in mud or sand. The sea-urchins, or Echini, so abundant in white chalk, 
afford a good illustration. It is well known that these animals, when living, 
are invariably covered with spines supported by rows of tubercles. These last 
are only seen after the death of the sea-urchin, when the spines have dropped 
off. In Figure 11 a living species of Spatangus, common on our coast, is 
represented with one half of its shell stripped of the spines. In Figure 10 a 
fossil of a similar and allied genus from the white chalk of England shows the 
naked surface which the individuals of this family exhibit when denuded of their 
bristles. The full-grown Serpula, therefore, which now adheres externally, could 
not have begun to grow till the Micraster had died, and the spines became 
detached.

(FIGURE 12.
a. Ananchytes from the chalk with lower valve of Crania attached.
b. Upper valve of Crania detached.)

Now the series of events here attested by a single fossil may be carried a step 
farther. Thus, for example, we often meet with a sea-urchin (Ananchytes) in the 
chalk (see Figure 12) which has fixed to it the lower valve of a Crania, a genus 
of bivalve mollusca. The upper valve (b, Figure 12) is almost invariably 
wanting, though occasionally found in a perfect state of preservation in white 
chalk at some distance. In this case, we see clearly that the sea-urchin first 
lived from youth to age, then died and lost its spines, which were carried away. 
Then the young Crania adhered to the bared shell, grew and perished in its turn; 
after which the upper valve was separated from the lower before the Ananchytes 
became enveloped in chalky mud.

(FIGURES 13 AND 14. Fossil and recent wood drilled by perforating Mollusca.

(FIGURE 13.
a. Fossil wood from London Clay, bored by Teredina.
b. Shell and tube of Teredina personata, the right-hand figure the ventral, the 
left the dorsal view.)

(FIGURE 14.
e. Recent wood bored by Toredo.
d. Shell and tube of Teredo navalis, from the same.
c. Anterior and posterior view of the valves of same detached from the tube.))

It may be well to mention one more illustration of the manner in which single 
fossils may sometimes throw light on a former state of things, both in the bed 
of the ocean and on some adjoining land. We meet with many fragments of wood 
bored by ship-worms at various depths in the clay on which London is built. 
Entire branches and stems of trees, several feet in length, are sometimes found 
drilled all over by the holes of these borers, the tubes and shells of the 
mollusk still remaining in the cylindrical hollows. In Figure 14, e, a 
representation is given of a piece of recent wood pierced by the Teredo navalis, 
or common ship-worm, which destroys wooden piles and ships. When the cylindrical 
tube d has been extracted from the wood, the valves are seen at the larger or 
anterior extremity, as shown at c. In like manner, a piece of fossil wood (a, 
Figure 13) has been perforated by a kindred but extinct genus, the Teredina of 
Lamarck. The calcareous tube of this mollusk was united and, as it were, 
soldered on to the valves of the shell (b), which therefore can not be detached 
from the tube, like the valves of the recent Teredo. The wood in this fossil 
specimen is now converted into a stony mass, a mixture of clay and lime; but it 
must once have been buoyant and floating in the sea, when the Teredinae lived 
upon, and perforated it. Again, before the infant colony settled upon the drift 
wood, part of a tree must have been floated down to the sea by a river, 
uprooted, perhaps, by a flood, or torn off and cast into the waves by the wind: 
and thus our thoughts are carried back to a prior period, when the tree grew for 
years on dry land, enjoying a fit soil and climate.

STRATA OF ORGANIC ORIGIN.

(FIGURE 15. Gaillonella ferruginea, Ehb.)

(FIGURE 16. Gaillonella distans, Ehb.)

(FIGURE 17. Bacillaria paradoxa.
a. Front view.
b. Side view.)

It has been already remarked that there are rocks in the interior of continents, 
at various depths in the earth, and at great heights above the sea, almost 
entirely made up of the remains of zoophytes and testacea. Such masses may be 
compared to modern oyster-beds and coral-reefs; and, like them, the rate of 
increase must have been extremely gradual. But there are a variety of stone 
deposits in the earth's crust, now proved to have been derived from plants and 
animals of which the organic origin was not suspected until of late years, even 
by naturalists. Great surprise was therefore created some years since by the 
discovery of Professor Ehrenberg, of Berlin, that a certain kind of siliceous 
stone, called tripoli, was entirely composed of millions of the remains of 
organic beings, which were formerly referred to microscopic Infusoria, but which 
are now admitted to be plants. They abound in rivulets, lakes, and ponds in 
England and other countries, and are termed Diatomaceae by those naturalists who 
believe in their vegetable origin. The subject alluded to has long been well-
known in the arts, under the name of infusorial earth or mountain meal, and is 
used in the form of powder for polishing stones and metals. It has been 
procured, among other places, from the mud of a lake at Dolgelly, in North 
Wales, and from Bilin, in Bohemia, in which latter place a single stratum, 
extending over a wide area, is no less than fourteen feet thick. This stone, 
when examined with a powerful microscope, is found to consist of the siliceous 
plates or frustules of the above-figured Diatomaceae, united together without 
any visible cement. It is difficult to convey an idea of their extreme 
minuteness; but Ehrenberg estimates that in the Bilin tripoli there are 41,000 
millions of individuals of the Gaillonella distans (see Figure 16) in every 
cubic inch (which weighs about 220 grains), or about 187 millions in a single 
grain. At every stroke, therefore, that we make with this polishing powder, 
several millions, perhaps tens of millions, of perfect fossils are crushed to 
atoms.

A well-known substance, called bog-iron ore, often met with in peat-mosses, has 
often been shown by Ehrenberg to consist of innumerable articulated threads, of 
a yellow ochre colour, composed of silica, argillaceous matter, and peroxide of 
iron. These threads are the cases of a minute microscopic body, called 
Gaillonella ferruginea (Figure 15), associated with the siliceous frustules of 
other fresh-water algae. Layers of this iron ore occurring in Scotch peat bogs 
are often called "the pan," and are sometimes of economical value.

It is clear much time must have been required for the accumulation of strata to 
which countless generations of Diatomaceae have contributed their remains; and 
these discoveries lead us naturally to suspect that other deposits, of which the 
materials have been supposed to be inorganic, may in reality be composed chiefly 
of microscopic organic bodies. That this is the case with the white chalk, has 
often been imagined, and is now proved to be the fact. It has, moreover, been 
lately discovered that the chambers into which these Foraminifera are divided 
are actually often filled with thousands of well-preserved organic bodies, which 
abound in every minute grain of chalk, and are especially apparent in the white 
coating of flints, often accompanied by innumerable needle-shaped spiculae of 
sponges (see Chapter 17.).

"The dust we tread upon was once alive!"-- Byron.

How faint an idea does this exclamation of the poet convey of the real wonders 
of nature! for here we discover proofs that the calcareous and siliceous dust of 
which hills are composed has not only been once alive, but almost every 
particle, albeit invisible to the naked eye, still retains the organic structure 
which, at periods of time incalculably remote, was impressed upon it by the 
powers of life.

FRESH-WATER AND MARINE FOSSILS.

Strata, whether deposited in salt or fresh water, have the same forms; but the 
imbedded fossils are very different in the two cases, because the aquatic 
animals which frequent lakes and rivers are distinct from those inhabiting the 
sea. In the northern part of the Isle of Wight formations of marl and limestone, 
more than 50 feet thick occur, in which the shells are of extinct species. Yet 
we recognise their fresh-water origin, because they are of the same genera as 
those now abounding in ponds, lakes, and rivers, either in our own country or in 
warmer latitudes.

In many parts of France-- in Auvergne, for example-- strata occur of limestone, 
marl, and sandstone hundreds of feet thick, which contain exclusively fresh-
water and land shells, together with the remains of terrestrial quadrupeds. The 
number of land-shells scattered through some of these fresh-water deposits is 
exceedingly great; and there are districts in Germany where the rocks scarcely 
contain any other fossils except snail-shells (helices); as, for instance, the 
limestone on the left bank of the Rhine, between Mayence and Worms, at 
Oppenheim, Findheim, Budenheim, and other places. In order to account for this 
phenomenon, the geologist has only to examine the small deltas of torrents which 
enter the Swiss lakes when the waters are low, such as the newly-formed plain 
where the Kander enters the Lake of Thun. He there sees sand and mud strewn over 
with innumerable dead land-shells, which have been brought down from the valleys 
in the Alps in the preceding spring, during the melting of the snows. Again, if 
we search the sands on the borders of the Rhine, in the lower part of its 
course, we find countless land-shells mixed with others of species belonging to 
lakes, stagnant pools, and marshes. These individuals have been washed away from 
the alluvial plains of the great river and its tributaries, some from 
mountainous regions, others from the low country.

Although fresh-water formations are often of great thickness, yet they are 
usually very limited in area when compared to marine deposits, just as lakes and 
estuaries are of small dimensions in comparison with seas.

The absence of many fossil forms usually met with in marine strata, affords a 
useful negative indication of the fresh-water origin of a formation. For 
example, there are no sea-urchins, no corals, no chambered shells, such as the 
nautilus, nor microscopic Foraminifera in lacustrine or fluviatile deposits. In 
distinguishing the latter from formations accumulated in the sea, we are chiefly 
guided by the forms of the mollusca. In a fresh-water deposit, the number of 
individual shells is often as great as in a marine stratum, if not greater; but 
there is a smaller variety of species and genera. This might be anticipated from 
the fact that the genera and species of recent fresh-water and land shells are 
few when contrasted with the marine. Thus, the genera of true mollusca according 
to Woodward's system, excluding those altogether extinct and those without 
shells, amount to 446 in number, of which the terrestrial and fresh-water genera 
scarcely form more than a fifth. (See Woodward's Manual of Mollusca 1856.)

(FIGURE 18. Cyrena obovata, Sowerby; fossil. Hants.)

(FIGURE 19. Cyrena (Corbicella) fluminalis, Moll.; fossil. Grays, Essex.)

(FIGURE 20. Anodonta Cordierii; D'Orbigny; fossil. Paris.)

(FIGURE 21. Anodonta latimarginata; recent. Bahia.)

(FIGURE 22. Unio littoralis. Lamarck; recent. Auvergne.)

(FIGURE 23. Gryphaea incurva, Sowerby; (G. arcuata, Lamarck) upper valve. Lias.)

Almost all bivalve shells, or those of acephalous mollusca, are marine, about 
sixteen only out of 140 genera being fresh-water. Among these last, the four 
most common forms, both recent and fossil, are Cyclas, Cyrena, Unio, and 
Anodonta (see Figures 18-22); the two first and two last of which are so nearly 
allied as to pass into each other.

Lamarck divided the bivalve mollusca into the Dimyary, or those having two large 
muscular impressions in each valve, as a, b in the Cyclas, Figure 18, and Unio, 
Figure 22, and the Monomyary, such as the oyster and scallop, in which there is 
only one of these impressions, as is seen in Figure 23. Now, as none of these 
last, or the unimuscular bivalves, are fresh-water, we may at once presume a 
deposit containing any of them to be marine. (The fresh-water Mulleria, when 
young, forms a single exception to the rule, as it then has two muscular 
impressions, but it has only one in the adult state.)

(FIGURE 24. Planorbis euomphalus, Sowerby; fossil. Isle of Wight.)

(FIGURE 25. Limnaea longiscala, Brongniart; fossil. Isle of Wight.)

(FIGURE 26. Paludina lenta, Brand.; fossil. Isle of Wight.)

(FIGURE 27. Succinea amphibia, Drap. (S. putris, L.); fossil. Loess, Rhine.)

(FIGURE 28. Ancylus velletia (A. elegans), Sowerby; fossil. Isle of Wight.)

(FIGURE 29. Valvata piscinalis, Mull.; fossil. Grays, Essex.)

(FIGURE 30. Physa hypnorum, Linne; recent. Isle of Wight.)

(FIGURE 31. Auricula; recent. Ava.)

(FIGURE 32. Melania inquinata, Def. Paris basin.)

(FIGURE 33. Physa columnaris, Desh. Paris basin.)

(FIGURE 34. Melanopsis buccinoidea, Ferr.; recent. Asia.)

The univalve shells most characteristic of fresh-water deposits are, Planorbis, 
Limnaea, and Paludina. (See Figures 24-26.) But to these are occasionally added 
Physa, Succinea, Ancylus, Valvata, Melanopsis, Melania, Potamides, and Neritina 
(see Figures 27-34), the four last being usually found in estuaries.

(FIGURE 35. Neritina globulus, Def. Paris basin.)

(FIGURE 36. Nerita granulosa, Desh. Paris basin.)

Some naturalists include Neritina (Figure 35) and the marine Nerita (Figure 36) 
in the same genus, it being scarcely possible to distinguish the two by good 
generic characters. But, as a general rule, the fluviatile species are smaller, 
smoother, and more globular than the marine; and they have never, like the 
Neritae, the inner margin of the outer lip toothed or crenulated. (See Figure 
36.)

(FIGURE 37. Potamides cinctus, Sowerby. Paris basin.)

The Potamides inhabit the mouths of rivers in warm latitudes, and are 
distinguishable from the marine Cerithia by their orbicular and multispiral 
opercula. The genus Auricula (Figure 31) is amphibious, frequenting swamps and 
marshes within the influence of the tide.

(FIGURE 38. Helix Turonensis, Desh.; faluns, Touraine.)

(FIGURE 39. Cyclostoma elegans, Mull.; Loess.)

(FIGURE 40. Pupa tridens, Drap.; Loess.)

(FIGURE 41. Clausilia bidens, Drap.; Loess.)

(FIGURE 42. Bulimus lubricus, Mull.; Loess, Rhine.)

The terrestrial shells are all univalves. The most important genera among these, 
both in a recent and fossil state, are Helix (Figure 38), Cyclostoma (Figure 
39), Pupa (Figure 40), Clausilia (Figure 41) Bulimus (Figure 42), Glandina and 
Achatina.

(FIGURE 43. Ampullaria glauca, from the Jumna.)

Ampullaria (Figure 43) is another genus of shells inhabiting rivers and ponds in 
hot countries. Many fossil species formerly referred to this genus, and which 
have been met with chiefly in marine formations, are now considered by 
conchologists to belong to Natica and other marine genera.

(FIGURE 44. Pleurotoma exorta, Brand. Upper and Middle Eocene. Barton and 
Bracklesham.)

(FIGURE 45. Ancillaria subulata, Sowerby. Barton clay. Eocene.)

All univalve shells of land and fresh-water species, with the exception of 
Melanopsis (Figure 34), and Achatina, which has a slight indentation, have 
entire mouths; and this circumstance may often serve as a convenient rule for 
distinguishing fresh-water from marine strata; since, if any univalves occur of 
which the mouths are not entire, we may presume that the formation is marine. 
The aperture is said to be entire in such shells as the fresh-water Ampullaria 
and the land-shells (Figures 38-42), when its outline is not interrupted by an 
indentation or notch, such as that seen at b in Ancillaria (Figure 45); or is 
not prolonged into a canal, as that seen at a in Pleurotoma (Figure 44).

The mouths of a large proportion of the marine univalves have these notches or 
canals, and almost all species are carnivorous; whereas nearly all testacea 
having entire mouths are plant-eaters, whether the species be marine, fresh-
water, or terrestrial.

There is, however, one genus which affords an occasional exception to one of the 
above rules. The Potamides (Figure 37), a subgenus of Cerithium, although 
provided with a short canal, comprises some species which inhabit salt, others 
brackish, and others fresh-water, and they are said to be all plant-eaters.

Among the fossils very common in fresh-water deposits are the shells of Cypris, 
a minute bivalve crustaceous animal. (For figures of fossil species of Purbeck 
see below, Chapter 19.) Many minute living species of this genus swarm in lakes 
and stagnant pools in Great Britain; but their shells are not, if considered 
separately, conclusive as to the fresh-water origin of a deposit, because the 
majority of species in another kindred genus of the same order, the Cytherina of 
Lamarck, inhabit salt-water; and, although the animal differs slightly, the 
shell is scarcely distinguishable from that of the Cypris.

FRESH-WATER FOSSIL PLANTS.

(FIGURE 46. Chara medicaginula; fossil. Upper Eocene, Isle of Wight.)

The seed-vessels and stems of Chara, a genus of aquatic plants, are very 
frequent in fresh-water strata. These seed-vessels were called, before their 
true nature was known, gyrogonites, and were supposed to be foraminiferous 
shells. (See Figure 46, a.)

(FIGURE 47. Chara elastica; recent, Italy.
a. Sessile seed-vessel between the divisions of the leaves of the female plant.
b. Magnified transverse section of a branch, with five seed-vessels, seen from 
below upward.)

The Charae inhabit the bottom of lakes and ponds, and flourish mostly where the 
water is charged with carbonate of lime. Their seed-vessels are covered with a 
very tough integument, capable of resisting decomposition; to which circumstance 
we may attribute their abundance in a fossil state. Figure 47 represents a 
branch of one of many new species found by Professor Amici in the lakes of 
Northern Italy. The seed-vessel in this plant is more globular than in the 
British Charae, and therefore more nearly resembles in form the extinct fossil 
species found in England, France, and other countries. The stems, as well as the 
seed-vessels, of these plants occur both in modern shell-marl and in ancient 
fresh-water formations. They are generally composed of a large central tube 
surrounded by smaller ones; the whole stem being divided at certain intervals by 
transverse partitions or joints. (See b, Figure 46.)

It is not uncommon to meet with layers of vegetable matter, impressions of 
leaves, and branches of trees, in strata containing fresh-water shells; and we 
also find occasionally the teeth and bones of land quadrupeds, of species now 
unknown. The manner in which such remains are occasionally carried by rivers 
into lakes, especially during floods, has been fully treated of in the 
"Principles of Geology."

FRESH-WATER AND MARINE FISH.

The remains of fish are occasionally useful in determining the fresh-water 
origin of strata. Certain genera, such as carp, perch, pike, and loach 
(Cyprinus, Perca, Esox, and Cobitis), as also Lebias, being peculiar to fresh-
water. Other genera contain some fresh-water and some marine species, as Cottus, 
Mugil, and Anguilla, or eel. The rest are either common to rivers and the sea, 
as the salmon; or are exclusively characteristic of salt-water. The above 
observations respecting fossil fishes are applicable only to the more modern or 
tertiary deposits; for in the more ancient rocks the forms depart so widely from 
those of existing fishes, that it is very difficult, at least in the present 
state of science, to derive any positive information from ichthyolites 
respecting the element in which strata were deposited.

The alternation of marine and fresh-water formations, both on a small and large 
scale, are facts well ascertained in geology. When it occurs on a small scale, 
it may have arisen from the alternate occupation of certain spaces by river-
water and the sea; for in the flood season the river forces back the ocean and 
freshens it over a large area, depositing at the same time its sediment; after 
which the salt-water again returns, and, on resuming its former place, brings 
with it sand, mud, and marine shells.

There are also lagoons at the mouth of many rivers, as the Nile and Mississippi, 
which are divided off by bars of sand from the sea, and which are filled with 
salt and fresh water by turns. They often communicate exclusively with the river 
for months, years, or even centuries; and then a breach being made in the bar of 
sand, they are for long periods filled with salt-water.

LYM-FIORD.

The Lym-Fiord in Jutland offers an excellent illustration of analogous changes; 
for, in the course of the last thousand years, the western extremity of this 
long frith, which is 120 miles in length, including its windings, has been four 
times fresh and four times salt, a bar of sand between it and the ocean having 
been often formed and removed. The last irruption of salt water happened in 
1824, when the North Sea entered, killing all the fresh-water shells, fish, and 
plants; and from that time to the present, the sea-weed Fucus vesiculosus, 
together with oysters and other marine mollusca, have succeeded the Cyclas, 
Lymnaea, Paludina, and Charae. (See Principles Index "Lym-Fiord.")

But changes like these in the Lym-Fiord, and those before mentioned as occurring 
at the mouths of great rivers, will only account for some cases of marine 
deposits of partial extent resting on fresh-water strata. When we find, as in 
the south-east of England (Chapter 18), a great series of fresh-water beds, 1000 
feet in thickness, resting upon marine formations and again covered by other 
rocks, such as the Cretaceous, more than 1000 feet thick, and of deep-sea 
origin, we shall find it necessary to seek for a different explanation of the 
phenomena.


CHAPTER IV.

CONSOLIDATION OF STRATA AND PETRIFACTION OF FOSSILS.

Chemical and Mechanical Deposits.
Cementing together of Particles.
Hardening by Exposure to Air.
Concretionary Nodules.
Consolidating Effects of Pressure.
Mineralization of Organic Remains.
Impressions and Casts: how formed.
Fossil Wood.
Goppert's Experiments.
Precipitation of Stony Matter most rapid where Putrefaction is going on.
Sources of Lime and Silex in Solution.

Having spoken in the preceding chapters of the characters of sedimentary 
formations, both as dependent on the deposition of inorganic matter and the 
distribution of fossils, I may next treat of the consolidation of stratified 
rocks, and the petrifaction of imbedded organic remains.

CHEMICAL AND MECHANICAL DEPOSITS.

A distinction has been made by geologists between deposits of a mechanical, and 
those of a chemical, origin. By the name mechanical are designated beds of mud, 
sand, or pebbles produced by the action of running water, also accumulations of 
stones and scoriae thrown out by a volcano, which have fallen into their present 
place by the force of gravitation. But the matter which forms a chemical deposit 
has not been mechanically suspended in water, but in a state of solution until 
separated by chemical action. In this manner carbonate of lime is occasionally 
precipitated upon the bottom of lakes in a solid form, as may be well seen in 
many parts of Italy, where mineral springs abound, and where the calcareous 
stone, called travertin, is deposited. In these springs the lime is usually held 
in solution by an excess of carbonic acid, or by heat if it be a hot spring, 
until the water, on issuing from the earth, cools or loses part of its acid. The 
calcareous matter then falls down in a solid state, incrusting shells, fragments 
of wood and leaves, and binding them together.

That similar travertin is formed at some points in the bed of the sea where 
calcareous springs issue can not be doubted, but as a general rule the quantity 
of lime, according to Bischoff, spread through the waters of the ocean is very 
small, the free carbonic acid gas in the same waters being five times as much as 
is necessary to keep the lime in a fluid state. Carbonate of lime, therefore, 
can rarely be precipitated at the bottom of the sea by chemical action alone, 
but must be produced by vital agency as in the case of coral reefs.

In such reefs, large masses of limestone are formed by the stony skeletons of 
zoophytes; and these, together with shells, become cemented together by 
carbonate of lime, part of which is probably furnished to the sea-water by the 
decomposition of dead corals. Even shells, of which the animals are still living 
on these reefs, are very commonly found to be incrusted over with a hard coating 
of limestone.

If sand and pebbles are carried by a river into the sea, and these are bound 
together immediately by carbonate of lime, the deposit may be described as of a 
mixed origin, partly chemical, and partly mechanical.

Now, the remarks already made in Chapter 2 on the original horizontality of 
strata are strictly applicable to mechanical deposits, and only partially to 
those of a mixed nature. Such as are purely chemical may be formed on a very 
steep slope, or may even incrust the vertical walls of a fissure, and be of 
equal thickness throughout; but such deposits are of small extent, and for the 
most part confined to vein-stones.

CONSOLIDATION OF STRATA.

It is chiefly in the case of calcareous rocks that solidification takes place at 
the time of deposition. But there are many deposits in which a cementing process 
comes into operation long afterwards. We may sometimes observe, where the water 
of ferruginous or calcareous springs has flowed through a bed of sand or gravel, 
that iron or carbonate of lime has been deposited in the interstices between the 
grains or pebbles, so that in certain places the whole has been bound together 
into a stone, the same set of strata remaining in other parts loose and 
incoherent.

Proofs of a similar cementing action are seen in a rock at Kelloway, in 
Wiltshire. A peculiar band of sandy strata belonging to the group called Oolite 
by geologists may be traced through several counties, the sand being for the 
most part loose and unconsolidated, but becoming stony near Kelloway. In this 
district there are numerous fossil shells which have decomposed, having for the 
most part left only their casts. The calcareous matter hence derived has 
evidently served, at some former period, as a cement to the siliceous grains of 
sand, and thus a solid sandstone has been produced. If we take fragments of many 
other argillaceous grits, retaining the casts of shells, and plunge them into 
dilute muriatic or other acid, we see them immediately changed into common sand 
and mud; the cement of lime, derived from the shells, having been dissolved by 
the acid.

Traces of impressions and casts are often extremely faint. In some loose sands 
of recent date we meet with shells in so advanced a stage of decomposition as to 
crumble into powder when touched. It is clear that water percolating such strata 
may soon remove the calcareous matter of the shell; and unless circumstances 
cause the carbonate of lime to be again deposited, the grains of sand will not 
be cemented together; in which case no memorial of the fossil will remain.

In what manner silex and carbonate of lime may become widely diffused in small 
quantities through the waters which permeate the earth's crust will be spoken of 
presently, when the petrifaction of fossil bodies is considered; but I may 
remark here that such waters are always passing in the case of thermal springs 
from hotter to colder parts of the interior of the earth; and, as often as the 
temperature of the solvent is lowered, mineral matter has a tendency to separate 
from it and solidify. Thus a stony cement is often supplied to sand, pebbles, or 
any fragmentary mixture. In some conglomerates, like the pudding-stone of 
Hertfordshire (a Lower Eocene deposit), pebbles of flint and grains of sand are 
united by a siliceous cement so firmly, that if a block be fractured, the rent 
passes as readily through the pebbles as through the cement.

It is probable that many strata became solid at the time when they emerged from 
the waters in which they were deposited, and when they first formed a part of 
the dry land. A well-known fact seems to confirm this idea: by far the greater 
number of the stones used for building and road-making are much softer when 
first taken from the quarry than after they have been long exposed to the air; 
and these, when once dried, may afterwards be immersed for any length of time in 
water without becoming soft again. Hence it is found desirable to shape the 
stones which are to be used in architecture while they are yet soft and wet, and 
while they contain their "quarry-water," as it is called; also to break up stone 
intended for roads when soft, and then leave it to dry in the air for months 
that it may harden. Such induration may perhaps be accounted for by supposing 
the water, which penetrates the minutest pores of rocks, to deposit, on 
evaporation, carbonate of lime, iron, silex, and other minerals previously held 
in solution, and thereby to fill up the pores partially. These particles, on 
crystallising, would not only be themselves deprived of freedom of motion, but 
would also bind together other portions of the rock which before were loosely 
aggregated. On the same principle wet sand and mud become as hard as stone when 
frozen; because one ingredient of the mass, namely, the water, has crystallised, 
so as to hold firmly together all the separate particles of which the loose mud 
and sand were composed.

Dr. MacCulloch mentions a sandstone in Skye, which may be moulded like dough 
when first found; and some simple minerals, which are rigid and as hard as glass 
in our cabinets, are often flexible and soft in their native beds: this is the 
case with asbestos, sahlite, tremolite, and chalcedony, and it is reported also 
to happen in the case of the beryl. (Dr. MacCulloch System of Geology volume 1 
page 123.)

The marl recently deposited at the bottom of Lake Superior, in North America, is 
soft, and often filled with fresh-water shells; but if a piece be taken up and 
dried, it becomes so hard that it can only be broken by a smart blow of the 
hammer. If the lake, therefore, was drained, such a deposit would be found to 
consist of strata of marlstone, like that observed in many ancient European 
formations, and, like them, containing fresh-water shells.

CONCRETIONARY STRUCTURE.

(FIGURE 48. Calcareous nodules in Lias.)

It is probable that some of the heterogeneous materials which rivers transport 
to the sea may at once set under water, like the artificial mixture called 
pozzolana, which consists of fine volcanic sand charged with about twenty per 
cent of oxide of iron, and the addition of a small quantity of lime. This 
substance hardens, and becomes a solid stone in water, and was used by the 
Romans in constructing the foundations of buildings in the sea. Consolidation in 
such cases is brought about by the action of chemical affinity on finely 
comminuted matter previously suspended in water. After deposition similar 
particles seem often to exert a mutual attraction on each other, and congregate 
together in particular spots, forming lumps, nodules, and concretions. Thus in 
many argillaceous deposits there are calcareous balls, or spherical concretions, 
ranged in layers parallel to the general stratification; an arrangement which 
took place after the shale or marl had been thrown down in successive laminae; 
for these laminae are often traceable through the concretions, remaining 
parallel to those of the surrounding unconsolidated rock. (See Figure 48.) Such 
nodules of limestone have often a shell or other foreign body in the centre.

(FIGURE 49. Spheroidal concretions in magnesian limestone.)

Among the most remarkable examples of concretionary structure are those 
described by Professor Sedgwick as abounding in the magnesian limestone of the 
north of England. The spherical balls are of various sizes, from that of a pea 
to a diameter of several feet, and they have both a concentric and radiated 
structure, while at the same time the laminae of original deposition pass 
uninterruptedly through them. In some cliffs this limestone resembles a great 
irregular pile of cannon-balls. Some of the globular masses have their centre in 
one stratum, while a portion of their exterior passes through to the stratum 
above or below. Thus the larger spheroid in the section (Figure 49) passes from 
the stratum b upward into a. In this instance we must suppose the deposition of 
a series of minor layers, first forming the stratum b, and afterwards the 
incumbent stratum a; then a movement of the particles took place, and the 
carbonates of lime and magnesia separated from the more impure and mixed matter 
forming the still unconsolidated parts of the stratum. Crystallisation, 
beginning at the centre, must have gone on forming concentric coats around the 
original nucleus without interfering with the laminated structure of the rock.

(FIGURE 50. Section through strata of grit.)

When the particles of rocks have been thus rearranged by chemical forces, it is 
sometimes difficult or impossible to ascertain whether certain lines of division 
are due to original deposition or to the subsequent aggregation of several 
particles. Thus suppose three strata of grit, A, B, C, are charged unequally 
with calcareous matter, and that B is the most calcareous. If consolidation 
takes place in B, the concretionary action may spread upward into a part of A, 
where the carbonate of lime is more abundant than in the rest; so that a mass, d 
e f, forming a portion of the superior stratum, becomes united with B into one 
solid mass of stone. The original line of division, d e, being thus effaced, the 
line d f would generally be considered as the surface of the bed B, though not 
strictly a true plane of stratification. (Figure 50.)

PRESSURE AND HEAT.

When sand and mud sink to the bottom of a deep sea, the particles are not 
pressed down by the enormous weight of the incumbent ocean; for the water, which 
becomes mingled with the sand and mud, resists pressure with a force equal to 
that of the column of fluid above. The same happens in regard to organic remains 
which are filled with water under great pressure as they sink, otherwise they 
would be immediately crushed to pieces and flattened. Nevertheless, if the 
materials of a stratum remain in a yielding state, and do not set or solidify, 
they will be gradually squeezed down by the weight of other materials 
successively heaped upon them, just as soft clay or loose sand on which a house 
is built may give way. By such downward pressure particles of clay, sand, and 
marl may become packed into a smaller space, and be made to cohere together 
permanently.

Analogous effects of condensation may arise when the solid parts of the earth's 
crust are forced in various directions by those mechanical movements hereafter 
to be described, by which strata have been bent, broken, and raised above the 
level of the sea. Rocks of more yielding materials must often have been forced 
against others previously consolidated, and may thus by compression have 
acquired a new structure. A recent discovery may help us to comprehend how fine 
sediment derived from the detritus of rocks may be solidified by mere pressure. 
The graphite or "black lead" of commerce having become very scarce, Mr. 
Brockedon contrived a method by which the dust of the purer portions of the 
mineral found in Borrowdale might be recomposed into a mass as dense and compact 
as native graphite. The powder of graphite is first carefully prepared and freed 
from air, and placed under a powerful press on a strong steel die, with air-
tight fittings. It is then struck several blows, each of a power of 1000 tons; 
after which operation the powder is so perfectly solidified that it can be cut 
for pencils, and exhibits when broken the same texture as native graphite. 

But the action of heat at various depths in the earth is probably the most 
powerful of all causes in hardening sedimentary strata. To this subject I shall 
refer again when treating of the metamorphic rocks, and of the slaty and jointed 
structure.

MINERALISATION OF ORGANIC REMAINS.

(FIGURE 51. Phasianella Heddingtonensis, and cast of the same. Coral Rag.)

(FIGURE 52. Pleurotomaria Anglica, and cast. Lias.)

The changes which fossil organic bodies have undergone since they were first 
imbedded in rocks, throw much light on the consolidation of strata. Fossil 
shells in some modern deposits have been scarcely altered in the course of 
centuries, having simply lost a part of their animal matter. But in other cases 
the shell has disappeared, and left an impression only of its exterior, or, 
secondly, a cast of its interior form, or, thirdly, a cast of the shell itself, 
the original matter of which has been removed. These different forms of 
fossilisation may easily be understood if we examine the mud recently thrown out 
from a pond or canal in which there are shells. If the mud be argillaceous, it 
acquires consistency on drying, and on breaking open a portion of it we find 
that each shell has left impressions of its external form. If we then remove the 
shell itself, we find within a solid nucleus of clay, having the form of the 
interior of the shell. This form is often very different from that of the outer 
shell. Thus a cast such as a, Figure 51, commonly called a fossil screw, would 
never be suspected by an inexperienced conchologist to be the internal shape of 
the fossil univalve, b, Figure 51. Nor should we have imagined at first sight 
that the shell a and the cast b, Figure 52, belong to one and the same fossil. 
The reader will observe, in the last-mentioned figure (b, Figure 52), that an 
empty space shaded dark, which the SHELL ITSELF once occupied, now intervenes 
between the enveloping stone and the cast of the smooth interior of the whorls. 
In such cases the shell has been dissolved and the component particles removed 
by water percolating the rock. If the nucleus were taken out, a hollow mould 
would remain, on which the external form of the shell with its tubercles and 
striae, as seen in a, Figure 52, would be seen embossed. Now if the space 
alluded to between the nucleus and the impression, instead of being left empty, 
has been filled up with calcareous spar, flint, pyrites, or other mineral, we 
then obtain from the mould an exact cast both of the external and internal form 
of the original shell. In this manner silicified casts of shells have been 
formed; and if the mud or sand of the nucleus happen to be incoherent, or 
soluble in acid, we can then procure in flint an empty shell, which in shape is 
the exact counterpart of the original. This cast may be compared to a bronze 
statue, representing merely the superficial form, and not the internal 
organisation; but there is another description of petrifaction by no means 
uncommon, and of a much more wonderful kind, which may be compared to certain 
anatomical models in wax, where not only the outward forms and features, but the 
nerves, blood-vessels, and other internal organs are also shown. Thus we find 
corals, originally calcareous, in which not only the general shape, but also the 
minute and complicated internal organisation is retained in flint.

(FIGURE 53. Section of a tree from the coal-measures, magnified (Witham), 
showing texture of wood.)

Such a process of petrifaction is still more remarkably exhibited in fossil 
wood, in which we often perceive not only the rings of annual growth, but all 
the minute vessels and medullary rays. Many of the minute cells and fibres of 
plants, and even those spiral vessels which in the living vegetable can only be 
discovered by the microscope, are preserved. Among many instances, I may mention 
a fossil tree, seventy-two feet in length, found at Gosforth, near Newcastle, in 
sandstone strata associated with coal. By cutting a transverse slice so thin as 
to transmit light, and magnifying it about fifty-five times, the texture, as 
seen in Figure 53, is exhibited. A texture equally minute and complicated has 
been observed in the wood of large trunks of fossil trees found in the 
Craigleith quarry near Edinburgh, where the stone was not in the slightest 
degree siliceous, but consisted chiefly of carbonate of lime, with oxide of 
iron, alumina, and carbon. The parallel rows of vessels here seen are the rings 
of annual growth, but in one part they are imperfectly preserved, the wood 
having probably decayed before the mineralising matter had penetrated to that 
portion of the tree.

In attempting to explain the process of petrifaction in such cases, we may first 
assume that strata are very generally permeated by water charged with minute 
portions of calcareous, siliceous, and other earths in solution. In what manner 
they become so impregnated will be afterwards considered. If an organic 
substance is exposed in the open air to the action of the sun and rain, it will 
in time putrefy, or be dissolved into its component elements, consisting usually 
of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. These will readily be absorbed by the 
atmosphere or be washed away by rain, so that all vestiges of the dead animal or 
plant disappear. But if the same substances be submerged in water, they 
decompose more gradually; and if buried in earth, still more slowly; as in the 
familiar example of wooden piles or other buried timber. Now, if as fast as each 
particle is set free by putrefaction in a fluid or gaseous state, a particle 
equally minute of carbonate of lime, flint, or other mineral, is at hand ready 
to be precipitated, we may imagine this inorganic matter to take the place just 
before left unoccupied by the organic molecule. In this manner a cast of the 
interior of certain vessels may first be taken, and afterwards the more solid 
walls of the same may decay and suffer a like transmutation. Yet when the whole 
is lapidified, it may not form one homogeneous mass of stone or metal. Some of 
the original ligneous, osseous, or other organic elements may remain mingled in 
certain parts, or the lapidifying substance itself may be differently coloured 
at different times, or so crystallised as to reflect light differently, and thus 
the texture of the original body may be faithfully exhibited.

The student may perhaps ask whether, on chemical principles, we have any ground 
to expect that mineral matter will be thrown down precisely in those spots where 
organic decomposition is in progress? The following curious experiments may 
serve to illustrate this point: Professor Goppert of Breslau, with a view of 
imitating the natural process of petrifaction, steeped a variety of animal and 
vegetable substances in waters, some holding siliceous, others calcareous, 
others metallic matter in solution. He found that in the period of a few weeks, 
or sometimes even days, the organic bodies thus immersed were mineralised to a 
certain extent. Thus, for example, thin vertical slices of deal, taken from the 
Scotch fir (Pinus sylvestris), were immersed in a moderately strong solution of 
sulphate of iron. When they had been thoroughly soaked in the liquid for several 
days they were dried and exposed to a red-heat until the vegetable matter was 
burnt up and nothing remained but an oxide of iron, which was found to have 
taken the form of the deal so exactly that casts even of the dotted vessels 
peculiar to this family of plants were distinctly visible under the microscope.

The late Dr. Turner observes, that when mineral matter is in a "nascent state," 
that is to say, just liberated from a previous state of chemical combination, it 
is most ready to unite with other matter, and form a new chemical compound. 
Probably the particles or atoms just set free are of extreme minuteness, and 
therefore move more freely, and are more ready to obey any impulse of chemical 
affinity. Whatever be the cause, it clearly follows, as before stated, that 
where organic matter newly imbedded in sediment is decomposing, there will 
chemical changes take place most actively.

An analysis was lately made of the water which was flowing off from the rich mud 
deposited by the Hooghly River in the Delta of the Ganges after the annual 
inundation. This water was found to be highly charged with carbonic acid holding 
lime in solution. (Piddington Asiatic Researches volume 18 page 226.) Now if 
newly-deposited mud is thus proved to be permeated by mineral matter in a state 
of solution, it is not difficult to perceive that decomposing organic bodies, 
naturally imbedded in sediment, may as readily become petrified as the 
substances artificially immersed by Professor Goppert in various fluid mixtures.

It is well known that the waters of all springs are more or less charged with 
earthy, alkaline, or metallic ingredients derived from the rocks and mineral 
veins through which they percolate. Silex is especially abundant in hot springs, 
and carbonate of lime is almost always present in greater or less quantity. The 
materials for the petrifaction of organic remains are, therefore, usually at 
hand in a state of chemical solution wherever organic remains are imbedded in 
new strata.


CHAPTER V.

ELEVATION OF STRATA ABOVE THE SEA.-- HORIZONTAL AND INCLINED STRATIFICATION.

Why the Position of Marine Strata, above the Level of the Sea, should be 
referred to the rising up of the Land, not to the going down of the Sea.
Strata of Deep-sea and Shallow-water Origin alternate.
Also Marine and Fresh-water Beds and old Land Surfaces.
Vertical, inclined, and folded Strata.
Anticlinal and Synclinal Curves.
Theories to explain Lateral Movements.
Creeps in Coal-mines.
Dip and Strike.
Structure of the Jura.
Various Forms of Outcrop.
Synclinal Strata forming Ridges.
Connection of Fracture and Flexure of Rocks.
Inverted Strata.
Faults described.
Superficial Signs of the same obliterated by Denudation.
Great Faults the Result of repeated Movements.
Arrangement and Direction of parallel Folds of Strata.
Unconformability.
Overlapping Strata.

LAND HAS BEEN RAISED, NOT THE SEA LOWERED.

It has been already stated that the aqueous rocks containing marine fossils 
extend over wide continental tracts, and are seen in mountain chains rising to 
great heights above the level of the sea (Chapter 1). Hence it follows, that 
what is now dry land was once under water. But if we admit this conclusion, we 
must imagine, either that there has been a general lowering of the waters of the 
ocean, or that the solid rocks, once covered by water, have been raised up 
bodily out of the sea, and have thus become dry land. The earlier geologists, 
finding themselves reduced to this alternative, embraced the former opinion, 
assuming that the ocean was originally universal, and had gradually sunk down to 
its actual level, so that the present islands and continents were left dry. It 
seemed to them far easier to conceive that the water had gone down, than that 
solid land had risen upward into its present position. It was, however, 
impossible to invent any satisfactory hypothesis to explain the disappearance of 
so enormous a body of water throughout the globe, it being necessary to infer 
that the ocean had once stood at whatever height marine shells might be 
detected. It moreover appeared clear, as the science of geology advanced, that 
certain spaces on the globe had been alternately sea, then land, then estuary, 
then sea again, and, lastly, once more habitable land, having remained in each 
of these states for considerable periods. In order to account for such phenomena 
without admitting any movement of the land itself, we are required to imagine 
several retreats and returns of the ocean; and even then our theory applies 
merely to cases where the marine strata composing the dry land are horizontal, 
leaving unexplained those more common instances where strata are inclined, 
curved, or placed on their edges, and evidently not in the position in which 
they were first deposited.

Geologists, therefore, were at last compelled to have recourse to the doctrine 
that the solid land has been repeatedly moved upward or downward, so as 
permanently to change its position relatively to the sea. There are several 
distinct grounds for preferring this conclusion. First, it will account equally 
for the position of those elevated masses of marine origin in which the 
stratification remains horizontal, and for those in which the strata are 
disturbed, broken, inclined, or vertical. Secondly, it is consistent with human 
experience that land should rise gradually in some places and be depressed in 
others. Such changes have actually occurred in our own days, and are now in 
progress, having been accompanied in some cases by violent convulsions, while in 
others they have proceeded so insensibly as to have been ascertainable only by 
the most careful scientific observations, made at considerable intervals of 
time. On the other hand, there is no evidence from human experience of a rising 
or lowering of the sea's level in any region, and the ocean can not be raised or 
depressed in one place without its level being changed all over the globe.

These preliminary remarks will prepare the reader to understand the great 
theoretical interest attached to all facts connected with the position of 
strata, whether horizontal or inclined, curved or vertical.

Now the first and most simple appearance is where strata of marine origin occur 
above the level of the sea in horizontal position. Such are the strata which we 
meet with in the south of Sicily, filled with shells for the most part of the 
same species as those now living in the Mediterranean. Some of these rocks rise 
to the height of more than 2000 feet above the sea. Other mountain masses might 
be mentioned, composed of horizontal strata of high antiquity, which contain 
fossil remains of animals wholly dissimilar from any now known to exist. In the 
south of Sweden, for example, near Lake Wener, the beds of some of the oldest 
fossiliferous deposits, called Silurian and Cambrian by geologists, occur in as 
level a position as if they had recently formed part of the delta of a great 
river, and been left dry on the retiring of the annual floods. Aqueous rocks of 
equal antiquity extend for hundreds of miles over the lake-district of North 
America, and exhibit in like manner a stratification nearly undisturbed. The 
Table Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope is another example of highly elevated 
yet perfectly horizontal strata, no less than 3500 feet in thickness, and 
consisting of sandstone of very ancient date.

Instead of imagining that such fossiliferous rocks were always at their present 
level, and that the sea was once high enough to cover them, we suppose them to 
have constituted the ancient bed of the ocean, and to have been afterwards 
uplifted to their present height. This idea, however startling it may at first 
appear, is quite in accordance, as before stated, with the analogy of changes 
now going on in certain regions of the globe. Thus, in parts of Sweden, and the 
shores and islands of the Gulf of Bothnia, proofs have been obtained that the 
land is experiencing, and has experienced for centuries, a slow upheaving 
movement. (See "Principles of Geology" 1867 page 314.)

It appears from the observations of Mr. Darwin and others, that very extensive 
regions of the continent of South America have been undergoing slow and gradual 
upheaval, by which the level plains of Patagonia, covered with recent marine 
shells, and the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, have been raised above the level of the 
sea. On the other hand, the gradual sinking of the west coast of Greenland, for 
the space of more than 600 miles from north to south, during the last four 
centuries, has been established by the observations of a Danish naturalist, Dr. 
Pingel. And while these proofs of continental elevation and subsidence, by slow 
and insensible movements, have been recently brought to light, the evidence has 
been daily strengthened of continued changes of level effected by violent 
convulsions in countries where earthquakes are frequent. There the rocks are 
rent from time to time, and heaved up or thrown down several feet at once, and 
disturbed in such a manner as to show how entirely the original position of 
strata may be modified in the course of centuries.

Mr. Darwin has also inferred that, in those seas where circular coral islands 
and barrier reefs abound, there is a slow and continued sinking of the submarine 
mountains on which the masses of coral are based; while there are other areas of 
the South Sea where the land is on the rise, and where coral has been upheaved 
far above the sea-level.

ALTERNATIONS OF MARINE AND FRESH-WATER STRATA.

It has been shown in the third chapter that there is such a difference between 
land, fresh-water, and marine fossils as to enable the geologist to determine 
whether particular groups of strata were formed at the bottom of the ocean or in 
estuaries, rivers, or lakes. If surprise was at first created by the discovery 
of marine corals and shells at the height of several miles above the sea-level, 
the imagination was afterwards not less startled by observing that in the 
successive strata composing the earth's crust, especially if their total 
thickness amounted to thousands of feet, they comprised in some parts formations 
of shallow-sea as well as of deep-sea origin; also beds of brackish or even of 
purely fresh-water formation, as well as vegetable matter or coal accumulated on 
ancient land. In these cases we as frequently find fresh-water beds below a 
marine set or shallow-water under those of deep-sea origin as the reverse. Thus, 
if we bore an artesian well below London, we pass through a marine clay, and 
there reach, at the depth of several hundred feet, a shallow-water and 
fluviatile sand, beneath which comes the white chalk originally formed in a deep 
sea. Or if we bore vertically through the chalk of the North Downs, we come, 
after traversing marine chalky strata, upon a fresh-water formation many 
hundreds of feet thick, called the Wealden, such as is seen in Kent and Surrey, 
which is known in its turn to rest on purely marine beds. In like manner, in 
various parts of Great Britain we sink vertical shafts through marine deposits 
of great thickness, and come upon coal which was formed by the growth of plants 
on an ancient land-surface sometimes hundreds of square miles in extent.

VERTICAL, INCLINED, AND CURVED STRATA.

(FIGURE 54. Vertical conglomerate and sandstone.)

It has been stated that marine strata of different ages are sometimes found at a 
considerable height above the sea, yet retaining their original horizontality; 
but this state of things is quite exceptional. As a general rule, strata are 
inclined or bent in such a manner as to imply that their original position has 
been altered.

(FIGURE 55. Section of Forfarshire, from N.W. to S.E., from the foot of the 
Grampians to the sea at Arbroath (volcanic or trap rocks omitted). Length of 
section twenty miles.
From S.E. (left) Sea: Whiteness, Arbroath: Strata a, 2, 3: Leys Mill: Strata 4: 
Sidlaw Hills. Viney R.: Strata B: Pitmuies: Strata 4: Position and nature of the 
rocks below No. 4 unknown: Turin: Findhaven: Strata 3, 2, A: Valley of 
Strathmore: Strata 1, 2, 3: W. Ogle: Strata 4 and Clay-Slate: to N.W. (right).)

The most unequivocal evidence of such a change is afforded by their standing up 
vertically, showing their edges, which is by no means a rare phenomenon, 
especially in mountainous countries. Thus we find in Scotland, on the southern 
skirts of the Grampians, beds of pudding-stone alternating with thin layers of 
fine sand, all placed vertically to the horizon. When Saussure first observed 
certain conglomerates in a similar position in the Swiss Alps, he remarked that 
the pebbles, being for the most part of an oval shape, had their longer axes 
parallel to the planes of stratification (see Figure 54). From this he inferred 
that such strata must, at first, have been horizontal, each oval pebble having 
settled at the bottom of the water, with its flatter side parallel to the 
horizon, for the same reason that an egg will not stand on either end if 
unsupported. Some few, indeed, of the rounded stones in a conglomerate 
occasionally afford an exception to the above rule, for the same reason that in 
a river's bed, or on a shingle beach, some pebbles rest on their ends or edges; 
these having been shoved against or between other stones by a wave or current, 
so as to assume this position.

ANTICLINAL AND SYNCLINAL CURVES.

Vertical strata, when they can be traced continuously upward or downward for 
some depth, are almost invariably seen to be parts of great curves, which may 
have a diameter of a few yards, or of several miles. I shall first describe two 
curves of considerable regularity, which occur in Forfarshire, extending over a 
country twenty miles in breadth, from the foot of the Grampians to the sea near 
Arbroath.

The mass of strata here shown may be 2000 feet in thickness, consisting of red 
and white sandstone, and various coloured shales, the beds being distinguishable 
into four principal groups, namely, No. 1, red marl or shale; No. 2, red 
sandstone, used for building; No. 3, conglomerate; and No. 4, grey paving-stone, 
and tile-stone, with green and reddish shale, containing peculiar organic 
remains. A glance at the section (Figure 55.) will show that each of the 
formations 2, 3, 4 are repeated thrice at the surface, twice with a southerly, 
and once with a northerly inclination or DIP, and the beds in No. 1, which are 
nearly horizontal, are still brought up twice by a slight curvature to the 
surface, once on each side of A. Beginning at the north-west extremity, the 
tile-stones and conglomerates, No. 4 and No. 3, are vertical, and they generally 
form a ridge parallel to the southern skirts of the Grampians. The superior 
strata, Nos. 2 and 1, become less and less inclined on descending to the valley 
of Strathmore, where the strata, having a concave bend, are said by geologists 
to lie in a "trough" or "basin." Through the centre of this valley runs an 
imaginary line A, called technically a "synclinal line," where the beds, which 
are tilted in opposite directions, may be supposed to meet. It is most important 
for the observer to mark such lines, for he will perceive by the diagram that, 
in travelling from the north to the centre of the basin, he is always passing 
from older to newer beds; whereas, after crossing the line A, and pursuing his 
course in the same southerly direction, he is continually leaving the newer, and 
advancing upon older strata. All the deposits which he had before examined begin 
then to recur in reversed order, until he arrives at the central axis of the 
Sidlaw hills, where the strata are seen to form an arch, or SADDLE, having an 
ANTICLINAL line, B, in the centre. On passing this line, and continuing towards 
the S.E., the formations 4, 3, and 2, are again repeated, in the same relative 
order of superposition, but with a southerly dip. At Whiteness (see Figure 55) 
it will be seen that the inclined strata are covered by a newer deposit, a, in 
horizontal beds. These are composed of red conglomerate and sand, and are newer 
than any of the groups, 1, 2, 3, 4, before described, and rest UNCONFORMABLY 
upon strata of the sandstone group, No. 2.

An example of curved strata, in which the bends or convolutions of the rock are 
sharper and far more numerous within an equal space, has been well described by 
Sir James Hall. (Edinburgh Transactions volume 7 plate 3.) It occurs near St. 
Abb's Head, on the east coast of Scotland, where the rocks consist principally 
of a bluish slate, having frequently a ripple-marked surface. The undulations of 
the beds reach from the top to the bottom of cliffs from 200 to 300 feet in 
height, and there are sixteen distinct bendings in the course of about six 
miles, the curvatures being alternately concave and convex upward.

FOLDING BY LATERAL MOVEMENT.

(FIGURE 56. Curved strata of slate near St. Abb's Head, Berwickshire. (Sir J. 
Hall.)

(FIGURE 57. Curved strata in line of cliff.)

(FIGURE 58. Folded cloths imitating bent strata.)

An experiment was made by Sir James Hall, with a view of illustrating the manner 
in which such strata, assuming them to have been originally horizontal, may have 
been forced into their present position. A set of layers of clay were placed 
under a weight, and their opposite ends pressed towards each other with such 
force as to cause them to approach more nearly together. On the removal of the 
weight, the layers of clay were found to be curved and folded, so as to bear a 
miniature resemblance to the strata in the cliffs. We must, however, bear in 
mind that in the natural section or sea-cliff we only see the foldings 
imperfectly, one part being invisible beneath the sea, and the other, or upper 
portion, being supposed to have been carried away by DENUDATION, or that action 
of water which will be explained in the next chapter. The dark lines in the plan 
(Figure 57) represent what is actually seen of the strata in the line of cliff 
alluded to; the fainter lines, that portion which is concealed beneath the sea-
level, as also that which is supposed to have once existed above the present 
surface.

We may still more easily illustrate the effects which a lateral thrust might 
produce on flexible strata, by placing several pieces of differently coloured 
cloths upon a table, and when they are spread out horizontally, cover them with 
a book. Then apply other books to each end, and force them towards each other. 
The folding of the cloths (see Figure 58) will imitate those of the bent strata; 
the incumbent book being slightly lifted up, and no longer touching the two 
volumes on which it rested before, because it is supported by the tops of the 
anticlinal ridges formed by the curved cloths. In like manner there can be no 
doubt that the squeezed strata, although laterally condensed and more closely 
packed, are yet elongated and made to rise upward, in a direction perpendicular 
to the pressure.

Whether the analogous flexures in stratified rocks have really been due to 
similar sideway movements is a question which we can not decide by reference to 
our own observation. Our inability to explain the nature of the process is, 
perhaps, not simply owing to the inaccessibility of the subterranean regions 
where the mechanical force is exerted, but to the extreme slowness of the 
movement. The changes may sometimes be due to variation in the temperature of 
mountain masses of rock causing them, while still solid, to expand or contract; 
or melting them, and then again cooling them and allowing them to crystallise. 
If such be the case, we have scarcely more reason to expect to witness the 
operation of the process within the limited periods of our scientific 
observation than to see the swelling of the roots of a tree, by which, in the 
course of years, a wall of solid masonry may be lifted up, rent or thrown down. 
In both instances the force may be irresistible, but though adequate, it need 
not be visible by us, provided the time required for its development be very 
great. The lateral pressure arising from the unequal expansion of rocks by heat 
may cause one mass lying in the same horizontal plane gradually to occupy a 
larger space, so as to press upon another rock, which, if flexible, may be 
squeezed into a bent and folded form. It will also appear, when the volcanic and 
granitic rocks are described, that some of them have, when melted in the 
interior of the earth's crust, been injected forcibly into fissures, and after 
the solidification of such intruded matter, other sets of rents, crossing the 
first, have been formed and in their turn filled by melted rock. Such repeated 
injections imply a stretching, and often upheaval, of the whole mass.

We also know, especially by the study of regions liable to earthquakes, that 
there are causes at work in the interior of the earth capable of producing a 
sinking in of the ground, sometimes very local, but often extending over a wide 
area. The continuance of such a downward movement, especially if partial and 
confined to linear areas, may produce regular folds in the strata.

CREEPS IN COAL-MINES.

The "creeps," as they are called in coal-mines, afford an excellent illustration 
of this fact.-- First, it may be stated generally, that the excavation of coal 
at a considerable depth causes the mass of overlying strata to sink down bodily, 
even when props are left to support the roof of the mine. "In Yorkshire," says 
Mr. Buddle, "three distinct subsidences were perceptible at the surface, after 
the clearing out of three seams of coal below, and innumerable vertical cracks 
were caused in the incumbent mass of sandstone and shale which thus settled 
down." (Proceedings of Geological Society volume 3 page 148.) The exact amount 
of depression in these cases can only be accurately measured where water 
accumulates on the surface, or a railway traverses a coal-field.

(FIGURE 59. Section of carboniferous strata at Wallsend, Newcastle, showing 
"creeps." (J. Buddle, Esq.)
Horizontal length of section 174 feet. The upper seam, or main coal, here worked 
out, was 630 feet below the surface.
Section through, from top to bottom:
Siliceous sandstone.
Shale.
1. Main coal, 6 feet 6 inches, with creeps a, b, c, d.
Shale eighteen yards thick.
2. Metal coal, 3 feet, with fractures e, f, g, h.)

When a bed of coal is worked out, pillars or rectangular masses of coal are left 
at intervals as props to support the roof, and protect the colliers. Thus in 
Figure 59, representing a section at Wallsend, Newcastle, the galleries which 
have been excavated are represented by the white spaces a, b, while the 
adjoining dark portions are parts of the original coal seam left as props, beds 
of sandy clay or shale constituting the floor of the mine. When the props have 
been reduced in size, they are pressed down by the weight of overlying rocks (no 
less than 630 feet thick) upon the shale below, which is thereby squeezed and 
forced up into the open spaces.

Now it might have been expected that, instead of the floor rising up, the 
ceiling would sink down, and this effect, called a "thrust," does, in fact, take 
place where the pavement is more solid than the roof. But it usually happens, in 
coalmines, that the roof is composed of hard shale, or occasionally of 
sandstone, more unyielding than the foundation, which often consists of clay. 
Even where the argillaceous substrata are hard at first, they soon become 
softened and reduced to a plastic state when exposed to the contact of air and 
water in the floor of a mine.

The first symptom of a "creep," says Mr. Buddle, is a slight curvature at the 
bottom of each gallery, as at a, Figure 59: then the pavement, continuing to 
rise, begins to open with a longitudinal crack, as at b; then the points of the 
fractured ridge reach the roof, as at c; and, lastly, the upraised beds close up 
the whole gallery, and the broken portions of the ridge are reunited and 
flattened at the top, exhibiting the flexure seen at d. Meanwhile the coal in 
the props has become crushed and cracked by pressure. It is also found that 
below the creeps a, b, c, d, an inferior stratum, called the "metal coal," which 
is 3 feet thick, has been fractured at the points e, f, g, h, and has risen, so 
as to prove that the upward movement, caused by the working out of the "main 
coal," has been propagated through a thickness of 54 feet of argillaceous beds, 
which intervene between the two coal-seams. This same displacement has also been 
traced downward more than 150 feet below the metal coal, but it grows 
continually less and less until it becomes imperceptible.

No part of the process above described is more deserving of our notice than the 
slowness with which the change in the arrangement of the beds is brought about. 
Days, months, or even years, will sometimes elapse between the first bending of 
the pavement and the time of its reaching the roof. Where the movement has been 
most rapid, the curvature of the beds is most regular, and the reunion of the 
fractured ends most complete; whereas the signs of displacement or violence are 
greatest in those creeps which have required months or years for their entire 
accomplishment. Hence we may conclude that similar changes may have been wrought 
on a larger scale in the earth's crust by partial and gradual subsidences, 
especially where the ground has been undermined throughout long periods of time; 
and we must be on our guard against inferring sudden violence, simply because 
the distortion of the beds is excessive.

Engineers are familiar with the fact that when they raise the level of a railway 
by heaping stone or gravel on a foundation of marsh, quicksand, or other 
yielding formation, the new mound often sinks for a time as fast as they attempt 
to elevate it; when they have persevered so as to overcome this difficulty, they 
frequently find that some of the adjoining flexible ground has risen up in one 
or more parallel arches or folds, showing that the vertical pressure of the 
sinking materials has given rise to a lateral folding movement.

In like manner, in the interior of the earth, the solid parts of the earth's 
crust may sometimes, as before mentioned, be made to expand by heat, or may be 
pressed by the force of steam against flexible strata loaded with a great weight 
of incumbent rocks. In this case the yielding mass, squeezed, but unable to 
overcome the resistance which it meets with in a vertical direction, may be 
gradually relieved by lateral folding.

DIP AND STRIKE.

(FIGURE 60. Series of inclined strata dipping to the north at an angle of 45 
degrees.)

In describing the manner in which strata depart from their original 
horizontality, some technical terms, such as "dip" and "strike," "anticlinal" 
and "synclinal" line or axis, are used by geologists. I shall now proceed to 
explain some of these to the student. If a stratum or bed of rock, instead of 
being quite level, be inclined to one side, it is said to DIP; the point of the 
compass to which it is inclined is called the POINT OF DIP, and the degree of 
deviation from a level or horizontal line is called THE AMOUNT OF DIP, or THE 
ANGLE OF DIP. Thus, in the diagram (Figure 60), a series of strata are inclined, 
and they dip to the north at an angle of forty-five degrees. The STRIKE, or LINE 
OF BEARING, is the prolongation or extension of the strata in a direction AT 
RIGHT ANGLES to the dip; and hence it is sometimes called the DIRECTION of the 
strata. Thus, in the above instance of strata dipping to the north, their strike 
must necessarily be east and west. We have borrowed the word from the German 
geologists, streichen signifying to extend, to have a certain direction. Dip and 
strike may be aptly illustrated by a row of houses running east and west, the 
long ridge of the roof representing the strike of the stratum of slates, which 
dip on one side to the north, and on the other to the south.

A stratum which is horizontal, or quite level in all directions, has neither dip 
nor strike.

It is always important for the geologist, who is endeavouring to comprehend the 
structure of a country, to learn how the beds dip in every part of the district; 
but it requires some practice to avoid being occasionally deceived, both as to 
the point of dip and the amount of it.

(FIGURE 61. Apparent horizontality of inclined strata.)

If the upper surface of a hard stony stratum be uncovered, whether artificially 
in a quarry, or by waves at the foot of a cliff, it is easy to determine towards 
what point of the compass the slope is steepest, or in what direction water 
would flow if poured upon it. This is the true dip. But the edges of highly 
inclined strata may give rise to perfectly horizontal lines in the face of a 
vertical cliff, if the observer see the strata in the line of the strike, the 
dip being inward from the face of the cliff. If, however, we come to a break in 
the cliff, which exhibits a section exactly at right angles to the line of the 
strike, we are then able to ascertain the true dip. In the drawing (Figure 61), 
we may suppose a headland, one side of which faces to the north, where the beds 
would appear perfectly horizontal to a person in the boat; while in the other 
side facing the west, the true dip would be seen by the person on shore to be at 
an angle of 40 degrees. If, therefore, our observations are confined to a 
vertical precipice facing in one direction, we must endeavour to find a ledge or 
portion of the plane of one of the beds projecting beyond the others, in order 
to ascertain the true dip.

(FIGURE 62. Two hands used to determine the inclination of strata.)

If not provided with a clinometer, a most useful instrument, when it is of 
consequence to determine with precision the inclination of the strata, the 
observer may measure the angle within a few degrees by standing exactly opposite 
to a cliff where the true dip is exhibited, holding the hands immediately before 
the eyes, and placing the fingers of one in a perpendicular, and of the other in 
a horizontal position, as in Figure 62. It is thus easy to discover whether the 
lines of the inclined beds bisect the angle of 90 degrees, formed by the meeting 
of the hands, so as to give an angle of 45 degrees, or whether it would divide 
the space into two equal or unequal portions. You have only to change hands to 
get the line of dip on the upper side of the horizontal hand.

(FIGURE 63. Section illustrating the structure of the Swiss Jura.)

It has been already seen, in describing the curved strata on the east coast of 
Scotland, in Forfarshire and Berwickshire, that a series of concave and convex 
bendings are occasionally repeated several times. These usually form part of a 
series of parallel waves of strata, which are prolonged in the same direction, 
throughout a considerable extent of country. Thus, for example, in the Swiss 
Jura, that lofty chain of mountains has been proved to consist of many parallel 
ridges, with intervening longitudinal valleys, as in Figure 63, the ridges being 
formed by curved fossiliferous strata, of which the nature and dip are 
occasionally displayed in deep transverse gorges, called "cluses," caused by 
fractures at right angles to the direction of the chain. (Thurmann "Essai sur 
les Soulevemens Jurassiques de Porrentruy" Paris 1832.) Now let us suppose these 
ridges and parallel valleys to run north and south, we should then say that the 
STRIKE of the beds is north and south, and the DIP east and west. Lines drawn 
along the summits of the ridges, A, B, would be anticlinal lines, and one 
following the bottom of the adjoining valleys a synclinal line.

OUTCROP OF STRATA.

(FIGURE 64. Ground-plan of the denuded ridge C, Figure 63.)

(FIGURE 65. Transverse section of the denuded ridge C, Figure 63..)

It will be observed that some of these ridges, A, B, are unbroken on the summit, 
whereas one of them, C, has been fractured along the line of strike, and a 
portion of it carried away by denudation, so that the ridges of the beds in the 
formations a, b, c come out to the day, or, as the miners say, CROP OUT, on the 
sides of a valley. The ground-plan of such a denuded ridge as C, as given in a 
geological map, may be expressed by the diagram, Figure 64, and the cross-
section of the same by Figure 65. The line D E, Figure 64, is the anticlinal 
line, on each side of which the dip is in opposite directions, as expressed by 
the arrows. The emergence of strata at the surface is called by miners their 
OUTCROP, or BASSET.

If, instead of being folded into parallel ridges, the beds form a boss or dome-
shaped protuberance, and if we suppose the summit of the dome carried off, the 
ground-plan would exhibit the edges of the strata forming a succession of 
circles, or ellipses, round a common centre. These circles are the lines of 
strike, and the dip being always at right angles is inclined in the course of 
the circuit to every point of the compass, constituting what is termed a qua-
quaversal dip-- that is, turning every way.

There are endless variations in the figures described by the basset-edges of the 
strata, according to the different inclination of the beds, and the mode in 
which they happen to have been denuded. One of the simplest rules, with which 
every geologist should be acquainted, relates to the V-like form of the beds as 
they crop out in an ordinary valley. First, if the strata be horizontal, the V-
like form will be also on a level, and the newest strata will appear at the 
greatest heights.

(FIGURE 66. Slope of valley 40 degrees, dip of strata 20 degrees.)

Secondly, if the beds be inclined and intersected by a valley sloping in the 
same direction, and the dip of the beds be less steep than the slope of the 
valley, then the V's, as they are often termed by miners, will point upward (see 
Figure 66), those formed by the newer beds appearing in a superior position, and 
extending highest up the valley, as A is seen above B.

(FIGURE 67. Slope of valley 20 degrees, dip of strata 50 degrees.)

Thirdly, if the dip of the beds be steeper than the slope of the valley, then 
the V's will point downward (see Figure 67), and those formed of the older beds 
will now appear uppermost, as B appears above A.

(FIGURE 68. Slope of valley 20 degrees, dip of strata 20 degrees, in opposite 
directions.)

Fourthly, in every case where the strata dip in a contrary direction to the 
slope of the valley, whatever be the angle of inclination, the newer beds will 
appear the highest, as in the first and second cases. This is shown by the 
drawing (Figure 68), which exhibits strata rising at an angle of 20 degrees, and 
crossed by a valley, which declines in an opposite direction at 20 degrees.

These rules may often be of great practical utility; for the different degrees 
of dip occurring in the two cases represented in Figures 66 and 67 may 
occasionally be encountered in following the same line of flexure at points a 
few miles distant from each other. A miner unacquainted with the rule, who had 
first explored the valley Figure 66, may have sunk a vertical shaft below the 
coal-seam A, until he reached the inferior bed, B. He might then pass to the 
valley, Figure 67, and discovering there also the outcrop of two coal-seams, 
might begin his workings in the uppermost in the expectation of coming down to 
the other bed A, which would be observed cropping out lower down the valley. But 
a glance at the section will demonstrate the futility of such hopes. (I am 
indebted to the kindness of T. Sopwith, Esq., for three models which I have 
copied in the above diagrams; but the beginner may find it by no means easy to 
understand such copies, although, if he were to examine and handle the 
originals, turning them about in different ways, he would at once comprehend 
their meaning, as well as the import of others far more complicated, which the 
same engineer has constructed to illustrate FAULTS.)

SYNCLINAL STRATA FORMING RIDGES.

(FIGURE 69. Section of carboniferous rocks of Lancashire. (E. Hull. (Edward 
Hull, Quarterly Geological Journal volume 24 page 324. 1868.))
a. Synclinal. Grits and shales.
c. Anticlinal. Mountain limestone.
b. Synclinal. Grits and shales.)

Although in many cases an anticlinal axis forms a ridge, and a synclinal axis a 
valley, as in A B, Figure 63, yet this can by no means be laid down as a general 
rule, as the beds very often slope inward from either side of a mountain, as at 
a, b, Figure 69, while in the intervening valley, c, they slope upward, forming 
an arch.

It would be natural to expect the fracture of solid rocks to take place chiefly 
where the bending of the strata has been sharpest, and such rending may produce 
ravines giving access to running water and exposing the surface to atmospheric 
waste. The entire absence, however, of such cracks at points where the strain 
must have been greatest, as at a, Figure 63, is often very remarkable, and not 
always easy of explanation. We must imagine that many strata of limestone, 
chert, and other rocks which are now brittle, were pliant when bent into their 
present position. They may have owed their flexibility in part to the fluid 
matter which they contained in their minute pores, as before described, and in 
part to the permeation of sea-water while they were yet submerged.

(FIGURE 70. Strata of chert, grit, and marl, near St. Jean de Luz.)

At the western extremity of the Pyrenees, great curvatures of the strata are 
seen in the sea-cliffs, where the rocks consist of marl, grit, and chert. At 
certain points, as at a, Figure 70, some of the bendings of the flinty chert are 
so sharp that specimens might be broken off well fitted to serve as ridge-tiles 
on the roof of a house. Although this chert could not have been brittle as now, 
when first folded into this shape, it presents, nevertheless, here and there, at 
the points of greatest flexure, small cracks, which show that it was solid, and 
not wholly incapable of breaking at the period of its displacement. The numerous 
rents alluded to are not empty, but filled with chalcedony and quartz.

(FIGURE 71. Bent and undulating gypseous marl.
g. Gypsum. m. Marl.)

Between San Caterina and Castrogiovanni, in Sicily, bent and undulating gypseous 
marls occur, with here and there thin beds of solid gypsum interstratified. 
Sometimes these solid layers have been broken into detached fragments, still 
preserving their sharp edges (g, g, Figure 71), while the continuity of the more 
pliable and ductile marls, m, m, has not been interrupted.

(FIGURE 72. Folded strata.)

(FIGURE 73. Folded strata.)

We have already explained, Figure 69, that stratified rocks have usually their 
strata bent into parallel folds forming anticlinal and synclinal axes, a group 
of several of these folds having often been subjected to a common movement, and 
having acquired a uniform strike or direction. In some disturbed regions these 
folds have been doubled back upon themselves in such a manner that it is often 
difficult for an experienced geologist to determine correctly the relative age 
of the beds by superposition. Thus, if we meet with the strata seen in the 
section, Figure 72, we should naturally suppose that there were twelve distinct 
beds, or sets of beds, No. 1 being the newest, and No. 12 the oldest of the 
series. But this section may perhaps exhibit merely six beds, which have been 
folded in the manner seen in Figure 73, so that each of them is twice repeated, 
the position of one half being reversed, and part of No. 1, originally the 
uppermost, having now become the lowest of the series.

These phenomena are observable on a magnificent scale in certain regions in 
Switzerland, in precipices often more than 2000 feet in perpendicular height, 
and there are flexures not inferior in dimensions in the Pyrenees. The upper 
part of the curves seen in this diagram, Figure 73, and expressed in fainter 
lines, has been removed by what is called denudation, to be afterwards 
explained.

FRACTURES OF THE STRATA AND FAULTS.

Numerous rents may often be seen in rocks which appear to have been simply 
broken, the fractured parts still remaining in contact; but we often find a 
fissure, several inches or yards wide, intervening between the disunited 
portions. These fissures are usually filled with fine earth and sand, or with 
angular fragments of stone, evidently derived from the fracture of the 
contiguous rocks.

The face of each wall of the fissure is often beautifully polished, as if 
glazed, striated, or scored with parallel furrows and ridges, such as would be 
produced by the continued rubbing together of surfaces of unequal hardness. 
These polished surfaces are called by miners "slickensides." It is supposed that 
the lines of the striae indicate the direction in which the rocks were moved. 
During one of the minor earthquakes in Chili, in 1840, the brick walls of a 
building were rent vertically in several places, and made to vibrate for several 
minutes during each shock, after which they remained uninjured, and without any 
opening, although the line of each crack was still visible. When all movement 
had ceased, there were seen on the floor of the house, at the bottom of each 
rent, small heaps of fine brick-dust, evidently produced by trituration.

(FIGURE 74. Faults. A B perpendicular, C D oblique to the horizon.)

(FIGURE 75. E F, fault or fissure filled with rubbish, on each side of which the 
shifted strata are not parallel.)

It is not uncommon to find the mass of rock on one side of a fissure thrown up 
above or down below the mass with which it was once in contact on the other 
side. "This mode of displacement is called a fault, shift, slip, or throw." "The 
miner," says Playfair, describing a fault, "is often perplexed, in his 
subterranean journey, by a derangement in the strata, which changes at once all 
those lines and bearings which had hitherto directed his course. When his mine 
reaches a certain plane, which is sometimes perpendicular, as in A B, Figure 74, 
sometimes oblique to the horizon (as in C D, ibid.), he finds the beds of rock 
broken asunder, those on the one side of the plane having changed their place, 
by sliding in a particular direction along the face of the others. In this 
motion they have sometimes preserved their parallelism, as in Figure 74, so that 
the strata on each side of faults A B, C D, continue parallel to one another; in 
other cases, the strata on each side are inclined, as in a, b, c, d (Figure 75), 
though their identity is still to be recognised by their possessing the same 
thickness and the same internal characters." (Playfair, Illustration of Hutt. 
Theory paragraph 42.)

In Coalbrook Dale, says Mr. Prestwich (Geological Transactions second series 
volume 5 page 452.), deposits of sandstone, shale, and coal, several thousand 
feet thick, and occupying an area of many miles, have been shivered into 
fragments, and the broken remnants have been placed in very discordant 
positions, often at levels differing several hundred feet from each other. The 
sides of the faults, when perpendicular, are commonly several yards apart, and 
are sometimes as much as 50 yards asunder, the interval being filled with broken 
debris of the strata. In following the course of the same fault it is sometimes 
found to produce in different places very unequal changes of level, the amount 
of shift being in one place 300, and in another 700 feet, which arises from the 
union of two or more faults. In other words, the disjointed strata have in 
certain districts been subjected to renewed movements, which they have not 
suffered elsewhere.

We may occasionally see exact counterparts of these slips, on a small scale, in 
pits of loose sand and gravel, many of which have doubtless been caused by the 
drying and shrinking of argillaceous and other beds, slight subsidences having 
taken place from failure of support. Sometimes, however, even these small slips 
may have been produced during earthquakes; for land has been moved, and its 
level, relatively to the sea, considerably altered, within the period when much 
of the alluvial sand and gravel now covering the surface of continents was 
deposited.

I have already stated that a geologist must be on his guard, in a region of 
disturbed strata, against inferring repeated alternations of rocks, when, in 
fact, the same strata, once continuous, have been bent round so as to recur in 
the same section, and with the same dip. A similar mistake has often been 
occasioned by a series of faults.

(FIGURE 76. Apparent alternations of strata caused by vertical faults.)

If, for example, the dark line A H (Figure 76) represent the surface of a 
country on which the strata a, b, c frequently crop out, an observer who is 
proceeding from H to A might at first imagine that at every step he was 
approaching new strata, whereas the repetition of the same beds has been caused 
by vertical faults, or downthrows. Thus, suppose the original mass, A, B, C, D, 
to have been a set of uniformly inclined strata, and that the different masses 
under E F, F G, and G D sank down successively, so as to leave vacant the spaces 
marked in the diagram by dotted lines, and to occupy those marked by the 
continuous lines, then let denudation take place along the line A H, so that the 
protruding masses indicated by the fainter lines are swept away-- a miner, who 
has not discovered the faults, finding the mass a, which we will suppose to be a 
bed of coal four times repeated, might hope to find four beds, workable to an 
indefinite depth, but first, on arriving at the fault G, he is stopped suddenly 
in his workings, for he comes partly upon the shale b, and partly on the 
sandstone c; the same result awaits him at the fault F, and on reaching E he is 
again stopped by a wall composed of the rock d.

The very different levels at which the separated parts of the same strata are 
found on the different sides of the fissure, in some faults, is truly 
astonishing. One of the most celebrated in England is that called the "ninety-
fathom dike," in the coal-field of Newcastle. This name has been given to it, 
because the same beds are ninety fathoms (540 feet) lower on the northern than 
they are on the southern side. The fissure has been filled by a body of sand, 
which is now in the state of sandstone, and is called the dike, which is 
sometimes very narrow, but in other places more than twenty yards wide. 
(Conybeare and Phillips Outlines, etc. page 376.) The walls of the fissure are 
scored by grooves, such as would have been produced if the broken ends of the 
rock had been rubbed along the plane of the fault. (Phillips Geology Lardner's 
Cyclop. page 41.) In the Tynedale and Craven faults, in the north of England, 
the vertical displacement is still greater, and the fracture has extended in a 
horizontal direction for a distance of thirty miles or more.

GREAT FAULTS THE RESULT OF REPEATED MOVEMENTS.

It must not, however, be supposed that faults generally consist of single linear 
rents; there are usually a number of faults springing off from the main one, and 
sometimes a long strip of country seems broken up into fragments by sets of 
parallel and connecting transverse faults. Oftentimes a great line of fault has 
been repeated, or the movements have been continued through successive periods, 
so that, newer deposits having covered the old line of displacement, the strata 
both newer and older have given way along the old line of fracture. Some 
geologists have considered it necessary to imagine that the upward or downward 
movement in these cases was accomplished at a single stroke, and not by a series 
of sudden but interrupted movements. They appear to have derived this idea from 
a notion that the grooved walls have merely been rubbed in one direction, which 
is far from being a constant phenomenon. Not only are some sets of striae not 
parallel to others, but the clay and rubbish between the walls, when squeezed or 
rubbed, have been streaked in different directions, the grooves which the harder 
minerals have impressed on the softer being frequently curved and irregular.

(FIGURE 77. Faults and denuded coal-strata, Ashby de la Zouch. (Mammatt.))

The usual absence of protruding masses of rock forming precipices or ridges 
along the lines of great faults has already been alluded to in explaining Figure 
76, and the same remarkable fact is well exemplified in every coal-field which 
has been extensively worked. It is in such districts that the former relation of 
the beds which have been shifted is determinable with great accuracy. Thus in 
the coal-field of Ashby de la Zouch, in Leicestershire (see Figure 77), a fault 
occurs, on one side of which the coal-beds a, b, c, d must once have risen to 
the height of 500 feet above the corresponding beds on the other side. But the 
uplifted strata do not stand up 500 feet above the general surface; on the 
contrary, the outline of the country, as expressed by the line z z, is uniformly 
undulating, without any break, and the mass indicated by the dotted outline must 
have been washed away. (See Mammatt's Geological Facts etc. page 90 and plate.)

The student may refer to Mr. Hull's measurement of faults, observed in the 
Lancashire coal-field, where the vertical displacement has amounted to thousands 
of feet, and yet where all the superficial inequalities which must have resulted 
from such movements have been obliterated by subsequent denudation. In the same 
memoir proofs are afforded of there having been two periods of vertical movement 
in the same fault-- one, for example, before, and another after, the Triassic 
epoch. (Hull Quarterly Geological Journal volume 24 page 318. 1868.)

The shifting of the beds by faults is often intimately connected with those same 
foldings which constitute the anticlinal and synclinal axes before alluded to, 
and there is no doubt that the subterranean causes of both forms of disturbance 
are to a great extent the same. A fault in Virginia, believed to imply a 
displacement of several thousand feet, has been traced for more than eighty 
miles in the same direction as the foldings of the Appalachian chain. (H.D. 
Rogers Geology of Pennsylvania page 897.) An hypothesis which attributes such a 
change of position to a succession of movements, is far preferable to any theory 
which assumes each fault to have been accomplished by a single upcast or 
downthrow of several thousand feet. For we know that there are operations now in 
progress, at great depths in the interior of the earth, by which both large and 
small tracts of ground are made to rise above and sink below their former level, 
some slowly and insensibly, others suddenly and by starts, a few feet or yards 
at a time; whereas there are no grounds for believing that, during the last 3000 
years at least, any regions have been either upheaved or depressed, at a single 
stroke, to the amount of several hundred, much less several thousand feet.

It is certainly not easy to understand how in the subterranean regions one mass 
of solid rock should have been folded up by a continued series of movements, 
while another mass in contact, or only separated by a line of fissure, has 
remained stationary or has perhaps subsided. But every volcano, by the 
intermittent action of the steam, gases, and lava evolved during an eruption, 
helps us to form some idea of the manner in which such operations take place. 
For eruptions are repeated at uncertain intervals throughout the whole or a 
large part of a geological period, some of the surrounding and contiguous 
districts remaining quite undisturbed. And in most of the instances with which 
we are best acquainted the emission of lava, scoria, and steam is accompanied by 
the uplifting of the solid crust. Thus in Vesuvius, Etna, the Madeiras, the 
Canary Islands, and the Azores there is evidence of marine deposits of recent 
and tertiary date having been elevated to the height of a thousand feet, and 
sometimes more, since the commencement of the volcanic explosions. There is, 
moreover, a general tendency in contemporaneous volcanic vents to affect a 
linear arrangement, extending in some instances, as in the Andes or the Indian 
Archipelago, to distances equalling half the circumference of the globe. Where 
volcanic heat, therefore, operates at such a depth as not to obtain vent at the 
surface, in the form of an eruption, it may nevertheless be conceived to give 
rise to upheavals, foldings, and faults in certain linear tracts. And marine 
denudation, to be treated of in the next chapter, will help us to understand why 
that which should be the protruding portion of the faulted rocks is missing at 
the surface.

ARRANGEMENT AND DIRECTION OF PARALLEL FOLDS OF STRATA.

The possible causes of the folding of strata by lateral movements have been 
considered in a former part of this chapter. No European chain of mountains 
affords so remarkable an illustration of the persistency of such flexures for a 
great distance as the Appalachians before alluded to, and none has been studied 
and described by many good observers with more accuracy. The chain extends from 
north to south, or rather N.N.E. to S.S.W., for nearly 1500 miles, with a 
breadth of 50 miles, throughout which the Palaeozoic strata have been so bent as 
to form a series of parallel anticlinal and synclinal ridges and troughs, 
comprising usually three or four principal and many smaller plications, some of 
them forming broad and gentle arches, others narrower and steeper ones, while 
some, where the bending has been greatest, have the position of their beds 
inverted, as before shown in Figure 73.

The strike of the parallel ridges, after continuing in a straight line for many 
hundred miles, is then found to vary for a more limited distance as much as 30 
degrees, the folds wheeling round together in the new direction and continuing 
to be parallel, as if they had all obeyed the same movement. The date of the 
movements by which the great flexures were brought about must, of course, be 
subsequent to the formation of the uppermost part of the coal or the newest of 
the bent rocks, but the disturbance must have ceased before the Triassic strata 
were deposited on the denuded edges of the folded beds.

The manner in which the numerous parallel folds, all simultaneously formed, 
assume a new direction common to the whole of them, and sometimes varying at an 
angle of 30 degrees from the normal strike of the chain, shows what deviation 
from an otherwise uniform strike of the beds may be experienced when the 
geographical area through which they are traced is on so vast a scale.

The disturbances in the case here adverted to occurred between the Carboniferous 
period and that of the Trias, and this interval is so vast that they may have 
occupied a great lapse of time, during which their parallelism was always 
preserved. But, as a rule, wherever after a long geological interval the 
recurrence of lateral movements gives rise to a new set of folds, the strike of 
these last is different. Thus, for example, Mr. Hull has pointed out that three 
principal lines of disturbance, all later than the Carboniferous period, have 
affected the stratified rocks of Lancashire. The first of these, having an 
E.N.E. direction, took place at the close of the Carboniferous period. The next, 
running north and south, at the close of the Permian, and the third, having a 
N.N.W. direction, at the close of the Jurassic period. (Edward Hull Quarterly 
Geological Journal volume 24 page 323.)

UNCONFORMABILITY OF STRATA.

(FIGURE 78. Unconformable junction of old red sandstone and Silurian schist at 
the Siccar Point, near St. Abb's Head, Berwickshire.)

Strata are said to be unconformable when one series is so placed over another 
that the planes of the superior repose on the edges of the inferior (see Figure 
78.) In this case it is evident that a period had elapsed between the production 
of the two sets of strata, and that, during this interval, the older series had 
been tilted and disturbed. Afterwards the upper series was thrown down in 
horizontal strata upon it. If these superior beds, d d Figure 78, are also 
inclined, it is plain that the lower strata a a, have been twice displaced; 
first, before the deposition of the newer beds, d d, and a second time when 
these same strata were upraised out of the sea, and thrown slightly out of the 
horizontal position.

(FIGURE 79. Junction of unconformable strata near Mons, in Belgium.)

It often happens that in the interval between the deposition of two sets of 
unconformable strata, the inferior rock has not only been denuded, but drilled 
by perforating shells. Thus, for example, at Autreppe and Gusigny, near Mons, 
beds of an ancient (primary or palaeozoic) limestone, highly inclined, and often 
bent, are covered with horizontal strata of greenish and whitish marls of the 
Cretaceous formation. The lowest, and therefore the oldest, bed of the 
horizontal series is usually the sand and conglomerate, a, in which are rounded 
fragments of stone, from an inch to two feet in diameter. These fragments have 
often adhering shells attached to them, and have been bored by perforating 
mollusca. The solid surface of the inferior limestone has also been bored, so as 
to exhibit cylindrical and pear-shaped cavities, as at c, the work of saxicavous 
mollusca; and many rents, as at b, which descend several feet or yards into the 
limestone, have been filled with sand and shells, similar to those in the 
stratum a.

OVERLAPPING STRATA.

Strata are said to overlap when an upper bed extends beyond the limits of a 
lower one. This may be produced in various ways; as, for example, when 
alterations of physical geography cause the arms of a river or channels of 
discharge to vary, so that sediment brought down is deposited over a wider area 
than before, or when the sea-bottom has been raised up and again depressed 
without disturbing the horizontal position of the strata. In this case the newer 
strata may rest for the most part conformably on the older, but, extending 
farther, pass over their edges. Every intermediate state between unconformable 
and over-lapping beds may occur, because there may be every gradation between a 
slight derangement of position, and a considerable disturbance and denudation of 
the older formation before the newer beds come on.


CHAPTER VI.

DENUDATION.

Denudation defined.
Its Amount more than equal to the entire Mass of Stratified Deposits in the 
Earth's Crust.
Subaerial Denudation.
Action of the Wind.
Action of Running Water.
Alluvium defined.
Different Ages of Alluvium.
Denuding Power of Rivers affected by Rise or Fall of Land.
Littoral Denudation.
Inland Sea-Cliffs.
Escarpments.
Submarine Denudation.
Dogger-bank.
Newfoundland Bank.
Denuding Power of the Ocean during Emergence of Land.

Denudation, which has been occasionally spoken of in the preceding chapters, is 
the removal of solid matter by water in motion, whether of rivers or of the 
waves and currents of the sea, and the consequent laying bare of some inferior 
rock. This operation has exerted an influence on the structure of the earth's 
crust as universal and important as sedimentary deposition itself; for 
denudation is the necessary antecedent of the production of all new strata of 
mechanical origin. The formation of every new deposit by the transport of 
sediment and pebbles necessarily implies that there has been, somewhere else, a 
grinding down of rock into rounded fragments, sand, or mud, equal in quantity to 
the new strata. All deposition, therefore, except in the case of a shower of 
volcanic ashes, and the outflow of lava, and the growth of certain organic 
formations, is the sign of superficial waste going on contemporaneously, and to 
an equal amount, elsewhere. The gain at one point is no more than sufficient to 
balance the loss at some other. Here a lake has grown shallower, there a ravine 
has been deepened. Here the depth of the sea has been augmented by the removal 
of a sandbank during a storm, there its bottom has been raised and shallowed by 
the accumulation in its bed of the same sand transported from the bank.

When we see a stone building, we know that somewhere, far or near, a quarry has 
been opened. The courses of stone in the building may be compared to successive 
strata, the quarry to a ravine or valley which has suffered denudation. As the 
strata, like the courses of hewn stone, have been laid one upon another 
gradually, so the excavation both of the valley and quarry have been gradual. To 
pursue the comparison still farther, the superficial heaps of mud, sand, and 
gravel, usually called alluvium, may be likened to the rubbish of a quarry which 
has been rejected as useless by the workmen, or has fallen upon the road between 
the quarry and the building, so as to lie scattered at random over the ground.

But we occasionally find in a conglomerate large rounded pebbles of an older 
conglomerate, which had previously been derived from a variety of different 
rocks. In such cases we are reminded that, the same materials having been used 
over and over again, it is not enough to affirm that the entire mass of 
stratified deposits in the earth's crust affords a monument and measure of the 
denudation which has taken place, for in truth the quantity of matter now extant 
in the form of stratified rock represents but a fraction of the material removed 
by water and redeposited in past ages.

SUBAERIAL DENUDATION.

Denudation may be divided into subaerial, or the action of wind, rain, and 
rivers; and submarine, or that effected by the waves of the sea, and its tides 
and currents. With the operation of the first of these we are best acquainted, 
and it may be well to give it our first attention.

ACTION OF THE WIND.

In desert regions where no rain falls, or where, as in parts of the Sahara, the 
soil is so salt as to be without any covering of vegetation, clouds of dust and 
sand attest the power of the wind to cause the shifting of the unconsolidated or 
disintegrated rock.

In examining volcanic countries I have been much struck with the great 
superficial changes brought about by this power in the course of centuries. The 
highest peak of Madeira is about 6050 feet above the sea, and consists of the 
skeleton of a volcanic cone now 250 feet high, the beds of which once dipped 
from a centre in all directions at an angle of more than 30 degrees. The summit 
is formed of a dike of basalt with much olivine, fifteen feet wide, apparently 
the remains of a column of lava which once rose to the crater. Nearly all the 
scoriae of the upper part of the cone have been swept away, those portions only 
remaining which were hardened by the contact or proximity of the dike. While I 
was myself on this peak on January 25, 1854, I saw the wind, though it was not 
stormy weather, removing sand and dust derived from the decomposing scoriae. 
There had been frost in the night, and some ice was still seen in the crevices 
of the rock.

On the highest platform of the Grand Canary, at an elevation of 6000 feet, there 
is a cylindrical column of hard lava, from which the softer matter has been 
carried away; and other similar remnants of the dikes of cones of eruption 
attest the denuding power of the wind at points where running water could never 
have exerted any influence. The waste effected by wind aided by frost and snow, 
may not be trifling, even in a single winter, and when multiplied by centuries 
may become indefinitely great.

ACTION OF RUNNING WATER.

(FIGURE 80. Section through several eroded formations.
a. Older alluvium or drift.
b. Modern alluvium.)

There are different classes of phenomena which attest in a most striking manner 
the vast spaces left vacant by the erosive power of water. I may allude, first, 
to those valleys on both sides of which the same strata are seen following each 
other in the same order, and having the same mineral composition and fossil 
contents. We may observe, for example, several formations, as Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 
in the diagram (Figure 80): No. 1, conglomerate, No. 2, clay, No. 3, grit, and 
No. 4, limestone, each repeated in a series of hills separated by valleys 
varying in depth. When we examine the subordinate parts of these four 
formations, we find, in like manner, distinct beds in each, corresponding, on 
the opposite sides of the valleys, both in composition and order of position. No 
one can doubt that the strata were originally continuous, and that some cause 
has swept away the portions which once connected the whole series. A torrent on 
the side of a mountain produces similar interruptions; and when we make 
artificial cuts in lowering roads, we expose, in like manner, corresponding beds 
on either side. But in nature, these appearances occur in mountains several 
thousand feet high, and separated by intervals of many miles or leagues in 
extent.

In the "Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Great Britain" (volume 1), Professor 
Ramsay has shown that the missing beds, removed from the summit of the Mendips, 
must have been nearly a mile in thickness; and he has pointed out considerable 
areas in South Wales and some of the adjacent counties of England, where a 
series of primary (or palaeozoic) strata, no less than 11,000 feet in thickness, 
have been stripped off. All these materials have of course been transported to 
new regions, and have entered into the composition of more modern formations. On 
the other hand, it is shown by observations in the same "Survey," that the 
Palaeozoic strata are from 20,000 to 30,000 feet thick. It is clear that such 
rocks, formed of mud and sand, now for the most part consolidated, are the 
monuments of denuding operations, which took place on a grand scale at a very 
remote period in the earth's history. For, whatever has been given to one area 
must always have been borrowed from another; a truth which, obvious as it may 
seem when thus stated, must be repeatedly impressed on the student's mind, 
because in many geological speculations it is taken for granted that the 
external crust of the earth has been always growing thicker in consequence of 
the accumulation, period after period, of sedimentary matter, as if the new 
strata were not always produced at the expense of pre-existing rocks, stratified 
or unstratified. By duly reflecting on the fact that all deposits of mechanical 
origin imply the transportation from some other region, whether contiguous or 
remote, of an equal amount of solid matter, we perceive that the stony exterior 
of the planet must always have grown thinner in one place, whenever, by 
accessions of new strata, it was acquiring thickness in another.

It is well known that generally at the mouths of large rivers, deltas are 
forming and the land is encroaching upon the sea; these deltas are monuments of 
recent denudation and deposition; and it is obvious that if the mud, sand, and 
gravel were taken from them and restored to the continents they would fill up a 
large part of the gullies and valleys which are due to the excavating and 
transporting power of torrents and rivers.

ALLUVIUM.

Between the superficial covering of vegetable mould and the subjacent rock there 
usually intervenes in every district a deposit of loose gravel, sand, and mud, 
to which when it occurs in valleys the name of alluvium has been popularly 
applied. The term is derived from alluvio, an inundation, or alluo, to wash, 
because the pebbles and sand commonly resemble those of a river's bed or the mud 
and gravel washed over low lands by a flood.

In the course of those changes in physical geography which may take place during 
the gradual emergence of the bottom of the sea and its conversion into dry land, 
any spot may either have been a sunken reef, or a bay, or estuary, or sea-shore, 
or the bed of a river. The drainage, moreover, may have been deranged again and 
again by earthquakes, during which temporary lakes are caused by landslips, and 
partial deluges occasioned by the bursting of the barriers of such lakes. For 
this reason it would be unreasonable to hope that we should ever be able to 
account for all the alluvial phenomena of each particular country, seeing that 
the causes of their origin are so various. Besides, the last operations of water 
have a tendency to disturb and confound together all pre-existing alluviums. 
Hence we are always in danger of regarding as the work of a single era, and the 
effect of one cause, what has in reality been the result of a variety of 
distinct agents, during a long succession of geological epochs. Much useful 
instruction may therefore be gained from the exploration of a country like 
Auvergne, where the superficial gravel of very different eras happens to have 
been preserved and kept separate by sheets of lava, which were poured out one 
after the other at periods when the denudation, and probably the upheaval, of 
rocks were in progress. That region had already acquired in some degree its 
present configuration before any volcanoes were in activity, and before any 
igneous matter was superimposed upon the granitic and fossiliferous formations. 
The pebbles therefore in the older gravels are exclusively constituted of 
granite and other aboriginal rocks; and afterwards, when volcanic vents burst 
forth into eruption, those earlier alluviums were covered by streams of lava, 
which protected them from intermixture with gravel of subsequent date. In the 
course of ages, a new system of valleys was excavated, so that the rivers ran at 
lower levels than those at which the first alluviums and sheets of lava were 
formed. When, therefore, fresh eruptions gave rise to new lava, the melted 
matter was poured out over lower grounds; and the gravel of these plains 
differed from the first or upland alluvium, by containing in it rounded 
fragments of various volcanic rocks, and often fossil bones belonging to species 
of land animals different from those which had previously flourished in the same 
country and been buried in older gravels.

(FIGURE 81. Lavas of Auvergne resting on alluviums of different ages.)

Figure 81 will explain the different heights at which beds of lava and gravel, 
each distinct from the other in composition and age, are observed, some on the 
flat tops of hills, 700 or 800 feet high, others on the slope of the same hills, 
and the newest of all in the channel of the existing river where there is 
usually gravel alone, although in some cases a narrow strip of solid lava shares 
the bottom of the valley with the river.

The proportion of extinct species of quadrupeds is more numerous in the fossil 
remains of the gravel No. 1 than in that indicated as No. 2; and in No. 3 they 
agree more closely, sometimes entirely, with those of the existing fauna. The 
usual absence or rarity of organic remains in beds of loose gravel and sand is 
partly owing to the friction which originally ground down the rocks into small 
fragments, and partly to the porous nature of alluvium, which allows the free 
percolation through it of rain-water, and promotes the decomposition and removal 
of fossil remains.

The loose transported matter on the surface of a large part of the land now 
existing in the temperate and arctic regions of the northern hemisphere, must be 
regarded as being in a somewhat exceptional state, in consequence of the 
important part which ice has played in comparatively modern geological times. 
This subject will be more specially alluded to when we describe, in the eleventh 
chapter, the deposits called "glacial."

DENUDING POWER OF RIVERS AFFECTED BY RISE OR FALL OF LAND.

It has long been a matter of common observation that most rivers are now cutting 
their channels through alluvial deposits of greater depth and extent than could 
ever have been formed by the present streams. From this fact it has been 
inferred that rivers in general have grown smaller, or become less liable to be 
flooded than formerly. It may be true that in the history of almost every 
country the rivers have been both larger and smaller than they are at the 
present moment. For the rainfall in particular regions varies according to 
climate and physical geography, and is especially governed by the elevation of 
the land above the sea, or its distance from it and other conditions equally 
fluctuating in the course of time. But the phenomenon alluded to may sometimes 
be accounted for by oscillations in the level of the land, experienced since the 
existing valleys originated, even where no marked diminution in the quantity of 
rain and in the size of the rivers has occurred.

We know that many large areas of land are rising and others sinking, and unless 
it could be assumed that both the upward and downward movements are everywhere 
uniform, many of the existing hydrographical basins ought to have the appearance 
of having been temporary lakes first filled with fluviatile strata and then 
partially re-excavated.

Suppose, for example, part of a continent, comprising within it a large 
hydrographical basin like that of the Mississippi, to subside several inches or 
feet in a century, as the west coast of Greenland, extending 600 miles north and 
south, has been sinking for three or four centuries, between the latitudes 60 
and 69 degrees N. (Principles of Geology 7th edition page 506; 10th edition 
volume 2 page 196.) It will rarely happen that the rate of subsidence will be 
everywhere equal, and in many cases the amount of depression in the interior 
will regularly exceed that of the region nearer the sea. Whenever this happens, 
the fall of the waters flowing from the upland country will be diminished, and 
each tributary stream will have less power to carry its sand and sediment into 
the main river, and the main river less power to convey its annual burden of 
transported matter to the sea. All the rivers, therefore, will proceed to fill 
up partially their ancient channels, and, during frequent inundations, will 
raise their alluvial plains by new deposits. If then the same area of land be 
again upheaved to its former height, the fall, and consequently the velocity, of 
every river will begin to augment. Each of them will be less given to overflow 
its alluvial plain; and their power of carrying earthy matter seaward, and of 
scouring out and deepening their channels, will be sustained till, after a lapse 
of many thousand years, each of them has eroded a new channel or valley through 
a fluviatile formation of comparatively modern date. The surface of what was 
once the river-plain at the period of greatest depression, will then remain 
fringing the valley-sides in the form of a terrace apparently flat, but in 
reality sloping down with the general inclination of the river. Everywhere this 
terrace will present cliffs of gravel and sand, facing the river. That such a 
series of movements has actually taken place in the main valley of the 
Mississippi and in its tributary valleys during oscillations of level, I have 
endeavoured to show in my description of that country (Second Visit to the 
United States volume 1 chapter 34.); and the fresh-water shells of existing 
species and bones of land quadrupeds, partly of extinct races, preserved in the 
terraces of fluviatile origin, attest the exclusion of the sea during the whole 
process of filling up and partial re-excavation.

LITTORAL DENUDATION.

Part of the action of the waves between high and low watermark must be included 
in subaerial denudation, more especially as the undermining of cliffs by the 
waves is facilitated by land-springs, and these often lead to the sliding down 
of great masses of land into the sea. Along our coasts we find numerous 
submerged forests, only visible at low water, having the trunks of the trees 
erect and their roots attached to them and still spreading through the ancient 
soil as when they were living. They occur in too many places, and sometimes at 
too great a depth, to be explained by a mere change in the level of the tides, 
although as the coasts waste away and alter in shape, the height to which the 
tides rise and fall is always varying, and the level of high tide at any given 
point may, in the course of many ages, differ by several feet or even fathoms. 
It is this fluctuation in the height of the tides, and the erosion and 
destruction of the sea-coast by the waves, that makes it exceedingly difficult 
for us in a few centuries, or even perhaps in a few thousand years, to determine 
whether there is a change by subterranean movement in the relative level of sea 
and land.

We often behold, as on the coasts of Devonshire and Pembrokeshire, facts which 
appear to lead to opposite conclusions. In one place a raised beach with marine 
littoral shells, and in another immediately adjoining a submerged forest. These 
phenomena indicate oscillations of level, and as the movements are very gradual, 
they must give repeated opportunities to the breakers to denude the land which 
is thus again and again exposed to their fury, although it is evident that the 
submergence is sometimes effected in such a manner as to allow the trees which 
border the coast not to be carried away.

INLAND SEA-CLIFFS.

In countries where hard limestone rocks abound, inland cliffs have often 
retained faithfully for ages the characters which they acquired when they 
constituted the boundary of land and sea. Thus, in the Morea, no less than three 
or even four ranges of cliffs are well-preserved, rising one above the other at 
different distances from the actual shore, the summit of the highest and oldest 
occasionally attaining 1000 feet in elevation. A consolidated beach with marine 
shells is usually found at the base of each cliff, and a line of littoral 
caverns. These ranges of cliff probably imply pauses in the process of upheaval 
when the waves and currents had time to undermine and clear away considerable 
masses of rock.

But the beginner should be warned not to expect to find evidence of the former 
sojourn of the sea on all those lands which we are nevertheless sure have been 
submerged at periods comparatively modern; for notwithstanding the enduring 
nature of the marks left by littoral action on some rocks, especially 
limestones, we can by no means detect sea-beaches and inland cliffs everywhere. 
On the contrary, they are, upon the whole, extremely partial, and are often 
entirely wanting in districts composed of argillaceous and sandy formations, 
which must, nevertheless, have been upheaved at the same time, and by the same 
intermittent movements, as the adjoining harder rocks.

ESCARPMENTS.

Besides the inland cliffs above alluded to which mark the ancient limits of the 
sea, there are other abrupt terminations of rocks of various kinds which 
resemble sea-cliffs, but which have in reality been due to subaerial denudation. 
These have been called "escarpments," a term which it is useful to confine to 
the outcrop of particular formations having a scarped outline, as distinct from 
cliffs due to marine action.

I formerly supposed that the steep line of cliff-like slopes seen along the 
outcrop of the chalk, when we follow the edge of the North or South Downs, was 
due to marine action; but Professor Ramsay has shown (Physical Geography and 
Geology of Great Britain page 78 1864.) that the present outline of the physical 
geography is more in favour of the idea of the escarpments having been due to 
gradual waste since the rocks were exposed in the atmosphere to the action of 
rain and rivers.

Mr. Whittaker has given a good summary of the grounds for ascribing these 
apparent sea-cliffs to waste in the open air. 1. There is an absence of all 
signs of ancient sea-beaches or littoral deposits at the base of the escarpment. 
2. Great inequality is observed in the level of the base line. 3. The 
escarpments do not intersect, like sea-cliffs, a series of distinct rocks, but 
are always confined to the boundary-line of the same formation. 4. There are 
sometimes different contiguous and parallel escarpments-- those, for example, of 
the greensand and chalk-- which are so near each other, and occasionally so 
similar in altitude, that we can not imagine any existing archipelago if 
converted into dry land to present a like outline.

The above theory is by no means inconsistent with the opinion that the limits of 
the outcrop of the chalk and greensand which the escarpments now follow, were 
originally determined by marine denudation. When the south-east of England last 
emerged from beneath the level of the sea, it was acted upon, no doubt, by the 
tide, waves, and currents, and the chalk would form from the first a mass 
projecting above the more destructible clay called Gault. Still the present 
escarpments so much resembling sea-cliffs have no doubt, for reasons above 
stated, derived their most characteristic features subsequently to emergence 
from subaerial waste by rain and rivers.

SUBMARINE DENUDATION.

When we attempt to estimate the amount of submarine denudation, we become 
sensible of the disadvantage under which we labour from our habitual incapacity 
of observing the action of marine currents on the bed of the sea. We know that 
the agitation of the waves, even during storms, diminishes at a rapid rate, so 
as to become very insignificant at the depth of a few fathoms, and is quite 
imperceptible at the depth of about sixteen fathoms; but when large bodies of 
water are transferred by a current from one part of the ocean to another, they 
are known to maintain at great depths such a velocity as must enable them to 
remove the finer, and sometimes even the coarser, materials of the rocks over 
which they flow. As the Mississippi when more than 150 feet deep can keep open 
its channel and even carry down gravel and sand to its delta, the surface 
velocity being not more than two or three miles an hour, so a gigantic current, 
like the Gulf Stream, equal in volume to many hundred Mississippis, and having 
in parts a surface velocity of more than three miles, may act as a propelling 
and abrading power at still greater depths. But the efficacy of the sea as a 
denuding agent, geologically considered, is not dependent on the power of 
currents to preserve at great depths a velocity sufficient to remove sand and 
mud, because, even where the deposition or removal of sediment is not in 
progress, the depth of water does not remain constant throughout geological 
time. Every page of the geological record proves to us that the relative levels 
of land and sea, and the position of the ocean and of continents and islands, 
has been always varying, and we may feel sure that some portions of the 
submarine area are now rising and others sinking. The force of tidal and other 
currents and of the waves during storms is sufficient to prevent the emergence 
of many lands, even though they may be undergoing continual upheaval. It is not 
an uncommon error to imagine that the waste of sea-cliffs affords the measure of 
the amount of marine denudation of which it probably constitutes an 
insignificant portion.

DOGGER-BANK.

That great shoal called the Dogger-bank, about sixty miles east of the coast of 
Northumberland, and occupying an area about as large as Wales, has nowhere a 
depth of more than ninety feet, and in its shallower parts is less than forty 
feet under water. It might contribute towards the safety of the navigation of 
our seas to form an artificial island, and to erect a light-house on this bank; 
but no engineer would be rash enough to attempt it, as he would feel sure that 
the ocean in the first heavy gale would sweep it away as readily as it does 
every temporary shoal that accumulates from time to time around a sunk vessel on 
the same bank. (Principles 10th edition volume 1 page 569.)

No observed geographical changes in historical times entitle us to assume that 
where upheaval may be in progress it proceeds at a rapid rate. Three or four 
feet rather than as many yards in a century may probably be as much as we can 
reckon upon in our speculations; and if such be the case, the continuance of the 
upward movement might easily be counteracted by the denuding force of such 
currents aided by such waves as, during a gale, are known to prevail in the 
German Ocean. What parts of the bed of the ocean are stationary at present, and 
what areas may be rising or sinking, is a matter of which we are very ignorant, 
as the taking of accurate soundings is but of recent date.

NEWFOUNDLAND BANK.

The great bank of Newfoundland may be compared in size to the whole of England. 
This part of the bottom of the Atlantic is surrounded on three sides by a 
rapidly deepening ocean, the bank itself being from twenty to fifty fathoms (or 
from 120 to 300 feet) under water. We are unable to determine by the comparison 
of different charts made at distant periods, whether it is undergoing any change 
of level, but if it be gradually rising we can not anticipate on that account 
that it will become land, because the breakers in an open sea would exercise a 
prodigious force even on solid rock brought up to within a few yards of the 
surface. We know, for example, that when a new volcanic island rose in the 
Mediterranean in 1831, the waves were capable in a few years of reducing it to a 
sunken rock.

In the same way currents which flow over the Newfoundland bank a great part of 
the year at the rate of two miles an hour, and are known to retain a 
considerable velocity to near the bottom, may carry away all loose sand and mud, 
and make the emergence of the shoal impossible, in spite of the accessions of 
mud, sand, and boulders derived occasionally from melting icebergs which, coming 
from the northern glaciers, are frequently stranded on various parts of the 
bank. They must often leave at the bottom large erratic blocks which the marine 
currents may be incapable of moving, but the same rocky fragments may be made to 
sink by the undermining of beds consisting of finer matter on which the blocks 
and gravel repose. In this way gravel and boulders may continue to overspread a 
submarine bottom after the latter has been lowered for hundreds of feet, the 
surface never having been able to emerge and become land. It is by no means 
improbable that the annual removal of an average thickness of half an inch of 
rock might counteract the ordinary upheaval which large submarine areas are 
undergoing; and the real enigma which the geologist has to solve is not the 
extensive denudation of the white chalk or of our tertiary sands and clays, but 
the fact that such incoherent materials have ever succeeded in lifting up their 
heads above water in an open sea. Why were they not swept away during storms 
into some adjoining abysses, the highest parts of each shoal being always planed 
off down to the depth of a few fathoms? The hardness and toughness of some rocks 
already exposed to windward and acting as breakwaters may perhaps have assisted; 
nor must we forget the protection afforded by a dense and unbroken covering of 
barnacles, limpets, and other creatures which flourish most between high and low 
water and shelter some newly risen coasts from the waves.


CHAPTER VII.

JOINT ACTION OF DENUDATION, UPHEAVAL, AND SUBSIDENCE IN REMODELLING THE EARTH'S 
CRUST.

How we obtain an Insight at the Surface, of the Arrangement of Rocks at great 
Depths.
Why the Height of the successive Strata in a given Region is so disproportionate 
to their Thickness.
Computation of the average annual Amount of subaerial Denudation.
Antagonism of Volcanic Force to the Levelling Power of running Water.
How far the Transfer of Sediment from the Land to a neighbouring Sea-bottom may 
affect Subterranean Movements.
Permanence of Continental and Oceanic Areas.

HOW WE OBTAIN AN INSIGHT AT THE SURFACE, OF THE ARRANGEMENT OF ROCKS AT GREAT 
DEPTHS.

The reader has been already informed that, in the structure of the earth's 
crust, we often find proofs of the direct superposition of marine to fresh-water 
strata, and also evidence of the alternation of deep-sea and shallow-water 
formations. In order to explain how such a series of rocks could be made to form 
our present continents and islands, we have not only to assume that there have 
been alternate upward and downward movements of great vertical extent, but that 
the upheaval in the areas which we at present inhabit has, in later geological 
times, sufficiently predominated over subsidence to cause these portions of the 
earth's crust to be land instead of sea. The sinking down of a delta beneath the 
sea-level may cause strata of fluviatile or even terrestrial origin, such as 
peat with trees proper to marshes, to be covered by deposits of deep-sea origin. 
There is also no end to the thickness of mud and sand which may accumulate in 
shallow water, provided that fresh sediment is brought down from the wasting 
land at a rate corresponding to that of the sinking of the bed of the sea. The 
latter, again, may sometimes sink so fast that the earthy matter, being 
intercepted in some new landward depression, may never reach its former resting-
place, where, the water becoming clear may favour the growth of shells and 
corals, and calcareous rocks of organic origin may thus be superimposed on 
mechanical deposits.

The succession of strata here alluded to would be consistent with the occurrence 
of gradual downward and upward movements of the land and bed of the sea without 
any disturbance of the horizontality of the several formations. But the 
arrangement of rocks composing the earth's crust differs materially from that 
which would result from a mere series of vertical movements. Had the volcanic 
forces been confined to such movements, and had the stratified rocks been first 
formed beneath the sea and then raised above it, without any lateral 
compression, the geologist would never have obtained an insight into the 
monuments of various ages, some of extremely remote antiquity.

What we have said in Chapter 5 of dip and strike, of the folding and inversion 
of strata, of anticlinal and synclinal flexures, and in Chapter 6 of denudation 
at different periods, whether subaerial or submarine, must be understood before 
the student can comprehend what may at first seem to him an anomaly, but which 
it is his business particularly to understand. I allude to the small height 
above the level of the sea attained by strata often many miles in thickness, and 
about the chronological succession of which, in one and the same region, there 
is no doubt whatever. Had stratified rocks in general remained horizontal, the 
waves of the sea would have been enabled during oscillations of level to plane 
off entirely the uppermost beds as they rose or sank during the emergence or 
submergence of the land. But the occurrence of a series of formations of widely 
different ages, all remaining horizontal and in conformable stratification, is 
exceptional, and for this reason the total annihilation of the uppermost strata 
has rarely taken place. We owe, indeed, to the side way movements of LATERAL 
COMPRESSION those anticlinal and synclinal curves of the beds already described 
(Figure 55 Chapter 4), which, together with denudation, subaerial and submarine, 
enable us to investigate the structure of the earth's crust many miles below 
those points which the miner can reach. I have already shown in Figure 56 
Chapter 4, how, at St. Abb's Head, a series of strata of indefinite thickness 
may become vertical, and then denuded, so that the edges of the beds alone shall 
be exposed to view, the altitude of the upheaved ridges being reduced to a 
moderate height above the sea-level; and it may be observed that although the 
incumbent strata of Old Red Sandstone are in that place nearly horizontal, yet 
these same newer beds will in other places be found so folded as to present 
vertical strata, the edges of which are abruptly cut off, as in 2, 3, 4 on the 
right-hand side of the diagram, Figure 55 Chapter 4.

WHY THE HEIGHT OF THE SUCCESSIVE STRATA IN A GIVEN REGION IS SO DISPROPORTIONATE 
TO THEIR THICKNESS.

We can not too distinctly bear in mind how dependent we are on the joint action 
of the volcanic and aqueous forces, the one in disturbing the original position 
of rocks, and the other in destroying large portions of them, for our power of 
consulting the different pages and volumes of those stony records of which the 
crust of the globe is composed. Why, it may be asked, if the ancient bed of the 
sea has been in many regions uplifted to the height of two or three miles, and 
sometimes twice that altitude, and if it can be proved that some single 
formations are of themselves two or three miles thick, do we so often find 
several important groups resting one upon the other, yet attaining only the 
height of a few hundred feet above the level of the sea?

The American geologists, after carefully studying the Allegheny or Appalachian 
mountains, have ascertained that the older fossiliferous rocks of that chain 
(from the Silurian to the Carboniferous inclusive) are not less than 42,000 feet 
thick, and if they were now superimposed on each other in the order in which 
they were thrown down, they ought to equal in height the Himalayas with the Alps 
piled upon them. Yet they rarely reach an altitude of 5000 feet, and their 
loftiest peaks are no more than 7000 feet high. The Carboniferous strata forming 
the highest member of the series, and containing beds of coal, can be shown to 
be of shallow-water origin, or even sometimes to have originated in swamps in 
the open air. But what is more surprising, the lowest part of this great 
Palaeozoic series, instead of having been thrown down at the bottom of an abyss 
more than 40,000 feet deep, consists of sediment (the Potsdam sandstone), 
evidently spread out on the bottom of a shallow sea, on which ripple-marked 
sands were occasionally formed. This vast thickness of 40,000 feet is not 
obtained by adding together the maximum density attained by each formation in 
distant parts of the chain, but by measuring the successive groups as they are 
exposed in a very limited area, and where the denuded edges of the vertical 
strata forming the parallel folds alluded to in Chapter 5 "crop out" at the 
surface. Our attention has been called by Mr. James Hall, Palaeontologist of New 
York, to the fact that these Palaeozoic rocks of the Appalachian chain, which 
are of such enormous density, where they are almost entirely of mechanical 
origin, thin out gradually as they are traced to the westward, where evidently 
the contemporaneous seas allowed organic rocks to be formed by corals, 
echinoderms, and encrinites in clearer water, and where, although the same 
successive periods are represented, the total mass of strata from the Silurian 
to the Carboniferous, instead of being 40,000 is only 4000 feet thick.

A like phenomenon is exhibited in every mountainous country, as, for example, in 
the European Alps; but we need not go farther than the north of England for its 
illustration. Thus in Lancashire and central England the thickness of the 
Carboniferous formation, including the Millstone Grit and Yoredale beds, is 
computed to be more than 18,000 feet; to this we may add the Mountain Limestone, 
at least 2000 feet in thickness, and the overlying Permian and Triassic 
formations, 3000 or 4000 feet thick. How then does it happen that the loftiest 
hills of Yorkshire and Lancashire, instead of being 24,000 feet high, never rise 
above 3000 feet? For here, as before pointed out in the Alleghenies, all the 
great thicknesses are sometimes found in close approximation and in a region 
only a few miles in diameter. It is true that these same sets of strata do not 
preserve their full force when followed for indefinite distances. Thus the 
18,000 feet of Carboniferous grits and shales in Lancashire, before alluded to, 
gradually thin out, as Mr. Hull has shown, as they extend southward, by 
attenuation or original deficiency of sediment, and not in consequence of 
subsequent denudation, so that when we have followed them for about 100 miles 
into Leicestershire, they have dwindled away to a thickness of only 3000 feet. 
In the same region the Carboniferous limestone attains so unusual a thickness-- 
namely, more than 4000 feet-- as to appear to compensate in some measure for the 
deficiency of contemporaneous sedimentary rock. (Hull Quarterly Geological 
Journal volume 24 page 322 1868.)

(FIGURE 82. Unconformable Palaeozoic strata, Sutherlandshire (Murchison).
Queenaig (2673 feet).
1. Laurentian gneiss.
2. Cambrian conglomerate and sandstone.
3, 3'. Quartzose Lower Silurian, with annelid burrows.)

It is admitted that when two formations are unconformable their fossil remains 
almost always differ considerably. The break in the continuity of the organic 
forms seems connected with a great lapse of time, and the same interval has 
allowed extensive disturbance of the strata, and removal of parts of them by 
denudation, to take place. The more we extend our investigations the more 
numerous do the proofs of these breaks become, and they extend to the most 
ancient rocks yet discovered. The oldest examples yet brought to light in the 
British Isles are on the borders of Rosshire and Sutherlandshire, and have been 
well described by Sir Roderick Murchison, by whom their chronological relations 
were admirably worked out, and proved to be very different from those which 
previous observers had imagined them to be. I had an opportunity in the autumn 
of 1869 of verifying the splendid section given in Figure 82 by climbing in a 
few hours from the banks of Loch Assynt to the summit of the mountain called 
Queenaig, 2673 feet high.

The formations 1, 2, 3, the Laurentian, Cambrian, and Silurian, to be explained 
in Chapters 25 and 26, not only occur in succession in this one mountain, but 
their unconformable junctions are distinctly exposed to view.

To begin with the oldest set of rocks, No. 1; they consist chiefly of 
hornblendic gneiss, and in the neighbouring Hebrides form whole islands, 
attaining a thickness of thousands of feet, although they have suffered such 
contortions and denudation that they seldom rise more than a few hundred feet 
above the sea-level. In discordant stratification upon the edges of this gneiss 
reposes No. 2, a group of conglomerate and purple sandstone referable to the 
Cambrian (or Longmynd) formation, which can elsewhere be shown to be 
characterised by its peculiar organic remains. On this again rests No. 3, a 
lower member of the important group called Silurian, an outlier of which, 3', 
caps the summit of Queenaig, attesting the removal by denudation of rocks of the 
same age, which once extended from the great mass 3 to 3'. Although this rock 
now consists of solid quartz, it is clear that in its original state it was 
formed of fine sand, perforated by numerous lob-worms or annelids, which left 
their burrows in the shape of tubular hollows (Chapter 26, Figure 563 of 
Arenicolites), hundreds, nay thousands, of which I saw as I ascended the 
mountain.

(FIGURE 83. Diagrammatic section of the same groups near Queenaig (Murchison) 
through west (left), Suilvein, Assynt and Ben More, east (right).
1. Laurentian gneiss.
2. Cambrian conglomerate and sandstone.
3, 3'. Quartzose Lower Silurian, with annelid burrows.
3a. Fossiliferous Silurian limestone.
3b. Quartzose, micaceous and gneissose rocks (altered Silurian).)

In Queenaig we only behold this single quartzose member of the Silurian series, 
but in the neighbouring country (see Figure 83) it is seen to the eastward to be 
followed by limestones, 3a, and schists, 3b, presenting numerous folds, and 
becoming more and more metamorphic and crystalline, until at length, although 
very different in age and strike, they much resemble in appearance the group No. 
1. It is very seldom that in the same country one continuous formation, such as 
the Silurian, is, as in this case, more fossiliferous and less altered by 
volcanic heat in its older than in its newer strata, and still more rare to find 
an underlying and unconformable group like the Cambrian retaining its original 
condition of a conglomerate and sandstone more perfectly than the overlying 
formation. Here also we may remark in regard to the origin of these Cambrian 
rocks that they were evidently produced at the expense of the underlying 
Laurentian, for the rounded pebbles occurring in them are identical in 
composition and texture with that crystalline gneiss which constitutes the 
contorted beds of the inferior formation No. 1. When the reader has studied the 
chapter on metamorphism, and has become aware how much modification by heat, 
pressure, and chemical action is required before the conversion of sedimentary 
into crystalline strata can be brought about, he will appreciate the insight 
which we thus gain into the date of the changes which had already been effected 
in the Laurentian rocks long before the Cambrian pebbles of quartz and gneiss 
were derived from them. The Laurentian is estimated by Sir William Logan to 
amount in Canada to 30,000 feet in thickness. As to the Cambrian, it is supposed 
by Sir Roderick Murchison that the fragment left in Sutherlandshire is about 
3500 feet thick, and in Wales and the borders of Shropshire this formation may 
equal 10,000 feet, while the Silurian strata No. 3, difficult as it may be to 
measure them in their various foldings to the eastward, where they have been 
invaded by intrusive masses of granite, are supposed many times to surpass the 
Cambrian in volume and density.

But although we are dealing here with stratified rocks, each of which would be 
several miles in thickness, if they were fully represented, the whole of them do 
not attain the elevation of a single mile above the level of the sea.

COMPUTATION OF THE AVERAGE ANNUAL AMOUNT OF SUBAERIAL DENUDATION.

The geology of the district above alluded to may assist our imagination in 
conceiving the extent to which groups of ancient rocks, each of which may in 
their turn have formed continents and oceanic basins, have been disturbed, 
folded, and denuded even in the course of a few out of many of those geological 
periods to which our imperfect records relate. It is not easy for us to 
overestimate the effects which causes in every day action must produce when the 
multiplying power of time is taken into account.

Attempts were made by Manfredi in 1736, and afterwards by Playfair in 1802, to 
calculate the time which it would require to enable the rivers to deliver over 
the whole of the land into the basin of the ocean. The data were at first too 
imperfect and vague to allow them even to approximate to safe conclusions. But 
in our own time similar investigations have been renewed with more prospect of 
success, the amount brought down by many large rivers to the sea having been 
more accurately ascertained. Mr. Alfred Tylor, in 1850, inferred that the 
quantity of detritus now being distributed over the sea-bottom would, at the end 
of 10,000 years, cause an elevation of the sea-level to the extent of at least 
three inches. (Tylor Philosophical Magazine 4th series page 268 1850.) 
Subsequently Mr. Croll, in 1867, and again, with more exactness, in 1868, 
deduced from the latest measurement of the sediment transported by European and 
American rivers the rate of subaerial denudation to which the surface of large 
continents is exposed, taking especially the hydrographical basin of the 
Mississippi as affording the best available measure of the average waste of the 
land. The conclusion arrived at in his able memoir was that the whole 
terrestrial surface is denuded at the rate of one foot in 6000 years (Croll 
Philosophical Magazine 1868 page 381.), and this opinion was simultaneously 
enforced by his fellow-labourer, Mr. Geikie, who, being jointly engaged in the 
same line of inquiry, published a luminous essay on the subject in 1868.

The student, by referring to my "Principles of Geology" (Volume 1 page 442 
1867.) may see that Messrs. Humphrey and Abbot, during their survey of the 
Mississippi, attempted to make accurate measurements of the proportion of 
sediment carried down annually to the sea by that river, including not only the 
mud held in suspension, but also the sand and gravel forced along the bottom.

It is evident that when we know the dimensions of the area which is drained, and 
the annual quantity of earthy matter taken from it and borne into the sea, we 
can affirm how much on an average has been removed from the general surface in 
one year, and there seems no danger of our overrating the mean rate of waste by 
selecting the Mississippi as our example, for that river drains a country equal 
to more than half the continent of Europe, extends through twenty degrees of 
latitude, and therefore through regions enjoying a great variety of climate, and 
some of its tributaries descend from mountains of great height. The Mississippi 
is also more likely to afford us a fair test of ordinary denudation, because, 
unlike the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, there are no great lakes in which 
the fluviatile sediment is thrown down and arrested in its way to the sea. In 
striking a general average we have to remember that there are large deserts in 
which there is scarcely any rainfall, and tracts which are as rainless as parts 
of Peru, and these must not be neglected as counterbalancing others, in the 
tropics, where the quantity of rain is in excess. If then, argues Mr. Geikie, we 
assume that the Mississippi is lowering the surface of the great basin which it 
drains at the rate of one foot in 6000 years, 10 feet in 60,000 years, 100 feet 
in 600,000 years, and 1000 feet in 6,000,000 years, it would not require more 
than about 4,500,000 years to wear away the whole of the North American 
continent if its mean height is correctly estimated by Humboldt at 748 feet. And 
if the mean height of all the land now above the sea throughout the globe is 
1000 feet, as some geographers believe, it would only require six million years 
to subject a mass of rock equal in volume to the whole of the land to the action 
of subaerial denudation. It may be objected that the annual waste is partial, 
and not equally derived from the general surface of the country, inasmuch as 
plains, water-sheds, and level ground at all heights remain comparatively 
unaltered; but this, as Mr. Geikie has well pointed out, does not affect our 
estimate of the sum total of denudation. The amount remains the same, and if we 
allow too little for the loss from the surface of table-lands we only increase 
the proportion of the loss sustained by the sides and bottoms of the valleys, 
and vice versa. (Transactions of the Geological Society Glasgow volume 3 page 
169.)

ANTAGONISM OF VOLCANIC FORCE TO THE LEVELLING POWER OF RUNNING WATER.

In all these estimates it is assumed that the entire quantity of land above the 
sea-level remains on an average undiminished in spite of annual waste. Were it 
otherwise the subaerial denudation would be continually lessened by the 
diminution of the height and dimensions of the land exposed to waste. 
Unfortunately we have as yet no accurate data enabling us to measure the action 
of that force by which the inequalities of the surface of the earth's crust may 
be restored, and the height of the continents and depth of the seas made to 
continue unimpaired. I stated in 1830 in the "Principles of Geology" (1st 
edition chapter 10 page 167 1830; see also 10th edition volume 1 chapter 15 page 
327 1867.), that running water and volcanic action are two antagonistic forces; 
the one labouring continually to reduce the whole of the land to the level of 
the sea, the other to restore and maintain the inequalities of the crust on 
which the very existence of islands and continents depends. I stated, however, 
that when we endeavour to form some idea of the relation of these destroying and 
renovating forces, we must always bear in mind that it is not simply by upheaval 
that subterranean movements can counteract the levelling force of running water. 
For whereas the transportation of sediment from the land to the ocean would 
raise the general sea-level, the subsidence of the sea-bottom, by increasing its 
capacity, would check this rise and prevent the submergence of the land. I have, 
indeed, endeavoured to show that unless we assume that there is, on the whole, 
more subsidence than upheaval, we must suppose the diameter of the planet to be 
always increasing, by that quantity of volcanic matter which is annually poured 
out in the shape of lava or ashes, whether on the land or in the bed of the sea, 
and which is derived from the interior of the earth. The abstraction of this 
matter causes, no doubt, subterranean vacuities and a corresponding giving way 
of the surface; if it were not so, the average density of parts of the interior 
would be always lessening and the size of the planet increasing. (Principles 
volume 2 page 237; also 1st edition page 447 1830.)

Our inability to estimate the amount or direction of the movements due to 
volcanic power by no means renders its efficacy as a land-preserving force in 
past times a mere matter of conjecture. The student will see in Chapter 24 that 
we have proofs of Carboniferous forests hundreds of miles in extent which grew 
on the lowlands or deltas near the sea, and which subsided and gave place to 
other forests, until in some regions fluviatile and shallow-water strata with 
occasional seams of coal were piled one over the other, till they attained a 
thickness of many thousand feet. Such accumulations, observed in Great Britain 
and America on opposite sides of the Atlantic, imply the long-continued 
existence of land vegetation, and of rivers draining a former continent placed 
where there is now deep sea.

It will be also seen in Chapter 25 that we have evidence of a rich terrestrial 
flora, the Devonian, even more ancient than the Carboniferous; while on the 
other hand, the later Triassic, Oolitic, Cretaceous, and successive Tertiary 
periods have all supplied us with fossil plants, insects, or terrestrial 
mammalia; showing that, in spite of great oscillations of level and continued 
changes in the position of land and sea, the volcanic forces have maintained a 
due proportion of dry land. We may appeal also to fresh-water formations, such 
as the Purbeck and Wealden, to prove that in the Oolitic and Neocomian eras 
there were rivers draining ancient lands in Europe in times when we know that 
other spaces, now above water, were submerged.

HOW FAR THE TRANSFER OF SEDIMENT FROM THE LAND TO A NEIGHBOURING SEA-BOTTOM MAY 
AFFECT SUBTERRANEAN MOVEMENTS.

Little as we understand at present the laws which govern the distribution of 
volcanic heat in the interior and crust of the globe, by which mountain chains, 
high table-lands, and the abysses of the ocean are formed, it seems clear that 
this heat is the prime mover on which all the grander features in the external 
configuration of the planet depend.

It has been suggested that the stripping off by denudation of dense masses from 
one part of a continent and the delivery of the same into the bed of the ocean 
must have a decided effect in causing changes of temperature in the earth's 
crust below, or, in other words, in causing the subterranean isothermals to 
shift their position. If this be so, one part of the crust may be made to rise, 
and another to sink, by the expansion and contraction of the rocks, of which the 
temperature is altered.

I can not, at present, discuss this subject, of which I have treated more fully 
elsewhere (Principles volume 2 page 229 1868.), but may state here that I 
believe this transfer of sediment to play a very subordinate part in modifying 
those movements on which the configuration of the earth's crust depends. In 
order that strata of shallow-water origin should be able to attain a thickness 
of several thousand feet, and so come to exert a considerable downward pressure, 
there must have been first some independent and antecedent causes at work which 
have given rise to the incipient shallow receptacle in which the sediment began 
to accumulate. The same causes there continuing to depress the sea-bottom, room 
would be made for fresh accessions of sediment, and it would only be by a long 
repetition of the depositing process that the new matter could acquire weight 
enough to affect the temperature of the rocks far below, so as to increase or 
diminish their volume.

PERMANENCE OF CONTINENTAL AND OCEANIC AREAS.

If the thickness of more than 40,000 feet of sedimentary strata before alluded 
to in the Appalachians proves a preponderance of downward movements in 
Palaeozoic times in a district now forming the eastern border of North America, 
it also proves, as before hinted, the continued existence and waste of some 
neighbouring continent, probably formed of Laurentian rocks, and situated where 
the Atlantic now prevails. Such an hypothesis would be in perfect harmony with 
the conclusions forced upon us by the study of the present configuration of our 
continents, and the relation of their height to the depth of the oceanic basins; 
also to the considerable elevation and extent sometimes reached by drift 
containing shells of recent species, and still more by the fact of sedimentary 
strata, several thousand feet thick, as those of central Sicily, or such as 
flank the Alps and Apennines, containing fossil Mollusca sometimes almost wholly 
identical with species still living.

I have remarked elsewhere (Principles volume 1 page 265 1867.) that upward and 
downward movements of 1000 feet or more would turn much land into sea and sea 
into land in the continental areas and their borders, whereas oscillations of 
equal magnitude would have no corresponding effect in the bed of the ocean 
generally, believed as it is to have a mean depth of 15,000 feet, and which, 
whether this estimate be correct or not, is certainly of great profundity. 
Subaerial denudation would not of itself lessen the area of the land, but would 
tend to fill up with sediment seas of moderate depth adjoining the coast. The 
coarser matter falls to the bottom near the shore in the first still water which 
it reaches, and whenever the sea-bottom on which this matter has been thrown is 
slightly elevated, it becomes land, and an upheaval of a thousand feet causes it 
to attain the mean elevation of continents in general.

Suppose, therefore, we had ascertained that the triturating power of subaerial 
denudation might in a given time-- in three, or six, or a greater number of 
millions of years-- pulverise a volume of rock equal in dimensions to all the 
present land, we might yet find, could we revisit the earth at the end of such a 
period, that the continents occupied very much the same position which they held 
before; we should find the rivers employed in carrying down to the sea the very 
same mud, sand, and pebbles with which they had been charged in our own time, 
the superficial alluvial matter as well as a great thickness of sedimentary 
strata would inclose shells, all or a great part of which we should recognise as 
specifically identical with those already known to us as living. Every geologist 
is aware that great as have been the geographical changes in the northern 
hemisphere since the commencement of the Glacial Period, there having been 
submergence and re-emergence of land to the extent of 1000 feet vertically, and 
in the temperate latitudes great vicissitudes of climate, the marine mollusca 
have not changed, and the same drift which had been carried down to the sea at 
the beginning of the period is now undergoing a second transportation in the 
same direction.

As when we have measured a fraction of time in an hour-glass we have only to 
reverse the position of our chronometer and we make the same sand measure over 
again the duration of a second equal period, so when the volcanic force has 
remoulded the form of a continent and the adjoining sea-bottom, the same 
materials are made to do duty a second time. It is true that at each oscillation 
of level the solid rocks composing the original continent suffer some fresh 
denudation, and do not remain unimpaired like the wooden and glass framework of 
the hour-glass, still the wear and tear suffered by the larger area exposed to 
subaerial denudation consists either of loose drift or of sedimentary strata, 
which were thrown down in seas near the land, and subsequently upraised, the 
same continents and oceanic basins remaining in existence all the while.

From all that we know of the extreme slowness of the upward and downward 
movements which bring about even slight geographical changes, we may infer that 
it would require a long succession of geological periods to cause the submarine 
and supramarine areas to change places, even if the ascending movements in the 
one region and the descending in the other were continuously in one direction. 
But we have only to appeal to the structure of the Alps, where there are so many 
shallow and deep water formations of various ages crowded into a limited area, 
to convince ourselves that mountain chains are the result of great oscillations 
of level. High land is not produced simply by uniform upheaval, but by a 
predominance of elevatory over subsiding movements. Where the ocean is extremely 
deep it is because the sinking of the bottom has been in excess, in spite of 
interruptions by upheaval.

Yet persistent as may be the leading features of land and sea on the globe, they 
are not immutable. Some of the finest mud is doubtless carried to indefinite 
distances from the coast by marine currents, and we are taught by deep-sea 
dredgings that in clear water at depths equalling the height of the Alps organic 
beings may flourish, and their spoils slowly accumulate on the bottom. We also 
occasionally obtain evidence that submarine volcanoes are pouring out ashes and 
streams of lava in mid-ocean as well as on land (see Principles volume 2 page 
64), and that wherever mountains like Etna, Vesuvius, and the Canary Islands are 
now the site of eruptions, there are signs of accompanying upheaval, by which 
beds of ashes full of recent marine shells have been uplifted many hundred feet. 
We need not be surprised, therefore, if we learn from geology that the 
continents and oceans were not always placed where they now are, although the 
imagination may well be overpowered when it endeavours to contemplate the 
quantity of time required for such revolutions.

We shall have gained a great step if we can approximate to the number of 
millions of years in which the average aqueous denudation going on upon the land 
would convey seaward a quantity of matter equal to the average volume of our 
continents, and this might give us a gauge of the minimum of volcanic force 
necessary to counteract such levelling power of running water; but to discover a 
relation between these great agencies and the rate at which species of organic 
beings vary, is at present wholly beyond the reach of our computation, though 
perhaps it may not prove eventually to transcend the powers of man.


CHAPTER VIII.

CHRONOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF ROCKS.

Aqueous, Plutonic, volcanic, and metamorphic Rocks considered chronologically.
Terms Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary; Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Cainozoic 
explained.
On the different Ages of the aqueous Rocks.
Three principal Tests of relative Age: Superposition, Mineral Character, and 
Fossils.
Change of Mineral Character and Fossils in the same continuous Formation.
Proofs that distinct Species of Animals and Plants have lived at successive 
Periods.
Distinct Provinces of indigenous Species.
Great Extent of single Provinces.
Similar Laws prevailed at successive Geological Periods.
Relative Importance of mineral and palaeontological Characters.
Test of Age by included Fragments.
Frequent Absence of Strata of intervening Periods.
Tabular Views of fossiliferous Strata.

CHRONOLOGY OF ROCKS.

In the first chapter it was stated that the four great classes of rocks, the 
aqueous, the volcanic, the Plutonic, and the metamorphic, would each be 
considered not only in reference to their mineral characters, and mode of 
origin, but also to their relative age. In regard to the aqueous rocks, we have 
already seen that they are stratified, that some are calcareous, others 
argillaceous or siliceous, some made up of sand, others of pebbles; that some 
contain fresh-water, others marine fossils, and so forth; but the student has 
still to learn which rocks, exhibiting some or all of these characters, have 
originated at one period of the earth's history, and which at another.

To determine this point in reference to the fossiliferous formations is more 
easy than in any other class, and it is therefore the most convenient and 
natural method to begin by establishing a chronology for these strata, and then 
to refer as far as possible to the same divisions, the several groups of 
Plutonic, volcanic, and metamorphic rocks. Such a system of classification is 
not only recommended by its greater clearness and facility of application, but 
is also best fitted to strike the imagination by bringing into one view the 
contemporaneous revolutions of the inorganic and organic creations of former 
times. For the sedimentary formations are most readily distinguished by the 
different species of fossil animals and plants which they inclose, and of which 
one assemblage after another has flourished and then disappeared from the earth 
in succession.

In the present work, therefore, the four great classes of rocks, the aqueous, 
Plutonic, volcanic, and metamorphic, will form four parallel, or nearly 
parallel, columns in one chronological table. They will be considered as four 
sets of monuments relating to four contemporaneous, or nearly contemporaneous, 
series of events. I shall endeavour, in a subsequent chapter on the Plutonic 
rocks, to explain the manner in which certain masses belonging to each of the 
four classes of rocks may have originated simultaneously at every geological 
period, and how the earth's crust may have been continually remodelled, above 
and below, by aqueous and igneous causes, from times indefinitely remote. In the 
same manner as aqueous and fossiliferous strata are now formed in certain seas 
or lakes, while in other places volcanic rocks break out at the surface, and are 
connected with reservoirs of melted matter at vast depths in the bowels of the 
earth, so, at every era of the past, fossiliferous deposits and superficial 
igneous rocks were in progress contemporaneously with others of subterranean and 
Plutonic origin, and some sedimentary strata were exposed to heat, and made to 
assume a crystalline or metamorphic structure.

It can by no means be taken for granted, that during all these changes the solid 
crust of the earth has been increasing in thickness. It has been shown, that so 
far as aqueous action is concerned, the gain by fresh deposits, and the loss by 
denudation, must at each period have been equal (see Chapter 6); and in like 
manner, in the inferior portion of the earth's crust, the acquisition of new 
crystalline rocks, at each successive era, may merely have counterbalanced the 
loss sustained by the melting of materials previously consolidated. As to the 
relative antiquity of the crystalline foundations of the earth's crust, when 
compared to the fossiliferous and volcanic rocks which they support, I have 
already stated, in the first chapter, that to pronounce an opinion on this 
matter is as difficult as at once to decide which of the two, whether the 
foundations or superstructure of an ancient city built on wooden piles may be 
the oldest. We have seen that, to answer this question, we must first be 
prepared to say whether the work of decay and restoration had gone on most 
rapidly above or below; whether the average duration of the piles has exceeded 
that of the buildings, or the contrary. So also in regard to the relative age of 
the superior and inferior portions of the earth's crust; we can not hazard even 
a conjecture on this point, until we know whether, upon an average, the power of 
water above, or that of heat below, is most efficacious in giving new forms to 
solid matter.

The early geologists gave to all the crystalline and non-fossiliferous rocks the 
name of Primitive or Primary, under the idea that they were formed anterior to 
the appearance of life upon the earth, while the aqueous or fossiliferous strata 
were termed Secondary, and alluviums or other superficial deposits, Tertiary. 
The meaning of these terms, has, however, been gradually modified with advancing 
knowledge, and they are now used to designate three great chronological 
divisions under which all geological formations can be classed, each of them 
being characterised by the presence of distinctive groups of organic remains 
rather than by any mechanical peculiarities of the strata themselves. If, 
therefore, we retain the term "primary," it must not be held to designate a set 
of crystalline rocks some of which have been proved to be even of Tertiary age, 
but must be applied to all rocks older than the secondary formations. Some 
geologists, to avoid misapprehension, have introduced the term Palaeozoic for 
primary, from palaion, "ancient," and zoon, "an organic being," still retaining 
the terms secondary and tertiary; Mr. Phillips, for the sake of uniformity, has 
proposed Mesozoic, for secondary, from mesos, "middle," etc.; and Cainozoic, for 
tertiary, from kainos, "recent," etc.; but the terms primary, secondary, and 
tertiary have the claim of priority in their favour, and are of corresponding 
value.

It may perhaps be suggested that some metamorphic strata, and some granites, may 
be anterior in date to the oldest of the primary fossiliferous rocks. This 
opinion is doubtless true, and will be discussed in future chapters; but I may 
here observe, that when we arrange the four classes of rocks in four parallel 
columns in one table of chronology, it is by no means assumed that these columns 
are all of equal length; one may begin at an earlier period than the rest, and 
another may come down to a later point of time, and we may not be yet acquainted 
with the most ancient of the primary fossiliferous beds, or with the newest of 
the hypogene.

For reasons already stated, I proceed first to treat of the aqueous or 
fossiliferous formations considered in chronological order or in relation to the 
different periods at which they have been deposited.

There are three principal tests by which we determine the age of a given set of 
strata; first, superposition; secondly, mineral character; and, thirdly, organic 
remains. Some aid can occasionally be derived from a fourth kind of proof, 
namely, the fact of one deposit including in it fragments of a pre-existing 
rock, by which the relative ages of the two may, even in the absence of all 
other evidence, be determined.

SUPERPOSITION.

The first and principal test of the age of one aqueous deposit, as compared to 
another, is relative position. It has been already stated, that, where strata 
are horizontal, the bed which lies uppermost is the newest of the whole, and 
that which lies at the bottom the most ancient. So, of a series of sedimentary 
formations, they are like volumes of history, in which each writer has recorded 
the annals of his own times, and then laid down the book, with the last written 
page uppermost, upon the volume in which the events of the era immediately 
preceding were commemorated. In this manner a lofty pile of chronicles is at 
length accumulated; and they are so arranged as to indicate, by their position 
alone, the order in which the events recorded in them have occurred.

In regard to the crust of the earth, however, there are some regions where, as 
the student has already been informed, the beds have been disturbed, and 
sometimes extensively thrown over and turned upside down. (See Chapter 5.) But 
an experienced geologist can rarely be deceived by these exceptional cases. When 
he finds that the strata are fractured, curved, inclined, or vertical, he knows 
that the original order of superposition must be doubtful, and he then 
endeavours to find sections in some neighbouring district where the strata are 
horizontal, or only slightly inclined. Here, the true order of sequence of the 
entire series of deposits being ascertained, a key is furnished for settling the 
chronology of those strata where the displacement is extreme.

MINERAL CHARACTER.

The same rocks may often be observed to retain for miles, or even hundreds of 
miles, the same mineral peculiarities, if we follow the planes of 
stratification, or trace the beds, if they be undisturbed, in a horizontal 
direction. But if we pursue them vertically, or in any direction transverse to 
the planes of stratification, this uniformity ceases almost immediately. In that 
case we can scarcely ever penetrate a stratified mass for a few hundred yards 
without beholding a succession of extremely dissimilar rocks, some of fine, 
others of coarse grain, some of mechanical, others of chemical origin; some 
calcareous, others argillaceous, and others siliceous. These phenomena lead to 
the conclusion that rivers and currents have dispersed the same sediment over 
wide areas at one period, but at successive periods have been charged, in the 
same region, with very different kinds of matter. The first observers were so 
astonished at the vast spaces over which they were able to follow the same 
homogeneous rocks in a horizontal direction, that they came hastily to the 
opinion, that the whole globe had been environed by a succession of distinct 
aqueous formations, disposed round the nucleus of the planet, like the 
concentric coats of an onion. But, although, in fact, some formations may be 
continuous over districts as large as half of Europe, or even more, yet most of 
them either terminate wholly within narrower limits, or soon change their 
lithological character. Sometimes they thin out gradually, as if the supply of 
sediment had failed in that direction, or they come abruptly to an end, as if we 
had arrived at the borders of the ancient sea or lake which served as their 
receptacle. It no less frequently happens that they vary in mineral aspect and 
composition, as we pursue them horizontally. For example, we trace a limestone 
for a hundred miles, until it becomes more arenaceous, and finally passes into 
sand, or sandstone. We may then follow this sandstone, already proved by its 
continuity to be of the same age, throughout another district a hundred miles or 
more in length.

ORGANIC REMAINS.

This character must be used as a criterion of the age of a formation, or of the 
contemporaneous origin of two deposits in distant places, under very much the 
same restrictions as the test of mineral composition.

First, the same fossils may be traced over wide regions, if we examine strata in 
the direction of their planes, although by no means for indefinite distances. 
Secondly, while the same fossils prevail in a particular set of strata for 
hundreds of miles in a horizontal direction, we seldom meet with the same 
remains for many fathoms, and very rarely for several hundred yards, in a 
vertical line, or a line transverse to the strata. This fact has now been 
verified in almost all parts of the globe, and has led to a conviction that at 
successive periods of the past, the same area of land and water has been 
inhabited by species of animals and plants even more distinct than those which 
now people the antipodes, or which now co-exist in the arctic, temperate, and 
tropical zones. It appears that from the remotest periods there has been ever a 
coming in of new organic forms, and an extinction of those which pre-existed on 
the earth; some species having endured for a longer, others for a shorter, time; 
while none have ever reappeared after once dying out. The law which has governed 
the succession of species, whether we adopt or reject the theory of 
transmutation, seems to be expressed in the verse of the poet:-- 

Natura il fece, e poi ruppe la stampa. Ariosto.

Nature made him, and then broke the die.

And this circumstance it is, which confers on fossils their highest value as 
chronological tests, giving to each of them, in the eyes of the geologist, that 
authority which belongs to contemporary medals in history.

The same can not be said of each peculiar variety of rock; for some of these, as 
red marl and red sandstone, for example, may occur at once at the top, bottom, 
and middle of the entire sedimentary series; exhibiting in each position so 
perfect an identity of mineral aspect as to be undistinguishable. Such exact 
repetitions, however, of the same mixtures of sediment have not often been 
produced, at distant periods, in precisely the same parts of the globe; and even 
where this has happened, we are seldom in any danger of confounding together the 
monuments of remote eras, when we have studied their imbedded fossils and their 
relative position.

ZOOLOGICAL PROVINCES.

It was remarked that the same species of organic remains can not be traced 
horizontally, or in the direction of the planes of stratifications for 
indefinite distances. This might have been expected from analogy; for when we 
inquire into the present distribution of living beings, we find that the 
habitable surface of the sea and land may be divided into a considerable number 
of distinct provinces, each peopled by a peculiar assemblage of animals and 
plants. In the "Principles of Geology," I have endeavoured to point out the 
extent and probable origin of these separate divisions; and it was shown that 
climate is only one of many causes on which they depend, and that difference of 
longitude as well as latitude is generally accompanied by a dissimilarity of 
indigenous species.

As different seas, therefore, and lakes are inhabited, at the same period, by 
different aquatic animals and plants, and as the lands adjoining these may be 
peopled by distinct terrestrial species, it follows that distinct fossils will 
be imbedded in contemporaneous deposits. If it were otherwise-- if the same 
species abounded in every climate, or in every part of the globe where, so far 
as we can discover, a corresponding temperature and other conditions favourable 
to their existence are found-- the identification of mineral masses of the same 
age, by means of their included organic contents, would be a matter of still 
greater certainty.

Nevertheless, the extent of some single zoological provinces, especially those 
of marine animals, is very great; and our geological researches have proved that 
the same laws prevailed at remote periods; for the fossils are often identical 
throughout wide spaces, and in detached deposits, consisting of rocks varying 
entirely in their mineral nature.

The doctrine here laid down will be more readily understood, if we reflect on 
what is now going on in the Mediterranean. That entire sea may be considered as 
one zoological province; for although certain species of testacea and zoophytes 
may be very local, and each region has probably some species peculiar to it, 
still a considerable number are common to the whole Mediterranean. If, 
therefore, at some future period, the bed of this inland sea should be converted 
into land, the geologist might be enabled, by reference to organic remains, to 
prove the contemporaneous origin of various mineral masses scattered over a 
space equal in area to half of Europe.

Deposits, for example, are well known to be now in progress in this sea in the 
deltas of the Po, Rhone, Nile, and other rivers, which differ as greatly from 
each other in the nature of their sediment as does the composition of the 
mountains which their drain. There are also other quarters of the Mediterranean, 
as off the coast of Campania, or near the base of Etna, in Sicily, or in the 
Grecian Archipelago, where another class of rocks is now forming; where showers 
of volcanic ashes occasionally fall into the sea, and streams of lava overflow 
its bottom; and where, in the intervals between volcanic eruptions, beds of sand 
and clay are frequently derived from the waste of cliffs, or the turbid waters 
of rivers. Limestones, moreover, such as the Italian travertins, are here and 
there precipitated from the waters of mineral springs, some of which rise up 
from the bottom of the sea. In all these detached formations, so diversified in 
their lithological characters, the remains of the same shells, corals, 
crustacea, and fish are becoming inclosed; or, at least, a sufficient number 
must be common to the different localities to enable the zoologist to refer them 
all to one contemporaneous assemblage of species.

There are, however, certain combinations of geographical circumstances which 
cause distinct provinces of animals and plants to be separated from each other 
by very narrow limits; and hence it must happen that strata will be sometimes 
formed in contiguous regions, differing widely both in mineral contents and 
organic remains. Thus, for example, the testacea, zoophytes, and fish of the Red 
Sea are, as a group, extremely distinct from those inhabiting the adjoining 
parts of the Mediterranean, although the two seas are separated only by the 
narrow isthmus of Suez. Calcareous formations have accumulated on a great scale 
in the Red Sea in modern times, and fossil shells of existing species are well 
preserved therein; and we know that at the mouth of the Nile large deposits of 
mud are amassed, including the remains of Mediterranean species. It follows, 
therefore, that if at some future period the bed of the Red Sea should be laid 
dry, the geologist might experience great difficulties in endeavouring to 
ascertain the relative age of these formations, which, although dissimilar both 
in organic and mineral characters, were of synchronous origin.

But, on the other hand, we must not forget that the north-western shores of the 
Arabian Gulf, the plains of Egypt, and the Isthmus of Suez, are all parts of one 
province of TERRESTRIAL species. Small streams, therefore, occasional land-
floods, and those winds which drift clouds of sand along the deserts, might 
carry down into the Red Sea the same shells of fluviatile and land testacea 
which the Nile is sweeping into its delta, together with some remains of 
terrestrial plants and the bones of quadrupeds, whereby the groups of strata 
before alluded to might, notwithstanding the discrepancy of their mineral 
composition and MARINE organic fossils, be shown to have belonged to the same 
epoch.

Yet, while rivers may thus carry down the same fluviatile and terrestrial spoils 
into two or more seas inhabited by different marine species, it will much more 
frequently happen that the coexistence of terrestrial species of distinct 
zoological and botanical provinces will be proved by the identity of the marine 
beings which inhabited the intervening space. Thus, for example, the land 
quadrupeds and shells of the valley of the Mississippi, of central America, and 
of the West India islands differ very considerably, yet their remains are all 
washed down by rivers flowing from these three zoological provinces into the 
Gulf of Mexico.

In some parts of the globe, at the present period, the line of demarkation 
between distinct provinces of animals and plants is not very strongly marked, 
especially where the change is determined by temperature, as it is in seas 
extending from the temperate to the tropical zone, or from the temperate to the 
arctic regions. Here a gradual passage takes place from one set of species to 
another. In like manner the geologist, in studying particular formations of 
remote periods, has sometimes been able to trace the gradation from one ancient 
province to another, by observing carefully the fossils of all the intermediate 
places. His success in thus acquiring a knowledge of the zoological or botanical 
geography of very distant eras has been mainly owing to this circumstance, that 
the mineral character has no tendency to be affected by climate. A large river 
may convey yellow or red mud into some part of the ocean, where it may be 
dispersed by a current over an area several hundred leagues in length, so as to 
pass from the tropics into the temperate zone. If the bottom of the sea be 
afterwards upraised, the organic remains imbedded in such yellow or red strata 
may indicate the different animals or plants which once inhabited at the same 
time the temperate and equatorial regions.

It may be true, as a general rule, that groups of the same species of animals 
and plants may extend over wider areas than deposits of homogeneous composition; 
and if so, palaeontological characters will be of more importance in geological 
classification than the test of mineral composition; but it is idle to discuss 
the relative value of these tests, as the aid of both is indispensable, and it 
fortunately happens, that where the one criterion fails, we can often avail 
ourselves of the other.

TEST BY INCLUDED FRAGMENTS OF OLDER ROCKS.

It was stated, that proof may sometimes be obtained of the relative date of two 
formations by fragments of an older rock being included in a newer one. This 
evidence may sometimes be of great use, where a geologist is at a loss to 
determine the relative age of two formations from want of clear sections 
exhibiting their true order of position, or because the strata of each group are 
vertical. In such cases we sometimes discover that the more modern rock has been 
in part derived from the degradation of the older. Thus, for example, we may 
find chalk in one part of a country, and in another strata of clay, sand, and 
pebbles. If some of these pebbles consist of that peculiar flint, of which 
layers more or less continuous are characteristic of the chalk, and which 
include fossil shells, sponges, and foraminifera of cretaceous species, we may 
confidently infer that the chalk was the oldest of the two formations.

CHRONOLOGICAL GROUPS.

The number of groups into which the fossiliferous strata may be separated are 
more or less numerous, according to the views of classification which different 
geologists entertain; but when we have adopted a certain system of arrangement, 
we immediately find that a few only of the entire series of groups occur one 
upon the other in any single section or district.

(FIGURE 84. Seven fossiliferous groups.)

The thinning out of individual strata was before described (Chapter 2). But let 
the diagram (Figure 84) represent seven fossiliferous groups, instead of as many 
strata. It will then be seen that in the middle all the superimposed formations 
are present; but in consequence of some of them thinning out, No. 2 and No. 5 
are absent at one extremity of the section, and No. 4 at the other.

(FIGURE 85. Section South of Bristol (A.C. Ramsay.)
Dundry Hill.
Length of section 4 miles.
a-b. Level of the sea.
1. Inferior Oolite.
2. Lias.
3. New Red Sandstone.
4. Dolomitic or magnesian conglomerate.
5. Upper coal-measures (shales, etc.)
6. Pennant rock (sandstone.)
7. Lower coal-measures (shales, etc.)
8. Carboniferous or mountain limestone.
9. Old Red Sandstone.)

In another diagram (Figure 85), a real section of the geological formations in 
the neighbourhood of Bristol and the Mendip Hills is presented to the reader, as 
laid down on a true scale by Professor Ramsay, where the newer groups 1, 2, 3, 4 
rest unconformably on the formations 5, 6, 7 and 8. At the southern end of the 
line of section we meet with the beds No. 3 (the New Red Sandstone) resting 
immediately on Nos. 7 and 8, while farther north as at Dundry Hill in 
Somersetshire, we behold eight groups superimposed one upon the other, 
comprising all the strata from the inferior Oolite, No. 1, to the coal and 
carboniferous limestone. The limited horizontal extension of the groups 1 and 2 
is owing to denudation, as these formations end abruptly, and have left outlying 
patches to attest the fact of their having originally covered a much wider area.

In order, therefore, to establish a chronological succession of fossiliferous 
groups, a geologist must begin with a single section in which several sets of 
strata lie one upon the other. He must then trace these formations, by attention 
to their mineral character and fossils, continuously, as far as possible, from 
the starting-point. As often as he meets with new groups, he must ascertain by 
superposition their age relatively to those first examined, and thus learn how 
to intercalate them in a tabular arrangement of the whole.

By this means the German, French, and English geologists have determined the 
succession of strata throughout a great part of Europe, and have adopted pretty 
generally the following groups, almost all of which have their representatives 
in the British Islands.

ABRIDGED GENERAL TABLE OF FOSSILIFEROUS STRATA.

1. RECENT.-- POST-TERTIARY.-- TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

2. POST-PLIOCENE.-- POST-TERTIARY.-- TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

3. NEWER-PLIOCENE.-- PLIOCENE.-- TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

4. OLDER PLIOCENE.-- PLIOCENE.-- TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

5. UPPER MIOCENE.-- MIOCENE.-- TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

6. LOWER MIOCENE.-- MIOCENE.-- TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

7. UPPER EOCENE.-- EOCENE.-- TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

8. MIDDLE EOCENE.-- EOCENE.-- TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

9. LOWER EOCENE.-- EOCENE.-- TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

10. MAESTRICHT BEDS.-- CRETACEOUS.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

11. WHITE CHALK.-- CRETACEOUS.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

12. CHLORITIC SERIES.-- CRETACEOUS.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

13. GAULT.-- CRETACEOUS.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

14. NEOCOMIAN.-- CRETACEOUS.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

15. WEALDEN.-- CRETACEOUS.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

16. PURBECK BEDS.-- JURASSIC.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

17. PORTLAND STONE.-- JURASSIC.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

18. KIMMERIDGE CLAY.-- JURASSIC.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

19. CORAL RAG.-- JURASSIC.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

20. OXFORD CLAY.-- JURASSIC.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

21. GREAT or BATH OOLITE.-- JURASSIC.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

22. INFERIOR OOLITE.-- JURASSIC.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

23. LIAS.-- JURASSIC.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

24. UPPER TRIAS.-- TRIASSIC.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

25. MIDDLE TRIAS.-- TRIASSIC.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

26. LOWER TRIAS.-- TRIASSIC.-- SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.-- NEOZOIC.

27. PERMIAN.-- PERMIAN.-- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- PALAEOZOIC.

28. COAL-MEASURES.-- CARBONIFEROUS.-- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- PALAEOZOIC.

29. CARBONIFEROUS LIMESTONE.-- CARBONIFEROUS.-- -- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- 
PALAEOZOIC.

30. UPPER DEVONIAN.-- DEVONIAN.-- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- PALAEOZOIC.

31. MIDDLE DEVONIAN.-- DEVONIAN.-- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- PALAEOZOIC.

32. LOWER DEVONIAN.-- DEVONIAN.-- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- PALAEOZOIC.

33. UPPER SILURIAN.-- SILURIAN.-- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- PALAEOZOIC.

34. LOWER SILURIAN.-- SILURIAN.-- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- PALAEOZOIC.

35. UPPER CAMBRIAN.-- CAMBRIAN.-- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- PALAEOZOIC.

36. LOWER CAMBRIAN.-- CAMBRIAN.-- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- PALAEOZOIC.

37. UPPER LAURENTIAN.-- LAURENTIAN.-- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- PALAEOZOIC.

38. LOWER LAURENTIAN.-- LAURENTIAN.-- PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.-- PALAEOZOIC.

TABULAR VIEW OF THE FOSSILIFEROUS STRATA,

SHOWING THE ORDER OF SUPERPOSITION OR CHRONOLOGICAL SUCCESSION OF THE PRINCIPAL 
GROUPS DESCRIBED IN THIS WORK (CITING EXAMPLES).

POST-TERTIARY.

1. RECENT. Shells and mammalia, all of living species.

BRITISH.
Clyde marine strata, with canoes (Chapter 10.)

FOREIGN. 
Danish kitchen middens (Chapter 10.)
Lacustrine mud, with remains of Swiss lake-dwellings (Chapter 10.)
Marine strata inclosing Temple of Serapis, at Puzzuoli (Chapter 10.)

2. POST-PLIOCENE. Shells, recent mammalia in part extinct.

BRITISH.
Loam of Brixham cave, with flint implements and bones of extinct and living 
quadrupeds. (Chapter 10.)
Drift near Salisbury, with bones of mammoth, Spermophilus, and stone implements. 
(Chapter 10.)
Glacial drift of Scotland, with marine shells and remains of mammoth. (Chapter 
11.)
Erratics of Pagham and Selsey Bill. (Chapter 11.)
Glacial drift of Wales, with marine fossil shells, about 1400 feet high, on Moel 
Tryfaen. (Chapter 11.)

FOREIGN. 
Dordogne caves of the reindeer period. (Chapter 10.)
Older valley-gravels of Amiens, with flint implements and bones of extinct 
mammalia. (Chapter 10.)
Loess of Rhine. (Chapter 10.)
Ancient Nile-mud forming river-terraces. (Chapter 10.)
Loam and breccia of Liege caverns, with human remains. (Chapter 10.)
Australian cave breccias, with bones of extinct marsupials. (Chapter 10.)
Glacial drift of Northern Europe. (Chapters 11 and 12.)

TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC.

PLIOCENE.

3. NEWER PLIOCENE. The shells almost all of living species.

BRITISH.
Bridlington beds, marine Arctic fauna. (Chapter 13.)
Glacial boulder formation of Norfolk cliffs. (Chapter 13.)
Forest-bed of Norfolk cliffs, with bones of Elephas meridionalis, etc. (Chapter 
13.)
Chillesford and Aldeby beds, with marine shells, chiefly Arctic. (Chapter 13.)
Norwich Crag. (Chapter 13.)

FOREIGN. 
Eastern base of Mount Etna, with marine shells. (Chapter 13.)
Sicilian calcareous and tufaceous strata. (Chapter 13.)
Lacustrine strata of Upper Val d'Arno. (Chapter 13.)
Madeira leaf-bed and land-shells. (Chapter 29.)

4. OLDER PLIOCENE. Extinct species of shells forming a large minority.

BRITISH.
Red crag of Suffolk, marine shells, some of northern forms. (Chapter 13.)
White or coralline crag of Suffolk. (Chapter 13.)

FOREIGN. 
Antwerp crag. (Chapter 13.)
Subapennine marls and sands. (Chapter 13.)

MIOCENE.

5. UPPER MIOCENE. Majority of the shells extinct.

BRITISH.
Wanting.

FOREIGN.
faluns of Touraine (Chapter 14.)
faluns, proper, of Bordeaux. (Chapter 14.)
Fresh-water strata of Gers. (Chapter 14.)
Swiss Oeningen beds, rich in plants and insects. (Chapter 14.)
Marine Molasse, Switzerland. (Chapter 14.)
Bolderberg beds of Belgium. (Chapter 14.)
Vienna basin. (Chapter 14.)
Beds of the Superga, near Turin. (Chapter 14.)
Deposit at Pikerme, near Athens. (Chapter 14.)
Strata of the Siwalik hills, India. (Chapter 14.)
Marine strata of the Atlantic border in the United States. (Chapter 14.)
Volcanic tuff and limestone of Madeira, the Canaries, and the Azores. (Chapter 
30.)

6. LOWER MIOCENE. Nearly all the shells extinct.

BRITISH.
Hempstead beds, marine and fresh-water strata. (Chapter 15.)
Lignites and clays of Bovey Tracey. (Chapter 15.)
Isle of Mull leaf-bed, volcanic tuff. (Chapter 15.)

FOREIGN. 
Calcaire de la Beauce, etc. (Chapter 15.)
Gres de Fontainebleau. (Chapter 15.)
Lacustrine strata of the Limagne d'Auvergne, and the Cantal. (Chapter 15.)
Mayence basin. (Chapter 15.)
Radaboj beds of Croatia. (Chapter 15.)
Brown coal of Germany. (Chapter 15.)
Lower Molasse of Switzerland, fresh-water and brackish. (Chapter 15.)
Rupelmonde, Kleynspawen, and Tongrian beds of Belgium. (Chapter 15.)
Nebraska beds, United States. (Chapter 15.)
Lower Miocene beds of Italy. (Chapter 15.)
Miocene flora of North Greenland. (Chapter 15.)

7. UPPER EOCENE.

BRITISH.
Bembridge fluvio-marine strata. (Chapter 16.)
Osborne or St. Helen's series. (Chapter 16.)
Headon series, with marine and fresh-water shells. (Chapter 16.)
Barton sands and clays (Chapter 16.)

FOREIGN. 
Gypsum of Montmartre, fresh-water with Palaeotherium. (Chapter 16.)
Calcaire silicieux, or Travertin inferieur. (Chapter 16.)
Gres de Beauchamp, or Sables moyens. (Chapter 16.)

8. MIDDLE EOCENE.

BRITISH.
Bracklesham beds and Bagshot sands. (Chapter 16.)
White clays of Alum Bay and Bournemouth. (Chapter 16.)

FOREIGN.
Calcaire grossier, miliolitic limestone. (Chapter 16.)
Soissonnais sands, or Lits coquilliers, with Nummulites planulata. (Chapter 16.)
Claiborne beds of the United States, with Orbitoides and Zeuglodon. (Chapter 
16.)

9. LOWER EOCENE.

Nummulitic formation of Europe, Asia, etc. (Chapter 16.)

BRITISH. 
London Clay proper. (Chapter 16.)
Woolwich and Reading series, fluvio-marine. (Chapter 16.)
Thanet sands. (Chapter 16.)

FOREIGN. 
Argile de Londres, near Dunkirk. (Chapter 16.)
Argile plastique. (Chapter 16.)
Sables de Bracheux. (Chapter 16.)

SECONDARY OR MESOZOIC.

CRETACEOUS.

10. UPPER CRETACEOUS.

BRITISH.
Upper white chalk, with flints. (Chapter 17.)
Lower white chalk, without flints. (Chapter 17.)
Chalk marl. (Chapter 17.)
Chloritic series (or Upper Greensand), fire-stone of Surrey. (Chapter 17.)
Gault. (Chapter 17.)
Blackdown beds. (Chapter 17.)

FOREIGN.
Maestricht beds and Faxoe chalk. (Chapter 17.)
Pisolitic limestone of France. (Chapter 17.)
White chalk of France, Sweden, and Russia. (Chapter 17.)
Planer-kalk of Saxony. (Chapter 17.)
Sands and clays of Aix-la-Chapelle. (Chapter 17.)
Hippurite limestone of South of France. (Chapter 17.)
New Jersey, U.S., sands and marls. (Chapter 17.)

11. LOWER CRETACEOUS OR NEOCOMIAN.

BRITISH.
Sands of Folkestone, Sandgate, and Hythe. (Chapter 18.)
Atherfield clay, with Perna mulleti. (Chapter 18.)
Punfield marine beds, with Vicarya lujana. (Chapter 18.)
Speeton clay of Flamborough Head and Tealby. (Chapter 18.)
Weald clay of Surrey, Kent, and Sussex, fresh-water, with Cypris. (Chapter 18.)
Hastings sands. 

FOREIGN. 
Neocomian of Neufchatel, and Hils conglomerate of North Germany. (Chapter 18.)
Wealden beds of Hanover. (Chapter 18.)

OOLITE.

12. UPPER OOLITE.

BRITISH.
Upper Purbeck beds, fresh-water. (Chapter 19.)
Middle Purbeck, with numerous marsupial quadrupeds, etc. (Chapter 19.)
Lower Purbeck, fresh-water, with intercalated dirt-bed. (Chapter 19.)
Portland stone and sand. (Chapter 19.)
Kimmeridge clay. (Chapter 19.)

FOREIGN.
Marnes a gryphees virgules of Argonne. (Chapter 19.)
Lithographic-stone of Solenhofen, with Archaeopteryx. (Chapter 19.)

13. MIDDLE OOLITE.

BRITISH.
Coral rag of Berkshire, Wilts, and Yorkshire. (Chapter 19.)
Oxford clay, with belemnites and Ammonite. (Chapter 19.)
Kelloway rock of Wilts and Yorkshire. (Chapter 19.)

FOREIGN. 
Nerinaean limestone of the Jura.

14. LOWER OOLITE.

BRITISH. 
Cornbrash and forest marble. (Chapter 19.)
Great or Bath oolite of Bradford. (Chapter 19.)
Stonesfield slate, with marsupials and Araucaria. (Chapter 19.)
Fuller's earth of Bath. (Chapter 19.)
Inferior oolite. (Chapter 19.)

LIAS.

15. LIAS.

Upper Lias, argillaceous, with Ammonites striatulus. (Chapter 20.)
Shale and limestone, with Ammonites bifrons. (Chapter 20.)
Middle Lias or Marlstone series, with zones containing characteristic Ammonites. 
(Chapter 20.)
Lower Lias, also with zones characterised by peculiar Ammonites. (Chapter 20.)

TRIAS.

16. UPPER TRIAS.

BRITISH.
Rhaetic, Penarth or Avicula contorta beds (beds of passage). (Chapter 21.)
Keuper or Upper New Red sandstone, etc. (Chapter 21.)
Red shales of Cheshire and Lancashire, with rock-salt. (Chapter 21.)
Dolomite conglomerate of Bristol (Chapter 21.)

FOREIGN.
Keuper beds of Germany. (Chapter 21.)
St. Cassian or Hallstadt beds, with rich marine fauna. (Chapter 21.)
Coal-field of Richmond, Virginia. (Chapter 21.)
Chatham coal-field, North Carolina. (Chapter 21.)

17. MIDDLE TRIAS.

BRITISH.
Wanting.

FOREIGN.
Muschelkalk of Germany. (Chapter 21.)

18. LOWER TRIAS.

BRITISH. 
Bunter or Lower New Red sandstone of Lancashire and Cheshire. (Chapter 21.)

FOREIGN. 
Bunter-sandstein of Germany. (Chapter 21.)
Red sandstone of Connecticut Valley, with footprints of birds and reptiles. 
(Chapter 21.)

PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC.

PERMIAN.

19. PERMIAN.

BRITISH.
Upper Permian of St. Bees' Head, Cumberland. (Chapter 22.)
Middle Permian, magnesian limestone, and marl-slate of Durham and Yorkshire, 
with Protosaurus. (Chapter 22.)
Lower Permian sandstones and breccias of Penrith and Dumfriesshire, 
intercalated. (Chapter 22.)

FOREIGN. 
Dark-coloured shales of Thuringia. (Chapter 22.)
Zechstein or Dolomitic limestone. (Chapter 22.)
Mergel-schiefer or Kupfer-schiefer. (Chapter 22.)
Rothliegendes of Thuringia, with Psaronius. (Chapter 22.)
Magnesian limestones, etc., of Russia. (Chapter 22.)

CARBONIFEROUS.

20. UPPER CARBONIFEROUS.

BRITISH.
Coal-measures of South Wales, with underclays inclosing Stigmaria. (Chapter 23.)
Coal-measures of north and central England. (Chapter 23.)
Millstone grit. (Chapter 23.)
Yoredale series of Yorkshire. (Chapter 23.)
Coal-field of Kilkenny with Labyrinthodont. (Chapter 23.)

FOREIGN.
Coal-field of Saarbruck, with Archegosaurus. (Chapter 23.)
Carboniferous strata of South Joggins, Nova Scotia. (Chapter 23.)
Pennsylvania coal-field. (Chapter 23.)

21. LOWER CARBONIFEROUS.

BRITISH.
Mountain limestone of Wales and South of England. (Chapter 24.)
Same in Ireland. (Chapter 24.)
Carboniferous limestone of Scotland alternating with coal-bearing sandstones. 
(Chapter 23.)
Erect trees in volcanic ash in the Island of Arran. (Chapter 30.)

FOREIGN. 
Mountain limestone of Belgium. (Chapter 24.)

DEVONIAN OR OLD RED SANDSTONE.

22. UPPER DEVONIAN.

BRITISH.
Yellow sandstone of Dura Den, with Holoptychius, etc. (Chapter 25.); and of 
Ireland with Anodon Jukesii. (Chapter 25.)
Sandstones of Forfarshire and Perthshire, with Holoptychius, etc. (Chapter 25.)
Pilton group of North Devon. (Chapter 25.)
Petherwyn group of Cornwall, with Clymenia and Cypridina. (Chapter 25.)

FOREIGN. 
Clymenien-kalk and Cypridinen-schiefer of Germany. (Chapter 25.)

23. MIDDLE DEVONIAN.

BRITISH.
Bituminous schists of Gamrie, Caithness, etc., with numerous fish. (Chapter 25.)
Ilfracombe beds with peculiar trilobites and corals. (Chapter 25.)
Limestones of Torquay, with broad-winged Spirifers. (Chapter 25.)

FOREIGN. (Chapter 25.)
Eifel limestone, with underlying schists containing Calceola. (Chapter 25.)
Devonian strata of Russia. (Chapter 25.)

24. LOWER DEVONIAN.

BRITISH. 
Arbroath paving-stones, with Cephalaspis and Pterygotus. (Chapter 25.)
Lower sandstones of Forfarshire, with Pterygotus. (Chapter 25.)
Sandstones and slates of the Foreland and Linton. (Chapter 25.)

FOREIGN. 
Oriskany sandstone of Western Canada and New York. (Chapter 25.)
Sandstones of Gaspe, with Cephalaspis. (Chapter 25.)

SILURIAN.

25. UPPER SILURIAN.

BRITISH.
Upper Ludlow formation, Downton sandstone, with bone-bed. (Chapter 26.)
Lower Ludlow formation, with oldest known fish remains. (Chapter 26.)
Wenlock limestone and shale. (Chapter 26.)
Woolhope limestone and grit. (Chapter 26.)
Tarannon shales. (Chapter 26.)
Beds of passage between Upper and Lower Silurian:
Upper Llandovery, or May-hill sandstone, with Pentamerus oblongus, etc. (Chapter 
26.)
Lower Llandovery slates. (Chapter 26.)

FOREIGN.
Niagara limestone, with Calymene, Homalonotus, etc. (Chapter 26.)
Clinton group of America, with Pentamerus oblongus, etc. (Chapter 26.)
Silurian strata of Russia, with Pentamerus. (Chapter 26.)

26. LOWER SILURIAN.

BRITISH.
Bala and Caradoc beds. (Chapter 26.)
Llandeilo flags. (Chapter 26.)
Arenig or Stiper-stones group (Lower Llandeilo of Murchison.) (Chapter 26.)

FOREIGN. 
Ungulite or Obolus grit of Russia. (Chapter 26.)
Trenton limestone, and other Lower Silurian groups of North America. (Chapter 
26.)
Lower Silurian of Sweden. (Chapter 26.)

CAMBRIAN.

27. UPPER CAMBRIAN.

BRITISH.
Tremadoc slates. (Chapter 27.)
Lingula flags, with Lingula Davisii. (Chapter 27.)

FOREIGN. 
"Primordial" zone of Bohemia in part, with trilobites of the genera Paradoxides, 
etc. (Chapter 27.)
Alum schists of Sweden and Norway. (Chapter 27.)
Potsdam sandstone, with Dikelocephalus and Obolella. (Chapter 27.)

28. LOWER CAMBRIAN.

BRITISH.
Menevian beds of Wales, with Paradoxides Davidis, etc. (Chapter 27.)
Longmynd group, comprising the Harlech grits and Llanberis slates. (Chapter 27.)

FOREIGN.
Lower portion of Barrande's "Primordial" zone in Bohemia. (Chapter 27.)
Fucoid sandstones of Sweden. (Chapter 27.)
Huronian series of Canada? (Chapter 27.)

LAURENTIAN.

29. UPPER LAURENTIAN.

BRITISH. 
Fundamental gneiss of the Hebrides? (Chapter 27.)
Hypersthene rocks of Skye? (Chapter 27.)

FOREIGN. 
Labradorite series north of the river St. Lawrence in Canada. (Chapter 27.)
Adirondack mountains of New York. (Chapter 27.)

30. LOWER LAURENTIAN.

BRITISH. 
Wanting? 

FOREIGN. 
Beds of gneiss and quartzite, with interstratified limestones, in one of which, 
1000 feet thick, occurs a foraminifer, Eozoon Canadense, the oldest known 
fossil. (Chapter 27.)


CHAPTER IX.

CLASSIFICATION OF TERTIARY FORMATIONS.

Order of Succession of Sedimentary Formations.
Frequent Unconformability of Strata.
Imperfection of the Record.
Defectiveness of the Monuments greater in Proportion to their Antiquity.
Reasons for studying the newer Groups first.
Nomenclature of Formations.
Detached Tertiary Formations scattered over Europe.
Value of the Shell-bearing Mollusca in Classification.
Classification of Tertiary Strata.
Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene Terms explained.

By reference to the tables given at the end of the last chapter the reader will 
see that when the fossiliferous rocks are arranged chronologically, we have 
first to consider the Post-tertiary and then the Tertiary or Cainozoic 
formations, and afterwards to pass on to those of older date.

ORDER OF SUPERPOSITION.

(FIGURE 86. Section through Primary (left), Secondary, Tertiary and Post-
tertiary (right) Strata.
1. Laurentian.
2. Cambrian.
3. Silurian.
4. Devonian.
5. Carboniferous.
6. Permian.
7. Triassic.
8. Jurassic.
9. Cretaceous.
10. Eocene.
11. Miocene.
12. Pliocene.
13. Post-pliocene.
14. Recent.
Sea.)

The diagram (Figure 86.) will show the order of superposition of these deposits, 
assuming them all to be visible in one continuous section. In nature, as before 
hinted (Chapter 6), we have never an opportunity of seeing the whole of them so 
displayed in a single region; first, because sedimentary deposition is confined, 
during any one geological period, to limited areas; and secondly, because 
strata, after they have been formed, are liable to be utterly annihilated over 
wide areas by denudation. But wherever certain members of the series are 
present, they overlie one another in the order indicated in the diagram, though 
not always in the exact manner there represented, because some of them repose 
occasionally in unconformable stratification on others. This mode of 
superposition has been already explained (Chapters 5 and 7), where I pointed out 
that the discordance which implies a considerable lapse of time between two 
formations in juxtaposition is almost invariably accompanied by a great 
dissimilarity in the species of organic remains.

FREQUENT UNCONFORMABILITY OF STRATA.

Where the widest gaps appear in the sequence of the fossil forms, as between the 
Permian and Triassic rocks, or between the Cretaceous and Eocene, examples of 
such unconformability are very frequent. But they are also met with in some part 
or other of the world at the junction of almost all the other principal 
formations, and sometimes the subordinate divisions of any one of the leading 
groups may be found lying unconformably on another subordinate member of the 
same-- the Upper, for example, on the Lower Silurian, or the superior division 
of the Old Red Sandstone on a lower member of the same, and so forth. Instances 
of such irregularities in the mode of succession of the strata are the more 
intelligible the more we extend our survey of the fossiliferous formations, for 
we are continually bringing to light deposits of intermediate date, which have 
to be intercalated between those previously known, and which reveal to us a long 
series of events, of which antecedently to such discoveries we had no knowledge.

But while unconformability invariably bears testimony to a lapse of 
unrepresented time, the conformability of two sets of strata in contact by no 
means implies that the newer formation immediately succeeded the older one. It 
simply implies that the ancient rocks were subjected to no movements of such a 
nature as to tilt, bend, or break them before the more modern formation was 
superimposed. It does not show that the earth's crust was motionless in the 
region in question, for there may have been a gradual sinking or rising, 
extending uniformly over a large surface, and yet, during such movement, the 
stratified rocks may have retained their original horizontality of position. 
There may have been a conversion of a wide area from sea into land and from land 
into sea, and during these changes of level some strata may have been slowly 
removed by aqueous action, and after this new strata may be superimposed, 
differing perhaps in date by thousands of years or centuries, and yet resting 
conformably on the older set. There may even be a blending of the materials 
constituting the older deposit with those of the newer, so as to give rise to a 
passage in the mineral character of the one rock into the other as if there had 
been no break or interruption in the depositing process.

IMPERFECTION OF THE RECORD.

Although by the frequent discovery of new sets of intermediate strata the 
transition from one type of organic remains to another is becoming less and less 
abrupt, yet the entire series of records appears to the geologists now living 
far more fragmentary and defective than it seemed to their predecessors half a 
century ago. The earlier inquirers, as often as they encountered a break in the 
regular sequence of formations, connected it theoretically with a sudden and 
violent catastrophe, which had put an end to the regular course of events that 
had been going on uninterruptedly for ages, annihilating at the same time all or 
nearly all the organic beings which had previously flourished, after which, 
order being re-established, a new series of events was initiated. In proportion 
as our faith in these views grows weaker, and the phenomena of the organic or 
inorganic world presented to us by geology seem explicable on the hypothesis of 
gradual and insensible changes, varied only by occasional convulsions, on a 
scale comparable to that witnessed in historical times; and in proportion as it 
is thought possible that former fluctuations in the organic world may be due to 
the indefinite modifiability of species without the necessity of assuming new 
and independent acts of creation, the number and magnitude of the gaps which 
still remain, or the extreme imperfection of the record, become more and more 
striking, and what we possess of the ancient annals of the earth's history 
appears as nothing when contrasted with that which has been lost.

When we examine a large area such as Europe, the average as well as the extreme 
height above the sea attained by the older formations is usually found to exceed 
that reached by the more modern ones, the primary or palaeozoic rising higher 
than the secondary, and these in their turn than the tertiary; while in 
reference to the three divisions of the tertiary, the lowest or Eocene group 
attains a higher summit-level than the Miocene, and these again a greater height 
than the Pliocene formations. Lastly, the post-tertiary deposits, such, at 
least, as are of marine origin, are most commonly restricted to much more 
moderate elevations above the sea-level than the tertiary strata.

It is also observed that strata, in proportion as they are of newer date, bear 
the nearest resemblance in mineral character to those which are now in the 
progress of formation in seas or lakes, the newest of all consisting principally 
of soft mud or loose sand, in some places full of shells, corals, or other 
organic bodies, animal or vegetable, in others wholly devoid of such remains. 
The farther we recede from the present time, and the higher the antiquity of the 
formations which we examine, the greater are the changes which the sedimentary 
deposits have undergone. Time, as I have explained in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, has 
multiplied the effects of condensation by pressure and cementation, and the 
modification produced by heat, fracture, contortion, upheaval, and denudation. 
The organic remains also have sometimes been obliterated entirely, or the 
mineral matter of which they were composed has been removed and replaced by 
other substances.

WHY NEWER GROUPS SHOULD BE STUDIED FIRST.

We likewise observe that the older the rocks the more widely do their organic 
remains depart from the types of the living creation. First, we find in the 
newer tertiary rocks a few species which no longer exist, mixed with many living 
ones, and then, as we go farther back, many genera and families at present 
unknown make their appearance, until we come to strata in which the fossil 
relics of existing species are nowhere to be detected, except a few of the 
lowest forms of invertebrate, while some orders of animals and plants wholly 
unrepresented in the living world begin to be conspicuous.

When we study, therefore, the geological records of the earth and its 
inhabitants, we find, as in human history, the defectiveness and obscurity of 
the monuments always increasing the remoter the era to which we refer, and the 
difficulty of determining the true chronological relations of rocks is more and 
more enhanced, especially when we are comparing those which were formed 
simultaneously in very distant regions of the globe. Hence we advance with 
securer steps when we begin with the study of the geological records of later 
times, proceeding from the newer to the older, or from the more to the less 
known.

In thus inverting what might at first seem to be the more natural order of 
historical research, we must bear in mind that each of the periods above 
enumerated, even the shortest, such as the Post-tertiary, or the Pliocene, 
Miocene, or Eocene, embrace a succession of events of vast extent, so that to 
give a satisfactory account of what we already know of any one of them would 
require many volumes. When, therefore, we approach one of the newer groups 
before endeavouring to decipher the monuments of an older one, it is like 
endeavouring to master the history of our own country and that of some 
contemporary nations, before we enter upon Roman History, or like investigating 
the annals of Ancient Italy and Greece before we approach those of Egypt and 
Assyria.

NOMENCLATURE.

The origin of the terms Primary and Secondary, and the synonymous terms 
Palaeozoic, and Mesozoic, were explained in Chapter 8.

The Tertiary or Cainozoic strata (see Chapter 8) were so called because they 
were all posterior in date to the Secondary series, of which last the Chalk of 
Cretaceous, No. 9, Figure 86, constitutes the newest group. The whole of them 
were at first confounded with the superficial alluviums of Europe; and it was 
long before their real extent and thickness, and the various ages to which they 
belong, were fully recognised. They were observed to occur in patches, some of 
fresh-water, others of marine origin, their geographical area being usually 
small as compared to the secondary formations, and their position often 
suggesting the idea of their having been deposited in different bays, lakes, 
estuaries, or inland seas, after a large portion of the space now occupied by 
Europe had already been converted into dry land.

The first deposits of this class, of which the characters were accurately 
determined, were those occurring in the neighbourhood of Paris, described in 
1810 by MM. Cuvier and Brongniart. They were ascertained to consist of 
successive sets of strata, some of marine, others of fresh-water origin, lying 
one upon the other. The fossil shells and corals were perceived to be almost all 
of unknown species, and to have in general a near affinity to those now 
inhabiting warmer seas. The bones and skeletons of land animals, some of them of 
large size, and belonging to more than forty distinct species, were examined by 
Cuvier, and declared by him not to agree specifically, nor most of them even 
generically, with any hitherto observed in the living creation.

Strata were soon afterwards brought to light in the vicinity of London, and in 
Hampshire, which, although dissimilar in mineral composition, were justly 
inferred by Mr. T. Webster to be of the same age as those of Paris, because the 
greater number of the fossil shells were specifically identical. For the same 
reason, rocks found on the Gironde, in the South of France, and at certain 
points in the North of Italy, were suspected to be of contemporaneous origin.

Another important discovery was soon afterwards made by Brocchi in Italy, who 
investigated the argillaceous and sandy deposits, replete with shells, which 
form a low range of hills, flanking the Apennines on both sides, from the plains 
of the Po to Calabria. These lower hills were called by him the Subapennines, 
and were formed of strata chiefly marine, and newer than those of Paris and 
London.

Another tertiary group occurring in the neighbourhood of Bordeaux and Dax, in 
the South of France, was examined by M. de Basterot in 1825, who described and 
figured several hundred species of shells, which differed for the most part both 
from the Parisian series and those of the Subapennine hills. It was soon, 
therefore, suspected that this fauna might belong to a period intermediate 
between that of the Parisian and Subapennine strata, and it was not long before 
the evidence of superposition was brought to bear in support of this opinion; 
for other strata, contemporaneous with those of Bordeaux, were observed in one 
district (the Valley of the Loire), to overlie the Parisian formation, and in 
another (in Piedmont) to underlie the Subapennine beds. The first example of 
these was pointed out in 1829 by M. Desnoyers, who ascertained that the sand and 
marl of marine origin called faluns, near Tours, in the basin of the Loire, full 
of sea-shells and corals, rested upon a lacustrine formation, which constitutes 
the uppermost subdivision of the Parisian group, extending continuously 
throughout a great table-land intervening between the basin of the Seine and 
that of the Loire. The other example occurs in Italy, where strata containing 
many fossils similar to those of Bordeaux were observed by Bonelli and others in 
the environs of Turin, subjacent to strata belonging to the Subapennine group of 
Brocchi.

VALUE OF TESTACEAN FOSSILS IN CLASSIFICATION.

It will be observed that in the foregoing allusions to organic remains, the 
testacea or the shell-bearing mollusca are selected as the most useful and 
convenient class for the purposes of general classification. In the first place, 
they are more universally distributed through strata of every age than any other 
organic bodies. Those families of fossils which are of rare and casual 
occurrence are absolutely of no avail in establishing a chronological 
arrangement. If we have plants alone in one group of strata and the bones of 
mammalia in another, we can draw no conclusion respecting the affinity or 
discordance of the organic beings of the two epochs compared; and the same may 
be said if we have plants and vertebrated animals in one series and only shells 
in another. Although corals are more abundant, in a fossil state, than plants, 
reptiles, or fish, they are still rare when contrasted with shells, because they 
are more dependent for their well-being on the constant clearness of the water, 
and are, therefore, less likely to be included in rocks which endure in 
consequence of their thickness and the copiousness of sediment which prevailed 
when they originated. The utility of the testacea is, moreover, enhanced by the 
circumstance that some forms are proper to the sea, others to the land, and 
others to fresh water. Rivers scarcely ever fail to carry down into their deltas 
some land-shells, together with species which are at once fluviatile and 
lacustrine. By this means we learn what terrestrial, fresh-water, and marine 
species coexisted at particular eras of the past: and having thus identified 
strata formed in seas with others which originated contemporaneously in inland 
lakes, we are then enabled to advance a step farther, and show that certain 
quadrupeds or aquatic plants, found fossil in lacustrine formations, inhabited 
the globe at the same period when certain fish, reptiles, and zoophytes lived in 
the ocean.

Among other characters of the molluscous animals, which render them extremely 
valuable in settling chronological questions in geology, may be mentioned, 
first, the wide geographical range of many species; and, secondly, what is 
probably a consequence of the former, the great duration of species in this 
class, for they appear to have surpassed in longevity the greater number of the 
mammalia and fish. Had each species inhabited a very limited space, it could 
never, when imbedded in strata, have enabled the geologist to identify deposits 
at distant points; or had they each lasted but for a brief period, they could 
have thrown no light on the connection of rocks placed far from each other in 
the chronological, or, as it is often termed, vertical series.

CLASSIFICATION OF TERTIARY STRATA.

Many authors have divided the European Tertiary strata into three groups-- 
lower, middle, and upper; the lower comprising the oldest formations of Paris 
and London before mentioned; the middle those of Bordeaux and Touraine; and the 
upper all those newer than the middle group.

In the first edition of the Principles of Geology, I divided the whole of the 
Tertiary formations into four groups, characterised by the percentage of recent 
shells which they contained. The lower tertiary strata of London and Paris were 
thought by M. Deshayes to contain only 3 1/2 per cent of recent species, and 
were termed Eocene. The middle tertiary of the Loire and Gironde had, according 
to the specific determinations of the same conchologist, 17 per cent, and formed 
the Miocene division. The Subapennine beds contained 35 to 50 per cent, and were 
termed Older Pliocene, while still more recent beds in Sicily, which had from 90 
to 95 per cent of species identical with those now living, were called Newer 
Pliocene. The first of the above terms, Eocene, is derived from eos, dawn, and 
cainos, recent, because the fossil shells of this period contain an extremely 
small proportion of living species, which may be looked upon as indicating the 
dawn of the existing state of the testaceous fauna, no recent species having 
been detected in the older or secondary rocks.

The term Miocene (from meion, less, and cainos, recent) is intended to express a 
minor proportion of recent species (of testacea), the term Pliocene (from 
pleion, more, and cainos, recent) a comparative plurality of the same. It may 
assist the memory of students to remind them, that the MI-ocene contain a MI-nor 
proportion, and PL-iocene a comparative PL-urality of recent species; and that 
the greater number of recent species always implies the more modern origin of 
the strata.

It has sometimes been objected to this nomenclature that certain species of 
infusoria found in the chalk are still existing, and, on the other hand, the 
Miocene and Older Pliocene deposits often contain the remains of mammalia, 
reptiles, and fish, exclusively of extinct species. But the reader must bear in 
mind that the terms Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene were originally invented with 
reference purely to conchological data, and in that sense have always been and 
are still used by me.

Since the year 1830 the number of known shells, both recent and fossil, has 
largely increased, and their identification has been more accurately determined. 
Hence some modifications have been required in the classifications founded on 
less perfect materials. The Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene periods have been made 
to comprehend certain sets of strata of which the fossils do not always conform 
strictly in the proportion of recent to extinct species with the definitions 
first given by me, or which are implied in the etymology of those terms.


CHAPTER X.

RECENT AND POST-PLIOCENE PERIODS.

Recent and Post-pliocene Periods.
Terms defined.
Formations of the Recent Period.
Modern littoral Deposits containing Works of Art near Naples.
Danish Peat and Shell-mounds.
Swiss Lake-dwellings.
Periods of Stone, Bronze, and Iron.
Post-pliocene Formations.
Coexistence of Man with extinct Mammalia.
Reindeer Period of South of France.
Alluvial Deposits of Paleolithic Age.
Higher and Lower-level Valley-gravels.
Loess or Inundation-mud of the Nile, Rhine, etc.
Origin of Caverns.
Remains of Man and extinct Quadrupeds in Cavern Deposits.
Cave of Kirkdale.
Australian Cave-breccias.
Geographical Relationship of the Provinces of living Vertebrata and those of 
extinct Post-pliocene Species.
Extinct struthious Birds of New Zealand.
Climate of the Post-pliocene Period.
Comparative Longevity of Species in the Mammalia and Testacea.
Teeth of Recent and Post-pliocene Mammalia.

We have seen in the last chapter that the uppermost or newest strata are called 
Post-tertiary, as being more modern than the Tertiary. It will also be observed 
that the Post-tertiary formations are divided into two subordinate groups: the 
Recent, and Post-pliocene. In the former, or the Recent, the mammalia as well as 
the shells are identical with species now living: whereas in the Post-pliocene, 
the shells being all of living forms, a part, and often a considerable part, of 
the mammalia belonged to extinct species. To this nomenclature it may be 
objected that the term Post-pliocene should in strictness include all geological 
monuments posterior in date to the Pliocene; but when I have occasion to speak 
of the whole collectively, I shall call them Post-tertiary, and reserve the term 
Post-pliocene for the older Post-tertiary formations, while the Upper or newer 
ones will be called "Recent."

Cases will occur where it may be scarcely possible to draw the boundary line 
between the Recent and Post-pliocene deposits; and we must expect these 
difficulties to increase rather than diminish with every advance in our 
knowledge, and in proportion as gaps are filled up in the series of records.

RECENT PERIOD.

It was stated in the sixth chapter, when I treated of denudation, that the dry 
land, or that part of the earth's surface which is not covered by the waters of 
lakes or seas, is generally wasting away by the incessant action of rain and 
rivers, and in some cases by the undermining and removing power of waves and 
tides on the sea-coast. But the rate of waste is very unequal, since the level 
and gently sloping lands, where they are protected by a continuous covering of 
vegetation, escape nearly all wear and tear, so that they may remain for ages in 
a stationary condition, while the removal of matter is constantly widening and 
deepening the intervening ravines and valleys.

The materials, both fine and coarse, carried down annually by rivers from the 
higher regions to the lower, and deposited in successive strata in the basins of 
seas and lakes, must be of enormous volume. We are always liable to underrate 
their magnitude, because the accumulation of strata is going on out of sight.

There are, however, causes at work which, in the course of centuries, tend to 
render visible these modern formations, whether of marine or lacustrine origin. 
For a large portion of the earth's crust is always undergoing a change of level, 
some areas rising and others sinking at the rate of a few inches, or a few feet, 
perhaps sometimes yards, in a century; so that spaces which were once subaqueous 
are gradually converted into land, and others which were high and dry become 
submerged. In consequence of such movements we find in certain regions, as in 
Cashmere, for example, where the mountains are often shaken by earthquakes, 
deposits which were formed in lakes in the historical period, but through which 
rivers have now cut deep and wide channels. In lacustrine strata thus 
intersected, works of art and fresh-water shells are seen. In other districts on 
the borders of the sea, usually at very moderate elevations above its level, 
raised beaches occur, or marine littoral deposits, such as those in which, on 
the borders of the Bay of Baiae, near Naples, the well-known temple of Serapis 
was imbedded. In that case the date of the monument buried in the marine strata 
is ascertainable, but in many other instances the exact age of the remains of 
human workmanship is uncertain, as in the estuary of the Clyde at Glasgow, where 
many canoes have been exhumed, with other works of art, all assignable to some 
part of the Recent Period.

DANISH PEAT AND SHELL-MOUNDS OR KITCHEN-MIDDENS.

Sometimes we obtain evidence, without the aid of a change of level, of events 
which took place in pre-historic times. The combined labours, for example, of 
the antiquary, zoologist, and botanist have brought to light many monuments of 
the early inhabitants buried in peat-mosses in Denmark. Their geological age is 
determined by the fact that, not only the contemporaneous fresh-water and land 
shells, but all the quadrupeds, found in the peat, agree specifically with those 
now inhabiting the same districts, or which are known to have been indigenous in 
Denmark within the memory of man. In the lower beds of peat (a deposit varying 
from 20 to 30 feet in thickness), weapons of stone accompany trunks of the 
Scotch fir, Pinus sylvestris. This peat may be referred to that part of the 
stone period for which Sir John Lubbock proposed the name of "Neolithic" in 
contradistinction to a still older era, termed by him "Paleolithic," and which 
will be described in the sequel. (Sir John Lubbock Pre-historic Times page 3 
1865.) In the higher portions of the same Danish bogs, bronze implements are 
associated with trunks and acorns of the common oak. It appears that the pine 
has never been a native of Denmark in historical times, and it seems to have 
given place to the oak about the time when articles and instruments of bronze 
superseded those of stone. It also appears that, at a still later period, the 
oak itself became scarce, and was nearly supplanted by the beech, a tree which 
now flourishes luxuriantly in Denmark. Again, at the still later epoch when the 
beech-tree abounded, tools of iron were introduced, and were gradually 
substituted for those of bronze.

On the coasts of the Danish islands in the Baltic, certain mounds, called in 
those countries "Kjokken-modding," or "kitchen-middens," occur, consisting 
chiefly of the castaway shells of the oyster, cockle, periwinkle, and other 
eatable kinds of molluscs. The mounds are from three to ten feet high, and from 
100 to 1000 feet in their longest diameter. They greatly resemble heaps of 
shells formed by the Red Indians of North America along the eastern shores of 
the United States. In the old refuse-heaps, recently studied by the Danish 
antiquaries and naturalists with great skill and diligence, no implements of 
metal have ever been detected. All the knives, hatchets, and other tools, are of 
stone, horn, bone, or wood. With them are often intermixed fragments of rude 
pottery, charcoal and cinders, and the bones of quadrupeds on which the rude 
people fed. These bones belong to wild species still living in Europe, though 
some of them, like the beaver, have long been extirpated in Denmark. The only 
animal which they seem to have domesticated was the dog.

As there is an entire absence of metallic tools, these refuse-heaps are referred 
to the Neolithic division of the age of stone, which immediately preceded in 
Denmark the age of bronze. It appears that a race more advanced in civilisation, 
armed with weapons of that mixed metal, invaded Scandinavia, and ousted the 
aborigines.

LACUSTRINE HABITATIONS OF SWITZERLAND.

In Switzerland a different class of monuments, illustrating the successive ages 
of stone, bronze, and iron, has been of late years investigated with great 
success, and especially since 1854, in which year Dr. F. Keller explored near 
the shore at Meilen, in the bottom of the lake of Zurich, the ruins of an old 
village, originally built on numerous wooden piles, driven, at some unknown 
period, into the muddy bed of the lake. Since then a great many other 
localities, more than a hundred and fifty in all, have been detected of similar 
pile-dwellings, situated near the borders of the Swiss lakes, at points where 
the depth of water does not exceed 15 feet. (Bulletin de la Societie Vaudoise 
des Sciences Nat. tome 6 Lausanne 1860; and Antiquity of Man by the author 
chapter 2.) The superficial mud in such cases is filled with various articles, 
many hundreds of them being often dredged up from a very limited area. Thousands 
of piles, decayed at their upper extremities, are often met with still firmly 
fixed in the mud.

As the ages of stone, bronze, and iron merely indicate successive stages of 
civilisation, they may all have coexisted at once in different parts of the 
globe, and even in contiguous regions, among nations having little intercourse 
with each other. To make out, therefore, a distinct chronological series of 
monuments is only possible when our observations are confined to a limited 
district, such as Switzerland.

The relative antiquity of the pile-dwellings, which belong respectively to the 
ages of stone and bronze, is clearly illustrated by the associations of the 
tools with certain groups of animal remains. Where the tools are of stone, the 
castaway bones which served for the food of the ancient people are those of 
deer, the wild boar, and wild ox, which abounded when society was in the hunter 
state. But the bones of the later or bronze epoch were chiefly those of the 
domestic ox, goat, and pig, indicating progress in civilisation. Some villages 
of the stone age are of later date than others, and exhibit signs of an improved 
state of the arts. Among their relics are discovered carbonised grains of wheat 
and barley, and pieces of bread, proving that the cultivation of cereals had 
begun. In the same settlements, also, cloth, made of woven flax and straw, has 
been detected.

The pottery of the bronze age in Switzerland is of a finer texture, and more 
elegant in form, than that of the age of stone. At Nidau, on the lake of Bienne, 
articles of iron have also been discovered, so that this settlement was 
evidently not abandoned till that metal had come into use.

At La Thene, in the northern angle of the lake of Neufchatel, a great many 
articles of iron have been obtained, which in form and ornamentation are 
entirely different both from those of the bronze period and from those used by 
the Romans. Gaulish and Celtic coins have also been found there by MM. Schwab 
and Desor. They agree in character with remains, including many iron swords, 
which have been found at Tiefenau, near Berne, in ground supposed to have been a 
battle-field; and their date appears to have been anterior to the great Roman 
invasion of Northern Europe, though perhaps not long before that event. (Sir J. 
Lubbock's Lecture, Royal Institution February 27, 1863.) Coins, which sometimes 
occur in deposits of the age of iron, have never yet been found in formations of 
the ages of bronze or stone.

The period of bronze must have been one of foreign commerce, as tin, which 
enters into this metallic mixture in the proportion of about ten per cent to the 
copper, was obtained by the ancients chiefly from Cornwall. (Diodorus 5, 21, 22 
and Sir H. James Note on Block of Tin dredged up in Falmouth Harbour. Royal 
Institution of Cornwall 1863.) Very few human bones of the bronze period have 
been met with in the Danish peat, or in the Swiss lake-dwellings, and this 
scarcity is generally attributed by archaeologists to the custom of burning the 
dead, which prevailed in the age of bronze.

POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD.

From the foregoing observations we may infer that the ages of iron and bronze in 
Northern and Central Europe were preceded by a stone age, the Neolithic, 
referable to that division of the post-tertiary epoch which I have called 
Recent, when the mammalia as well as the other organic remains accompanying the 
stone implements were of living species. But memorials have of late been brought 
to light of a still older age of stone, for which, as above stated, the name 
Paleolithic has been proposed, when man was contemporary in Europe with the 
elephant and rhinoceros, and various other animals, of which many of the most 
conspicuous have long since died out.

REINDEER PERIOD IN SOUTH OF FRANCE.

In the larger number of the caves of Europe, as for example in those of England, 
Belgium, Germany, and many parts of France, the animal remains agree 
specifically with the fauna of this oldest division of the age of stone, or that 
to which belongs the drift of Amiens and Abbeville presently to be mentioned, 
containing flint implements of a very antique type. But there are some caves in 
the departments of Dordogne, Aude, and other parts of the south of France, which 
are believed by M. Lartet to be of intermediate date between the Paleolithic and 
Neolithic periods. To this intermediate era M. Lartet gave, in 1863, the name of 
the "reindeer period," because vast quantities of the bones and horns of that 
deer have been met with in the French caverns. In some cases separate plates of 
molars of the mammoth, and several teeth of the great Irish deer, Cervus 
megaceros, and of the cave-lion, Felis spelaea, have been found mixed up with 
cut and carved bones of reindeer. On one of these sculptured bones in the cave 
of Perigord, a rude representation of the mammoth, with its long curved tusks 
and covering of wool, occurs, which is regarded by M. Lartet as placing beyond 
all doubt the fact that the early inhabitants of these caves must have seen this 
species of elephant still living in France. The presence of the marmot, as well 
as the reindeer and some other northern animals, in these caverns seems to imply 
a colder climate than that of the Swiss lake-dwellings, in which no remains of 
reindeer have as yet been discovered. The absence of this last in the old 
lacustrine habitations of Switzerland is the more significant, because in a cave 
in the neighbourhood of the lake of Geneva, namely, that of Mont Saleve, bones 
of the reindeer occur with flint implements similar to those of the caverns of 
Dordogne and Perigord.

The state of the arts, as exemplified by the instruments found in these caverns 
of the reindeer period, is somewhat more advanced than that which characterises 
the tools of the Amiens drift, but is nevertheless more rude than that of the 
Swiss lake-dwellings. No metallic articles occur, and the stone hatchets are not 
ground after the fashion of celts; the needles of bone are shaped in a 
workmanlike style, having their eyes drilled with consummate skill.

The formations above alluded to, which are as yet but imperfectly known, may be 
classed as belonging to the close of the Paleolithic era, of the monuments of 
which I am now about to treat.

ALLUVIAL DEPOSITS OF THE PALEOLITHIC AGE.

(FIGURE 87. Recent and Post-pliocene alluvial deposits.
1. Peat of the recent period.
2. Gravel of modern river.
2'. Loam of brick-earth (loess) of same age as 2, formed by inundations of the 
river.
3. Lower-level valley-gravel with extinct mammalia (Post-pliocene).
3'. Loam of same age.
4. Higher-level valley-gravel (Post-pliocene).
4'. Loam of same age.
5. Upland gravel of various kinds and periods, consisting in some places of 
unstratified boulder clay or glacial drift.
6. Older rocks.)

The alluvial and marine deposits of the Paleolithic age, the earliest to which 
any vestiges of man have yet been traced back, belong to a time when the 
physical geography of Europe differed in a marked degree from that now 
prevailing. In the Neolithic period, the valleys and rivers coincided almost 
entirely with those by which the present drainage of the land is effected, and 
the peat-mosses were the same as those now growing. The situation of the shell-
mounds and lake-dwellings above alluded to is such as to imply that the 
topography of the districts where they are observed has not subsequently 
undergone any material alteration. Whereas we no sooner examine the Post-
pliocene formations, in which the remains of so many extinct mammalia are found, 
than we at once perceive a more decided discrepancy between the former and 
present outline of the surface. Since those deposits originated, changes of 
considerable magnitude have been effected in the depth and width of many 
valleys, as also in the direction of the superficial and subterranean drainage, 
and, as is manifest near the sea-coast, in the relative position of land and 
water. In Figure 87 an ideal section is given, illustrating the different 
position which the Recent and Post-pliocene alluvial deposits occupy in many 
European valleys.

The peat, No. 1, has been formed in a low part of the modern alluvial plain, in 
parts of which gravel No. 2 of the recent period is seen. Over this gravel the 
loam or fine sediment 2' has in many places been deposited by the river during 
floods which covered nearly the whole alluvial plain.

No. 3 represents an older alluvium, composed of sand and gravel, formed before 
the valley had been excavated to its present depth. It contains the remains of 
fluviatile shells of living species associated with the bones of mammalia, in 
part of recent, and in part of extinct species. Among the latter, the mammoth 
(E. primigenius) and the Siberian rhinoceros (R. tichorhinus) are the most 
common in Europe. No. 3' is a remnant of the loam or brick-earth by which No. 3 
was overspread. No. 4 is a still older and more elevated terrace, similar in its 
composition and organic remains to No. 3, and covered in like manner with its 
inundation-mud, 4'. Sometimes the valley-gravels of older date are entirely 
missing, or there is only one, and occasionally there are more than two, marking 
as many successive stages in the excavation of the valley. They usually occur at 
heights varying from 10 to 100 feet, sometimes on the right and sometimes on the 
left side of the existing river-plain, but rarely in great strength on exactly 
opposite sides of the valley.

Among the genera of extinct quadrupeds most frequently met with in England, 
France, Germany, and other parts of Europe, are the elephant, rhinoceros, 
hippopotamus, horse, great Irish deer, bear, tiger, and hyaena. In the peat, No. 
1 (Figure 87), and in the more modern gravel and silt (No. 2), works of art of 
the ages of iron and bronze, and of the later or Neolithic stone period, already 
described, are met with. In the more ancient or Paleolithic gravels, 3 and 4, 
there have been found of late years in several valleys in France and England-- 
as, for example, in those of the Seine and Somme, and of the Thames and Ouse, 
near Bedford-- stone implements of a rude type, showing that man coexisted in 
those districts with the mammoth and other extinct quadrupeds of the genera 
above enumerated. In 1847, M. Boucher de Perthes observed in an ancient alluvium 
at Abbeville, in Picardy, the bones of extinct mammalia associated in such a 
manner with flint implements of a rude type as to lead him to infer that both 
the organic remains and the works of art were referable to one and the same 
period. This inference was soon after confirmed by Mr. Prestwich, who found in 
1859 a flint tool in situ in the same stratum at Amiens that contained the 
remains of extinct mammalia.

The flint implements found at Abbeville and Amiens are most of them considered 
to be hatchets and spear-heads, and are different from those commonly called 
"celts." These celts, so often found in the recent formations, have a more 
regular oblong shape, the result of grinding, by which also a sharp edge has 
been given to them. The Abbeville tools found in gravel at different levels, as 
in Nos. 3 and 4, Figure 87, in which bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, and 
other extinct mammalia occur, are always unground, having evidently been brought 
into their present form simply by the chipping off of fragments of flint by 
repeated blows, such as could be given by a stone hammer.

Some of them are oval, others of a spear-headed form, no two exactly alike, and 
yet the greater number of each kind are obviously fashioned after the same 
general pattern. Their outer surface is often white, the original black flint 
having been discoloured and bleached by exposure to the air, or by the action of 
acids, as they lay in the gravel. They are most commonly stained of the same 
ochreous colour as the flints of the gravel in which they are imbedded. 
Occasionally their antiquity is indicated not only by their colour but by 
superficial incrustations of carbonate of lime, or by dendrites formed of oxide 
of iron and manganese. The edges also of most of them are worn, sometimes by 
having been used as tools, or sometimes by having been rolled in the old river's 
bed. They are met with not only in the lower-level gravels, as in No. 3, Figure 
87, but also in No. 4, or the higher gravels, as at St. Acheul, in the suburbs 
of Amiens, where the old alluvium lies at an elevation of about 100 feet above 
the level of the river Somme. At both levels fluviatile and land-shells are met 
with in the loam as well as in the gravel, but there are no marine shells 
associated, except at Abbeville, in the lowest part of the gravel, near the sea, 
and a few feet only above the present high-water mark. Here with fossil shells 
of living species are mingled the bones of Elephas primigenius and E. antiquus, 
Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Hippopotamus, Felis spelaea, Hyaena spelaea, reindeer, 
and many others, the bones accompanying the flint implements in such a manner as 
to show that both were buried in the old alluvium at the same period.

Nearly the entire skeleton of a rhinoceros was found at one point, namely, in 
the Menchecourt drift at Abbeville, the bones being in such juxtaposition as to 
show that the cartilage must have held them together at the time of their 
inhumation.

The general absence here and elsewhere of human bones from gravel and sand in 
which flint tools are discovered, may in some degree be due to the present 
limited extent of our researches. But it may also be presumed that when a hunter 
population, always scanty in numbers, ranged over this region, they were too 
wary to allow themselves to be overtaken by the floods which swept away many 
herbivorous animals from the low river-plains where they may have been pasturing 
or sleeping. Beasts of prey prowling about the same alluvial flats in search of 
food may also have been surprised more readily than the human tenant of the same 
region, to whom the signs of a coming tempest were better known.

INUNDATION-MUD OF RIVERS.-- BRICK-EARTH.-- FLUVIATILE LOAM, OR LOESS.

As a general rule, the fluviatile alluvia of different ages (Nos. 2, 3, 4, 
Figure 87) are severally made up of coarse materials in their lower portions, 
and of fine silt or loam in their upper parts. For rivers are constantly 
shifting their position in the valley-plain, encroaching gradually on one bank, 
near which there is deep water, and deserting the other or opposite side, where 
the channel is growing shallower, being destined eventually to be converted into 
land. Where the current runs strongest, coarse gravel is swept along, and where 
its velocity is slackened, first sand, and then only the finest mud, is thrown 
down. A thin film of this fine sediment is spread, during floods, over a wide 
area, on one, or sometimes on both sides, of the main stream, often reaching as 
far as the base of the bluffs or higher grounds which bound the valley. Of such 
a description are the well-known annual deposits of the Nile, to which Egypt 
owes its fertility. So thin are they, that the aggregate amount accumulated in a 
century is said rarely to exceed five inches, although in the course of 
thousands of years it has attained a vast thickness, the bottom not having been 
reached by borings extending to a depth of 60 feet towards the central parts of 
the valley. Everywhere it consists of the same homogeneous mud, destitute of 
stratification-- the only signs of successive accumulation being where the Nile 
has silted up its channel, or where the blown sands of the Libyan desert have 
invaded the plain, and given rise to alternate layers of sand and mud.

In European river-loams we occasionally observe isolated pebbles and angular 
pieces of stone which have been floated by ice to the places where they now 
occur; but no such coarse materials are met with in the plains of Egypt.

In some parts of the valley of the Rhine the accumulation of similar loam, 
called in Germany "loess," has taken place on an enormous scale. Its colour is 
yellowish-grey, and very homogeneous; and Professor Bischoff has ascertained, by 
analysis, that it agrees in composition with the mud of the Nile. Although for 
the most part unstratified, it betrays in some places marks of stratification, 
especially where it contains calcareous concretions, or in its lower part where 
it rests on subjacent gravel and sand which alternate with each other near the 
junction. About a sixth part of the whole mass is composed of carbonate of lime, 
and there is usually an intermixture of fine quartzose and micaceous sand.

(FIGURE 88. Succinea elongata.)

Although this loam of the Rhine is unsolidified, it usually terminates where it 
has been undermined by running water in a vertical cliff, from the face of which 
shells of terrestrial, fresh-water and amphibious mollusks project in relief. 
These shells do not imply the permanent sojourn of a body of fresh water on the 
spot, for the most aquatic of them, the Succinea, inhabits marshes and wet 
grassy meadows. The Succinea elongata (or S. oblongata), Figure 88, is very 
characteristic both of the loess of the Rhine and of some other European river-
loams.

(FIGURE 89. Pupa muscorum (Linn.).)

(FIGURE 90. Helix hispida (Linn.) (plebeia).)

Among the land-shells of the Rhenish loess, Helix hispida, Figure 90, and Pupa 
muscorum, Figure 89, are very common. Both the terrestrial and aquatic shells 
are of most fragile and delicate structure, and yet they are almost invariably 
perfect and uninjured. They must have been broken to pieces had they been swept 
along by a violent inundation. Even the colour of some of the land-shells, as 
that of Helix nemoralis, is occasionally preserved.

In parts of the valley of the Rhine, between Bingen and Basle, the fluviatile 
loam or loess now under consideration is several hundred feet thick, and 
contains here and there throughout that thickness land and amphibious shells. As 
it is seen in masses fringing both sides of the great plain, and as occasionally 
remnants of it occur in the centre of the valley, forming hills several hundred 
feet in height, it seems necessary to suppose, first, a time when it slowly 
accumulated; and secondly, a later period, when large portions of it were 
removed, or when the original valley, which had been partially filled up with 
it, was re-excavated.

Such changes may have been brought about by a great movement of oscillation, 
consisting first of a general depression of the land, and then of a gradual re-
elevation of the same. The amount of continental depression which first took 
place in the interior, must be imagined to have exceeded that of the region near 
the sea, in which case the higher part of the great valley would have its 
alluvial plain gradually raised by an accumulation of sediment, which would only 
cease when the subsidence of the land was at an end. If the direction of the 
movement was then reversed, and, during the re-elevation of the continent, the 
inland region nearest the mountains should rise more rapidly than that near the 
coast, the river would acquire a denuding power sufficient to enable it to sweep 
away gradually nearly all the loam and gravel with which parts of its basin had 
been filled up. Terraces and hillocks of mud and sand would then alone remain to 
attest the various levels at which the river had thrown down and afterwards 
removed alluvial matter.

CAVERN DEPOSITS CONTAINING HUMAN REMAINS AND BONES OF EXTINCT ANIMALS.

In England, and in almost all countries where limestone rocks abound, caverns 
are found, usually consisting of cavities of large dimensions, connected 
together by low, narrow, and sometimes torturous galleries or tunnels. These 
subterranean vaults are usually filled in part with mud, pebbles, and breccia, 
in which bones occur belonging to the same assemblage of animals as those 
characterising the Post-pliocene alluvia above described. Some of these bones 
are referable to extinct and others to living species, and they are occasionally 
intermingled, as in the valley-gravels, with implements of one or other of the 
great divisions of the stone age, and these are not unfrequently accompanied by 
human bones, which are much more common in cavern deposits than in valley-
alluvium.

Each suite of caverns, and the passages by which they communicate the one with 
the other, afford memorials to the geologist of successive phases through which 
they must have passed. First, there was a period when the carbonate of lime was 
carried out gradually by springs; secondly, an era when engulfed rivers or 
occasional floods swept organic and inorganic debris into the subterranean 
hollows previously formed; and thirdly, there were such changes in the 
configuration of the region as caused the engulfed rivers to be turned into new 
channels, and springs to be dried up, after which the cave-mud, breccia, gravel, 
and fossil bones would bear the same kind of relation to the existing drainage 
of the country as the older valley-drifts with their extinct mammalian remains 
and works of art bear to the present rivers and alluvial plains.

The quarrying away of large masses of Carboniferous and Devonian limestone, near 
Liege, in Belgium, has afforded the geologist magnificent sections of some of 
these caverns, and the former communication of cavities in the interior of the 
rocks with the old surface of the country by means of vertical or oblique 
fissures, has been demonstrated in places where it would not otherwise have been 
suspected, so completely have the upper extremities of these fissures been 
concealed by superficial drift, while their lower ends, which extended into the 
roofs of the caves, are masked by stalactitic incrustations.

The origin of the stalactite is thus explained by the eminent chemist Liebig. 
Mould or humus, being acted on by moisture and air, evolves carbonic acid, which 
is dissolved by rain. The rain-water, thus impregnated, permeates the porous 
limestone, dissolves a portion of it, and afterwards, when the excess of 
carbonic acid evaporates in the caverns, parts with the calcareous matter, and 
forms stalactite. Even while caverns are still liable to be occasionally flooded 
such calcareous incrustations accumulate, but it is generally when they are no 
longer in the line of drainage that a solid floor of hard stalagmite is formed 
on the bottom.

The late Dr. Schmerling examined forty caves near Liege, and found in all of 
them the remains of the same fauna, comprising the mammoth, tichorhine 
rhinoceros, cave-bear, cave-hyaena, cave-lion, and many others, some of extinct 
and some of living species, and in all of them flint implements. In four or five 
caves only parts of human skeletons were met with, comprising sometimes skulls 
with a few other bones, sometimes nearly every part of the skeleton except the 
skull. In one of the caves, that of Engihoul, where Schmerling had found the 
remains of at least three human individuals, they were mingled in such a manner 
with bones of extinct mammalia, as to leave no doubt on his mind (in 1833) of 
man having co-existed with them.

In 1860, Professor Malaise, of Liege, explored with me this same cave of 
Engihoul, and beneath a hard floor of stalagmite we found mud full of bones of 
extinct and recent animals, such as Schmerling had described, and my companion, 
persevering in his researches after I had returned to England, extracted from 
the same deposit two human lower jaw-bones retaining their teeth. The skulls 
from these Belgian caverns display no marked deviation from the normal European 
type of the present day.

The careful investigations carried on by Dr. Falconer, Mr. Pengelly, and others, 
in the Brixham cave near Torquay, in 1858, demonstrated that flint knives were 
there imbedded in such a manner in loam underlying a floor of stalagmite as to 
prove that man had been an inhabitant of that region when the cave-bear and 
other members of the ancient post-pliocene fauna were also in existence.

The absence of gnawed bones had led Dr. Schmerling to infer that none of the 
Belgian caves which he explored had served as the dens of wild beasts; but there 
are many caves in Germany and England which have certainly been so inhabited, 
especially by the extinct hyaena and bear.

A fine example of a hyaena's den was afforded by the cave of Kirkdale, so well 
described by the late Dr. Buckland in his Reliquiae Diluvianae. In that cave, 
above twenty-five miles north-north-east of York, the remains of about 300 
hyaenas, belonging to individuals of every age, were detected. The species 
(Hyaena spelaea) has been considered by palaeontologists as extinct; it was 
larger than the fierce Hyaena crocuta of South Africa, which it closely 
resembled, and of which it is regarded by Mr. Boyd Dawkins as a variety. Dr. 
Buckland, after carefully examining the spot, proved that the hyaenas must have 
lived there; a fact attested by the quantity of their dung, which, as in the 
case of the living hyaena, is of nearly the same composition as bone, and almost 
as durable. In the cave were found the remains of the ox, young elephant, 
hippopotamus, rhinoceros, horse, bear, wolf, hare, water-rat, and several birds. 
All the bones have the appearance of having been broken and gnawed by the teeth 
of the hyaenas; and they occur confusedly mixed in loam or mud, or dispersed 
through a crust of stalagmite which covers it. In these and many other cases it 
is supposed that portions of herbivorous quadrupeds have been dragged into 
caverns by beasts of prey, and have served as their food-- an opinion quite 
consistent with the known habits of the living hyaena.

AUSTRALIAN CAVE-BRECCIAS.

Ossiferous breccias are not confined to Europe, but occur in all parts of the 
globe; and those discovered in fissures and caverns in Australia correspond 
closely in character with what has been called the bony breccia of the 
Mediterranean, in which the fragments of bone and rock are firmly bound together 
by a red ochreous cement.

Some of these caves were examined by the late Sir T. Mitchell in the Wellington 
Valley, about 210 miles west of Sidney, on the river Bell, one of the principal 
sources of the Macquarie, and on the Macquarie itself. The caverns often branch 
off in different directions through the rock, widening and contracting their 
dimensions, and the roofs and floors are covered with stalactite. The bones are 
often broken, but do not seem to be water-worn. In some places they lie imbedded 
in loose earth, but they are usually included in a breccia.

The remains belong to marsupial animals. Among the most abundant are those of 
the kangaroo, of which there are four species, while others belong to the genera 
Phascolomys, the wombat; Dasyurus, the ursine opossum; Phalangista, the vulpine 
opossum; and Hypsiprymnus, the kangaroo-rat.

(FIGURE 91. Part of lower jaw of Macropus atlas. Owen. A young individual of an 
extinct species.
a. Permanent false molar, in the alveolus.)

(FIGURE 92. Lower jaw of largest living species of kangaroo. (Macropus major.))

In the fossils above enumerated, several species are larger than the largest 
living ones of the same genera now known in Australia. Figure 91 of the right 
side of a lower jaw of a kangaroo (Macropus atlas, Owen) will at once be seen to 
exceed in magnitude the corresponding part of the largest living kangaroo, which 
is represented in Figure 92. In both these specimens part of the substance of 
the jaw has been broken open, so as to show the permanent false molar (a, Figure 
91), concealed in the socket. From the fact of this molar not having been cut, 
we learn that the individual was young, and had not shed its first teeth.

The reader will observe that all these extinct quadrupeds of Australia belong to 
the marsupial family, or, in other words, that they are referable to the same 
peculiar type of organisation which now distinguishes the Australian mammalia 
from those of other parts of the globe. This fact is one of many pointing to a 
general law deducible from the fossil vertebrate and invertebrate animals of 
times immediately antecedent to our own, namely, that the present geographical 
distribution of organic FORMS dates back to a period anterior to the origin of 
existing SPECIES; in other words, the limitation of particular genera or 
families of quadrupeds, mollusca, etc., to certain existing provinces of land 
and sea, began before the larger part of the species now contemporary with man 
had been introduced into the earth.

Professor Owen, in his excellent "History of British Fossil Mammals," has called 
attention to this law, remarking that the fossil quadrupeds of Europe and Asia 
differ from those of Australia or South America. We do not find, for example, in 
the Europaeo-Asiatic province fossil kangaroos, or armadillos, but the elephant, 
rhinoceros, horse, bear, hyaena, beaver, hare, mole, and others, which still 
characterise the same continent.

In like manner, in the Pampas of South America the skeletons of Megatherium, 
Megalonyx, Glyptodon, Mylodon, Toxodon, Macrauchenia, and other extinct forms, 
are analogous to the living sloth, armadillo, cavy, capybara, and llama. The 
fossil quadrumana, also associated with some of these forms in the Brazilian 
caves, belong to the Platyrrhine family of monkeys, now peculiar to South 
America. That the extinct fauna of Buenos Ayres and Brazil was very modern has 
been shown by its relation to deposits of marine shells, agreeing with those now 
inhabiting the Atlantic.

The law of geographical relationship above alluded to, between the living 
vertebrata of every great zoological province and the fossils of the period 
immediately antecedent, even where the fossil species are extinct, is by no 
means confined to the mammalia. New Zealand, when first examined by Europeans, 
was found to contain no indigenous land quadrupeds, no kangaroos, or opossums, 
like Australia; but a wingless bird abounded there, the smallest living 
representative of the ostrich family, called the Kiwi by the natives (Apteryx). 
In the fossils of the Post-pliocene period in this same island, there is the 
like absence of kangaroos, opossums, wombats, and the rest; but in their place a 
prodigious number of well-preserved specimens of gigantic birds of the 
struthious order, called by Owen Dinornis and Palapteryx, which are entombed in 
superficial deposits. These genera comprehended many species, some of which were 
four, some seven, others nine, and others eleven feet in height! It seems 
doubtful whether any contemporary mammalia shared the land with this population 
of gigantic feathered bipeds.

Mr. Darwin, when describing the recent and fossil mammalia of South America, has 
dwelt much on the wonderful relationship of the extinct to the living types in 
that part of the world, inferring from such geographical phenomena that the 
existing species are all related to the extinct ones which preceded them by a 
bond of common descent.

CLIMATE OF THE POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD.

The evidence as to the climate of Europe during this epoch is somewhat 
conflicting. The fluviatile and land-shells are all of existing species, but 
their geographical range has not always been the same as at present. Some, for 
example, which then lived in Britain are now only found in Norway and Finland, 
probably implying that the Post-pliocene climate of Britain was colder, 
especially in the winter. So also the reindeer and the musk-ox (Ovibos 
moschatus), now inhabitants of the Arctic regions, occur fossil in the valleys 
of the Thames and Avon, and also in France and Germany, accompanied in most 
places by the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. At Grays in Essex, on the other 
hand, another species both of elephant and rhinoceros occurs, together with a 
hippopotamus and the Cyrena fluminalis, a shell now extinct in Europe but still 
an inhabitant of the Nile and some Asiatic rivers. With it occurs the Unio 
littoralis, now living in the Seine and Loire. In the valley of the Somme flint 
tools have been found associated with Hippopotamus major and Cyrena fluminalis 
in the lower-level Post-pliocene gravels; while in the higher-level (and more 
ancient) gravels similar tools are more abundant, and are associated with the 
bones of the mammoth and other Post-pliocene quadrupeds indicative of a colder 
climate.

It is possible that we may here have evidence of summer and winter migrations 
rather than of a general change of temperature. Instead of imagining that the 
hippopotamus lived all the year round with the musk-ox and lemming, we may 
rather suppose that the apparently conflicting evidence may be due to the place 
of our observations being near the boundary line of a northern and southern 
fauna, either of which may have advanced or receded during comparatively slight 
and temporary fluctuations of climate. There may then have been a continuous 
land communication between England and the North of Siberia, as well as in an 
opposite direction with Africa, then united to Southern Europe.

In drift at Fisherton, near Salisbury, thirty feet above the river Wiley, the 
Greenland lemming and a new species of the Arctic genus Spermophilus have been 
found, along with the mammoth, reindeer, cave-hyaena, and other mammalia suited 
to a cold climate. A flint implement was taken out from beneath the bones of the 
mammoth. In a higher and older deposit in the vicinity, flint tools like those 
of Amiens have been discovered. Nearly all the known Post-pliocene quadrupeds 
have now been found accompanying flint knives or hatchets in such a way as to 
imply their coexistence with man; and we have thus the concurrent testimony of 
several classes of geological facts to the vast antiquity of the human race. In 
the first place, the disappearance of a great variety of species of wild animals 
from every part of a wide continent must have required a vast period for its 
accomplishment; yet this took place while man existed upon the earth, and was 
completed before that early period when the Danish shell-mounds were formed or 
the oldest of the Swiss lake-dwellings constructed. Secondly, the deepening and 
widening of valleys, indicated by the position of the river gravels at various 
heights, implies an amount of change of which that which has occurred during the 
historical period forms a scarcely perceptible part. Thirdly, the change in the 
course of rivers which once flowed through caves now removed from any line of 
drainage, and the formation of solid floors of stalagmite, must have required a 
great lapse of time. Lastly, ages must have been required to change the climate 
of wide regions to such an extent as completely to alter the geographical 
distribution of many mammalia as well as land and fresh-water shells. The 3000 
or 4000 years of the historical period does not furnish us with any appreciable 
measure for calculating the number of centuries which would suffice for such a 
series of changes, which are by no means of a local character, but have operated 
over a considerable part of Europe.

RELATIVE LONGEVITY OF SPECIES IN THE MAMMALIA AND TESTACEA.

I called attention in 1830 to the fact, which had not at that time attracted 
notice, that the association in the Post-pliocene deposits of shells, 
exclusively of living species, with many extinct quadrupeds betokened a 
longevity of species in the testacea far exceeding that in the mammalia. 
(Principles of Geology 1st edition volume 3 page 140.) Subsequent researches 
seem to show that this greater duration of the same specific forms in the class 
mollusca is dependent on a still more general law, namely, that the lower the 
grade of animals, or the greater the simplicity of their structure, the more 
persistent are they in general in their specific characters throughout vast 
periods of time. Not only have the invertebrata, as shown by geological data, 
altered at a less rapid rate than the vertebrata, but if we take one of the 
classes of the former, as for example the mollusca, we find those of more simple 
structure to have varied at a slower rate than those of a higher and more 
complex organisation; the Brachiopoda, for example, more slowly than the 
lamellibranchiate bivalves, while the latter have been more persistent than the 
univalves, whether gasteropoda or cephalopoda. In like manner the specific 
identity of the characters of the foraminifera, which are among the lowest types 
of the invertebrata, has outlasted that of the mollusca in an equally decided 
manner.

TEETH OF POST-PLIOCENE MAMMALIA.

To those who have never studied comparative anatomy, it may seem scarcely 
credible that a single bone taken from any part of the skeleton may enable a 
skilful osteologist to distinguish, in many cases, the genus, and sometimes the 
species, of quadrupeds to which it belonged. Although few geologists can aspire 
to such knowledge, which must be the result of long practice and study, they 
will nevertheless derive great advantage from learning, what is comparatively an 
easy task, to distinguish the principal divisions of the mammalia by the forms 
and characters of their teeth.

Figures 93 through 105 represent the teeth of some of the more common species 
and genera found in alluvial and cavern deposits.

(FIGURE 93. Elephas primigenius (or Mammoth ); molar of upper jaw, right side; 
one-third of natural size. Post-pliocene.
a. Grinding surface.
b. Side view.)

(FIGURE 94. Elephas antiquus, Falconer. Penultimate molar, one-third of natural 
size. Post-pliocene and Pliocene.)

(FIGURE 95. Elephas meridionalis, Nesti. Penultimate molar, one-third of natural 
size. Post-pliocene and Pliocene.)

(FIGURE 96. Rhinoceros leptorhinus, Cuvier-- Rhin. megarhinus, Christol; fossil 
from fresh-water beds of Grays, Essex; penultimate molar, lower jaw, left side; 
two-thirds of natural size. Post-pliocene and Newer Pliocene.)

(FIGURE 97. Rhinoceros tichorhinus; penultimate molar, lower jaw, left side; 
two-thirds of natural size. Post-pliocene.)

(FIGURE 98. Hippopotamus; from cave near Palermo; molar tooth; two-thirds of 
natural size. Post-pliocene.)

(FIGURE 99. Horse. Equus caballus, L. (common horse); from the shell-marl, 
Forfarshire; second molar, lower jaw. Recent.
a. Grinding surface, two-thirds natural size.
b. Side view of same, half natural size.)

(FIGURE 100. Deer.
Moose (Cervus alces, L.); recent; molar of upper jaw.
a. Grinding surface.
b. Side view, two-thirds of natural size.)

(FIGURE 101. Ox.
Ox, common, from shell-marl, Forfarshire; true molar, upper jaw; two-thirds 
natural size. Recent.
c. Grinding surface.
d. Side view, fangs uppermost.)

(FIGURE 102. Bear.
a. Canine tooth or tusk of bear (Ursus spelaeus); from cave near Liege.
b. Molar of left side, upper jaw; one-third of natural size. Post-pliocene.)

(FIGURE 103. Tiger.
c. Canine tooth of tiger (Felis tigris); recent.
d. Outside view of posterior molar, lower jaw: one-third of natural size. 
Recent.)

(FIGURE 104. Hyaena spelaea, Goldf. (variety of H. crocuta); lower jaw.
Kent's Hole, Torquay, Devonshire; one-third natural size. Post-pliocene.)

(FIGURE 105. Teeth of a new species of Arvicola, field-mouse; from the Norwich 
Crag. Newer Pliocene.
a. Grinding surface.
b. Side view of the same.
c. Natural size of a and b.)

On comparing the grinding surfaces of the corresponding molars of the three 
species of elephants, Figures 93, 94, 95 it will be seen that the folds of 
enamel are most numerous in the mammoth, fewer and wider, or more open, in E. 
antiquus; and most open and fewest in E. meridionalis. It will be also seen that 
the enamel in the molar of the Rhinoceros tichorhinus (Figure 97), is much 
thicker than in that of the Rhinoceros leptorhinus (Figure 96).


CHAPTER XI.

POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD, CONTINUED.-- GLACIAL CONDITIONS. (As to the former excess 
of cold, whether brought about by modifications in the height and distribution 
of the land or by altered astronomical conditions, see Principles volume 1 10th 
edition 1867 chapters 12 and 13 "Vicissitudes of Climate.")

Geographical Distribution, Form, and Characters of Glacial Drift.
Fundamental Rocks, polished, grooved, and scratched.
Abrading and striating Action of Glaciers.
Moraines, Erratic Blocks, and "Roches Moutonnees."
Alpine Blocks on the Jura.
Continental Ice of Greenland.
Ancient Centres of the Dispersion of Erratics.
Transportation of Drift by floating Icebergs.
Bed of the Sea furrowed and polished by the running aground of floating Ice-
islands.

CHARACTER AND DISTRIBUTION OF GLACIAL DRIFT.

In speaking of the loose transported matter commonly found on the surface of the 
land in all parts of the globe, I alluded to the exceptional character of what 
has been called the boulder formation in the temperate and Arctic latitudes of 
the northern hemisphere. The peculiarity of its form in Europe north of the 
50th, and in North America north of the 40th parallel of latitude, is now 
universally attributed to the action of ice, and the difference of opinion 
respecting it is now chiefly restricted to the question whether land-ice or 
floating icebergs have played the chief part in its distribution. It is wanting 
in the warmer and equatorial regions, and reappears when we examine the lands 
which lie south of the 40th and 50th parallels in the southern hemisphere, as, 
for example, in Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, and New Zealand. It consists of 
sand and clay, sometimes stratified, but often wholly devoid of stratification 
for a depth of 50, 100, or even a greater number of feet. To this unstratified 
form of the deposit the name of TILL has long been applied in Scotland. It 
generally contains a mixture of angular and rounded fragments of rock, some of 
large size, having occasionally one or more of their sides flattened and 
smoothed, or even highly polished. The smoothed surfaces usually exhibit many 
scratches parallel to each other, one set of which often crosses an older set. 
The till is almost everywhere wholly devoid of organic remains, except those 
washed into it from older formations, though in some places it contains marine 
shells, usually of northern or Arctic species, and frequently in a fragmentary 
state. The bulk of the till has usually been derived from the grinding down into 
mud of rocks in the immediate neighbourhood, so that it is red in a region of 
Red Sandstone, as in Strathmore in Forfarshire; grey or black in a district of 
coal and bituminous shale, as around Edinburgh; and white in a chalk country, as 
in parts of Norfolk and Denmark. The stony fragments dispersed irregularly 
through the till usually belong, especially in mountainous countries, to rocks 
found in some part of the same hydrographical basin; but there are regions where 
the whole of the boulder clay has come from a distance, and huge blocks, or 
"erratics," as they have been called, many feet in diameter, have not 
unfrequently travelled hundreds of miles from their point of departure, or from 
the parent rocks from which they have evidently been detached. These are 
commonly angular, and have often one or more of their sides polished and 
furrowed.

The rock on which the boulder formation reposes, if it consists of granite, 
gneiss, marble, or other hard stone, capable of permanently retaining any 
superficial markings which may have been imprinted upon it, is usually smoothed 
or polished, like the erratics above described, and exhibits parallel striae and 
furrows having a determinate direction. This direction, both in Europe and North 
America, agrees generally in a marked manner with the course taken by the 
erratic blocks in the same district. The boulder clay, when it was first 
studied, seemed in many of its characters so singular and anomalous, that 
geologists despaired of ever being able to interpret the phenomena by reference 
to causes now in action. In those exceptional cases where marine shells of the 
same date as the boulder clay were found, nearly all of them were recognised as 
living species-- a fact conspiring with the superficial position of the drift to 
indicate a comparatively modern origin.

The term "diluvium" was for a time the most popular name of the boulder 
formation, because it was referred by many to the deluge of Noah, while others 
retained the name as expressive of their opinion that a series of diluvial waves 
raised by hurricanes and storms, or by earthquakes, or by the sudden upheaval of 
land from the bed of the sea, had swept over the continents, carrying with them 
vast masses of mud and heavy stones, and forcing these stones over rocky 
surfaces so as to polish and imprint upon them long furrows and striae. But 
geologists were not long in seeing that the boulder formation was characteristic 
of high latitudes, and that on the whole the size and number of erratic blocks 
increases as we travel towards the Arctic regions. They could not fail to be 
struck with the contrast which the countries bordering the Baltic presented when 
compared with those surrounding the Mediterranean. The multitude of travelled 
blocks and striated rocks in the one region, and the absence of such appearances 
in the other, were too obvious to be overlooked. Even the great development of 
the boulder formation, with large erratics so far south as the Alps, offered an 
exception to the general rule favourable to the hypothesis that there was some 
intimate connection between it and accumulations of snow and ice.

TRANSPORTING AND ABRADING POWER OF GLACIERS.

(FIGURE 106. Limestone, polished, furrowed, and scratched by the glacier of 
Rosenlau in Switzerland. (Agassiz.)
a a. White streaks or scratches, caused by small grains of flint frozen into the 
ice.
b b. Furrows.)

I have described elsewhere ("Principles" volume 1 chapter 16 1867) the manner in 
which the snow of the Alpine heights is prevented from accumulating indefinitely 
in thickness by the constant descent of a large portion of it by gravitation. 
Becoming converted into ice it forms what are termed glaciers, which glide down 
the principal valleys. On their surface are seen mounds of rubbish or large 
heaps of sand and mud, with angular fragments of rock which fall from the steep 
slopes or precipices bounding the glaciers. When a glacier, thus laden, descends 
so far as to reach a region about 3500 feet above the level of the sea, the 
warmth of the air is such that it melts rapidly in summer, and all the mud, 
sand, and pieces of rock are slowly deposited at its lower end, forming a 
confused heap of unstratified rubbish called a MORAINE, and resembling the TILL 
before described.

Besides the blocks thus carried down on the top of the glacier, many fall 
through fissures in the ice to the bottom, where some of them become firmly 
frozen into the mass, and are pushed along the base of the glacier, abrading, 
polishing, and grooving the rocky floor below, as a diamond cuts glass, or as 
emery-powder polishes steel. The striae which are made, and the deep grooves 
which are scooped out by this action, are rectilinear and parallel to an extent 
never seen in those produced on loose stones or rocks, where shingle is hurried 
along by a torrent, or by the waves on a sea-beach. In addition to these 
polished, striated, and grooved surfaces of rock, another mark of the former 
action of a glacier is the "roche moutonnee." Projecting eminences of rock so 
called have been smoothed and worn into the shape of flattened domes by the 
glacier as it passed over them. They have been traced in the Alps to great 
heights above the present glaciers, and to great horizontal distances beyond 
them.

ALPINE BLOCKS ON THE JURA.

The moraines, erratics, polished surfaces, domes, and striae, above described, 
are observed in the great valley of Switzerland, fifty miles broad; and almost 
everywhere on the Jura, a chain which lies to the north of this valley. The 
average height of the Jura is about one-third that of the Alps, and it is now 
entirely destitute of glaciers; yet it presents almost everywhere similar 
moraines, and the same polished and grooved surfaces. The erratics, moreover, 
which cover it, present a phenomenon which has astonished and perplexed the 
geologist for more than half a century. No conclusion can be more incontestable 
than that these angular blocks of granite, gneiss, and other crystalline 
formations came from the Alps, and that they have been brought for a distance of 
fifty miles and upward across one of the widest and deepest valleys in the 
world; so that they are now lodged on a chain composed of limestone and other 
formations, altogether distinct from those of the Alps. Their great size and 
angularity, after a journey of so many leagues, has justly excited wonder; for 
hundreds of them are as large as cottages; and one in particular, composed of 
gneiss, celebrated under the name of Pierre a Bot, rests on the side of a hill 
about 900 feet above the lake of Neufchatel, and is no less than 40 feet in 
diameter.

In the year 1821, M. Venetz first announced his opinion that the Alpine glaciers 
must formerly have extended far beyond their present limits, and the proofs 
appealed to by him in confirmation of this doctrine were acknowledged by all 
subsequent observers, and greatly strengthened by new observations and 
arguments. M. Charpentier supposed that when the glaciers extended continuously 
from the Alps to the Jura, the former mountains were 2000 or 3000 feet higher 
than at present. Other writers, on the contrary, conjectured that the whole 
country had been submerged, and the moraines and erratic blocks transported on 
floating icebergs; but a careful study of the distribution of the travelled 
masses, and the total absence of marine shells from the old glacial drift of 
Switzerland, have entirely disproved this last hypothesis. In addition to the 
many evidences of the action of ice in the northern parts of Europe which we 
have already mentioned, there occur here and there in some of these countries, 
what are wanting in Switzerland, deposits of marine fossil shells, which exhibit 
so arctic a character that they must have led the geologist to infer the former 
prevalence of a much colder climate, even had he not encountered so many 
accompanying signs of ice-action. The same marine shells demonstrate the 
submergence of large areas in Scandinavia and the British Isles, during the 
glacial cold.

A characteristic feature of the deposits under consideration in all these 
countries is the occurrence of large erratic blocks, and sometimes of moraine 
matter, in situations remote from lofty mountains, and separated from the 
nearest points where the parent rocks appear at the surface by great intervening 
valleys, or arms of the sea. We also often observe striae and furrows, as in 
Norway, Sweden, and Scotland, which deviate from the direction which they ought 
to follow if they had been connected with the present line of drainage, and 
they, therefore, imply the prevalence of a very distinct condition of things at 
the time when the cold was most intense. The actual state of North Greenland 
seems to afford the best explanation of such abnormal glacial markings.

GREENLAND CONTINENTAL ICE.

Greenland is a vast unexplored continent, buried under one continuous and 
colossal mass of ice that is always moving seaward, a very small part of it in 
an easterly direction, and all the rest westward, or towards Baffin's Bay. All 
the minor ridges and valleys are levelled and concealed under a general covering 
of snow, but here and there some steep mountains protrude abruptly from the icy 
slope, and a few superficial lines of stones or moraines are visible at certain 
seasons, when no snow has fallen for many months, and when evaporation, promoted 
by the wind and sun, has caused much of the upper snow to disappear. The height 
of this continent is unknown, but it must be very great, as the most elevated 
lands of the outskirts, which are described as comparatively low, attain 
altitudes of 4000 to 6000 feet. The icy slope gradually lowers itself towards 
the outskirts, and then terminates abruptly in a mass about 2000 feet in 
thickness, the great discharge of ice taking place through certain large friths, 
which, at their upper ends, are usually about four miles across. Down these 
friths the ice is protruded in huge masses, several miles wide, which continue 
their course-- grating along the rocky bottom like ordinary glaciers long after 
they have reached the salt water. When at last they arrive at parts of Baffin's 
Bay deep enough to buoy up icebergs from 1000 to 1500 feet in vertical 
thickness, broken masses of them float off, carrying with them on their surface 
not only fine mud and sand but large stones. These fragments of rock are often 
polished and scored on one or more sides, and as the ice melts, they drop down 
to the bottom of the sea, where large quantities of mud are deposited, and this 
muddy bottom is inhabited by many mollusca.

Although the direction of the ice-streams in Greenland may coincide in the main 
with that which separate glaciers would take if there were no more ice than 
there is now in the Swiss Alps, yet the striation of the surface of the rocks on 
an ice-clad continent would, on the whole, vary considerably in its minor 
details from that which would be imprinted on rocks constituting a region of 
separate glaciers. For where there is a universal covering of ice there will be 
a general outward movement from the higher and more central regions towards the 
circumference and lower country, and this movement will be, to a certain extent, 
independent of the minor inequalities of hill and valley, when these are all 
reduced to one level by the snow. The moving ice may sometimes cross even at 
right angles deep narrow ravines, or the crests of buried ridges, on which last 
it may afterwards seem strange to detect glacial striae and polishing after the 
liquefaction of the snow and ice has taken place.

Rink mentions that in North Greenland powerful springs of clayey water escape in 
winter from under the ice, where it descends to "the outskirts," and where, as 
already stated, it is often 2000 feet thick-- a fact showing how much grinding 
action is going on upon the surface of the subjacent rocks. I also learn from 
Dr. Torell that there are large areas in the outskirts, now no longer covered 
with permanent snow or glaciers, which exhibit on their surface unmistakable 
signs of ancient ice-action, so that, vast as is the power now exerted by ice in 
Greenland, it must once have operated on a still grander scale. The land, though 
now very elevated, may perhaps have been formerly much higher. It is well-known 
that the south coast of Greenland, from latitude 60 degrees to about 70 degrees 
north, has for the last four centuries been sinking at the rate of several feet 
in a century. By this means a surface of rock, well scored and polished by ice, 
is now slowly subsiding beneath the sea, and is becoming strewed over, as the 
icebergs melt, with impalpable mud and smoothed and scratched stones. It is not 
precisely known how far north this downward movement extends.

DRIFT CARRIED BY ICEBERGS.

An account was given so long ago as the year 1822, by Scoresby, of icebergs seen 
by him in the Arctic seas drifting along in latitudes 69 and 70 degrees north, 
which rose above the surface from 100 to 200 feet, and some of which measured a 
mile in circumference. Many of them were loaded with beds of earth and rock, of 
such thickness that the weight was conjectured to be from 50,000 to 100,000 
tons. A similar transportation of rocks is known to be in progress in the 
southern hemisphere, where boulders included in ice are far more frequent than 
in the north. One of these icebergs was encountered in 1839, in mid-ocean, in 
the antarctic regions, many hundred miles from any known land, sailing 
northward, with a large erratic block firmly frozen into it. Many of them, 
carefully measured by the officers of the French exploring expedition of the 
Astrolabe, were between 100 and 225 feet high above water, and from two to five 
miles in length. Captain d'Urville ascertained one of them which he saw floating 
in the Southern Ocean to be 13 miles long and 100 feet high, with walls 
perfectly vertical. The submerged portions of such islands must, according to 
the weight of ice relatively to sea-water, be from six to eight times more 
considerable than the part which is visible, so that when they are once fairly 
set in motion, the mechanical force which they might exert against any obstacle 
standing in their way would be prodigious.

We learn, therefore, from a study both of the arctic and antarctic regions, that 
a great extent of land may be entirely covered throughout the whole year by snow 
and ice, from the summits of the loftiest mountains to the sea-coast, and may 
yet send down angular erratics to the ocean. We may also conclude that such land 
will become in the course of ages almost everywhere scored and polished like the 
rocks which underlie a glacier. The discharge of ice into the surrounding sea 
will take place principally through the main valleys, although these are hidden 
from our sight. Erratic blocks and moraine matter will be dispersed somewhat 
irregularly after reaching the sea, for not only will prevailing winds and 
marine currents govern the distribution of the drift, but the shape of the 
submerged area will have its influence; inasmuch as floating ice, laden with 
stones, will pass freely through deep water, while it will run a ground where 
there are reefs and shallows. Some icebergs in Baffin's Bay have been seen 
stranded on a bottom 1000 or even 1500 feet deep. In the course of ages such a 
sea-bed may become densely covered with transported matter, from which some of 
the adjoining greater depths may be free. If, as in West Greenland, the land is 
slowly sinking, a large extent of the bottom of the ocean will consist of rock 
polished and striated by land-ice, and then overspread by mud and boulders 
detached from melting bergs.

The mud, sand, and boulders thus let fall in still water must be exactly like 
the moraines of terrestrial glaciers, devoid of stratification and organic 
remains. But occasionally, on the outer side of such packs of stranded bergs, 
the waves and currents may cause the detached earthy and stony materials to be 
sorted according to size and weight before they reach the bottom, and to acquire 
a stratified arrangement.

I have already alluded to the large quantity of ice, containing great blocks of 
stone, which is sometimes seen floating far from land, in the southern or 
Antarctic seas. After the emergence, therefore, of such a submarine area, the 
superficial detritus will have no necessary relation to the hills, valleys, and 
river-plains over which it will be scattered. Many a water-shed may intervene 
between the starting-point of each erratic or pebble and its final resting-
place, and the only means of discovering the country from which it took its 
departure will consist in a careful comparison of its mineral or fossil contents 
with those of the parent rocks.


CHAPTER XII.

POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD, CONTINUED.-- GLACIAL CONDITIONS, CONCLUDED.

Glaciation of Scandinavia and Russia.
Glaciation of Scotland.
Mammoth in Scotch Till.
Marine Shells in Scotch Glacial Drift.
Their Arctic Character.
Rarity of Organic Remains in Glacial Deposits.
Contorted Strata in Drift.
Glaciation of Wales, England, and Ireland.
Marine Shells of Moel Tryfaen.
Erratics near Chichester.
Glacial Formations of North America.
Many Species of Testacea and Quadrupeds survived the Glacial Cold.
Connection of the Predominance of Lakes with Glacial Action.
Action of Ice in preventing the silting up of Lake-basins.
Absence of Lakes in the Caucasus.
Equatorial Lakes of Africa.

GLACIATION OF SCANDINAVIA AND RUSSIA.

In large tracts of Norway and Sweden, where there have been no glaciers in 
historical times, the signs of ice-action have been traced as high as 6000 feet 
above the level of the sea. These signs consist chiefly of polished and furrowed 
rock-surfaces, of moraines and erratic blocks. The direction of the erratics, 
like that of the furrows, has usually been conformable to the course of the 
principal valleys; but the lines of both sometimes radiate outward in all 
directions from the highest land, in a manner which is only explicable by the 
hypothesis above alluded to of a general envelope of continental ice, like that 
of Greenland (Chapter 11.) Some of the far-transported blocks have been carried 
from the central parts of Scandinavia towards the Polar regions; others 
southward to Denmark; some south-westward, to the coast of Norfolk in England; 
others south-eastward, to Germany, Poland, and Russia.

In the immediate neighbourhood of Upsala, in Sweden, I had observed, in 1834, a 
ridge of stratified sand and gravel, in the midst of which occurs a layer of 
marl, evidently formed originally at the bottom of the Baltic, by the slow 
growth of the mussel, cockle, and other marine shells of living species, 
intermixed with some proper to fresh water. The marine shells are all of 
dwarfish size, like those now inhabiting the brackish waters of the Baltic; and 
the marl, in which many of them are imbedded, is now raised more than 100 feet 
above the level of the Gulf of Bothnia. Upon the top of this ridge repose 
several huge erratics, consisting of gneiss for the most part unrounded, from 
nine to sixteen feet in diameter, and which must have been brought into their 
present position since the time when the neighbouring gulf was already 
characterised by its peculiar fauna. Here, therefore, we have proof that the 
transport of erratics continued to take place, not merely when the sea was 
inhabited by the existing testacea, but when the north of Europe had already 
assumed that remarkable feature of its physical geography which separates the 
Baltic from the North Sea, and causes the Gulf of Bothnia to have only one-
fourth of the saltness belonging to the ocean. In Denmark, also, recent shells 
have been found in stratified beds, closely associated with the boulder clay.

GLACIATION OF SCOTLAND.

Mr. T.F. Jamieson, in 1858, adduced a great body of facts to prove that the 
Grampians once sent down glaciers from the central regions in all directions 
towards the sea. "The glacial grooves," he observed, "radiate outward from the 
central heights towards all points of the compass, though they do not always 
strictly conform to the actual shape and contour of the minor valleys and 
ridges."

These facts and other characteristics of the Scotch drift lead us to the 
inference that when the glacial cold first set in, Scotland stood higher above 
the sea than at present, and was covered for the most part with snow and ice, as 
Greenland is now. This sheet of land-ice sliding down to lower levels, ground 
down and polished the subjacent rocks, sweeping off nearly all superficial 
deposits of older date, and leaving only till and boulders in their place. To 
this continental state succeeded a period of depression and partial submergence. 
The sea advanced over the lower lands, and Scotland was converted into an 
archipelago, some marine sand with shells being spread over the bottom of the 
sea. On this sand a great mass of boulder clay usually quite devoid of fossils 
was accumulated. Lastly, the land re-emerged from the water, and, reaching a 
level somewhat above its present height, became connected with the continent of 
Europe, glaciers being formed once more in the higher regions, though the ice 
probably never regained its former extension. (Jamieson Quarterly Geological 
Journal 1860 volume 16 page 370.) After all these changes, there were some minor 
oscillations in the level of the land, on which, although they have had 
important geographical consequences, separating Ireland from England, for 
example, and England from the Continent, we need not here enlarge.

MAMMOTH IN SCOTCH TILL.

Almost all remains of the terrestrial fauna of the Continent which preceded the 
period of submergence have been lost; but a few patches of estuarine and fresh-
water formations escaped denudation by submergence. To these belong the peaty 
clay from which several mammoths' tusks and horns of reindeer were obtained at 
Kilmaurs, in Ayrshire as long ago as 1816. Mr. Bryce in 1865 ascertained that 
the fresh-water formation containing these fossils rests on carboniferous 
sandstone, and is covered, first by a bed of marine sand with arctic shells, and 
then with a great mass of till with glaciated boulders. (Bryce Quarterly 
Geological Journal volume 21 page 217 1865.) Still more recent explorations in 
the neighbourhood of Kilmaurs have shown that the fresh-water formation contains 
the seed of the pond-weed Potamogeton and the aquatic Ranunculus; and Mr. Young 
of the Glasgow Museum washed the mud adhering to the reindeer horns of Kilmaurs 
and that which filled the cracks of the associated elephants' tusks, and 
detected in these fossils (which had been in the Glasgow Museum for half a 
century) abundance of the same seeds.

All doubts, therefore, as to the true position of the remains of the mammoth, a 
fossil so rare in Scotland, have been set at rest, and it serves to prove that 
part of the ancient continent sank beneath the sea at a period of great cold, as 
the shells of the overlying sand attest. The incumbent till or boulder clay is 
about 40 feet thick, but it often attains much greater thickness in the same 
part of Scotland.

MARINE SHELLS OF SCOTCH DRIFT.

(FIGURE 107. Astarte borealis, Chem.; (A. arctica, Moll. A. compressa, Mont.)

(FIGURE 108. Leda lanceolata (oblonga), Sowerby.)

(FIGURE 109. Saxicava rugosa, Penn.)

(FIGURE 110. Pecten islandicus, Moll. Northern shell common in the drift of the 
Clyde, in Scotland. )

(FIGURE 111. Natica clausa, Bred. Northern shell common in the drift of the 
Clyde, in Scotland.)

(FIGURE 112. Trophon clathratum, Linne. Northern shell common in the drift of 
the Clyde, in Scotland.)

(FIGURE 113. Leda truncata.
a. Exterior of left valve.
b. Interior of same.)

(FIGURE 114. Tellina calcarea, Chem. (Tellina proxima, Brown.)
a. Outside of left valve.
b. Interior of same.)

The greatest height to which marine shells have yet been traced in this boulder 
clay is at Airdie, in Lanarkshire, ten miles east of Glasgow, 524 feet above the 
level of the sea. At that spot they were found imbedded in stratified clays with 
till above and below them. There appears no doubt that the overlying deposit was 
true glacial till, as some boulders of granite were observed in it, which must 
have come from distances of sixty miles at the least.

The shells figured in Figures 107 to 112 are only a few out of a large 
assemblage of living species, which, taken as a whole, bear testimony to 
conditions far more arctic than those now prevailing in the Scottish seas. But a 
group of marine shells, indicating a still greater excess of cold, has been 
brought to light since 1860 by the Reverend Thomas Brown, from glacial drift or 
clay on the borders of the estuaries of the Forth and Tay. This clay occurs at 
Elie, in Fife, and at Errol, in Perthshire; and has already afforded about 35 
shells, all of living species, and now inhabitants of arctic regions, such as 
Leda truncata, Tellina proxima (see Figures 113 and 114), Pecten Groenlandicus, 
Crenella laevigata, Crenella nigra, and others, some of them first brought by 
Captain Sir E. Parry from the coast of Melville Island, latitude 76 degrees 
north. These were all identified in 1863 by Dr. Torell, who had just returned 
from a survey of the seas around Spitzbergen, where he had collected no less 
than 150 species of mollusca, living chiefly on a bottom of fine mud derived 
from the moraines of melting glaciers which there protrude into the sea. He 
informed me that the fossil fauna of this Scotch glacial deposit exhibits not 
only the species but also the peculiar varieties of mollusca now characteristic 
of very high latitudes. Their large size implies that they formerly enjoyed a 
colder, or, what was to them a more genial climate, than that now prevailing in 
the latitude where the fossils occur. Marine shells have also been found in the 
glacial drift of Caithness and Aberdeenshire at heights of 250 feet, and in 
Banff of 350 feet, and stratified drift continuous with the above ascends to 
heights of 500 feet. Already 75 species are enumerated from Caithness, and the 
same number from Aberdeenshire and Banff, and in both cases all but six are 
arctic species.

I formerly suggested that the absence of all signs of organic life in the Scotch 
drift might be connected with the severity of the cold, and also in some places 
with the depth of the sea during the period of extreme submergence; but my faith 
in such an hypothesis has been shaken by modern investigations, an exuberance of 
life having been observed both in arctic and antarctic seas of great depth, and 
where floating ice abounds. The difficulty, moreover, of accounting for the 
entire dearth of marine shells in till is removed when once we have adopted the 
theory of this boulder clay being the product of land-ice. For glaciers coming 
down from a continental ice-sheet like that which covers Greenland may fill 
friths many hundred feet below the sea-level, and even invade parts of a bay a 
thousand feet deep, before they find water enough to float off their terminal 
portions in the form of icebergs. In such a case till without marine shells may 
first accumulate, and then, if the climate becomes warmer and the ice melts, a 
marine deposit may be superimposed on the till without any change of level being 
required.

Another curious phenomenon bearing on this subject was styled by the late Hugh 
Miller the "striated pavements" of the boulder clay. Where portions of the till 
have been removed by the sea on the shores of the Forth, or in the interior by 
railway cuttings, the boulders imbedded in what remains of the drift are seen to 
have been all subjected to a process of abrasion and striation, the striae and 
furrows being parallel and persistent across them all, exactly as if a glacier 
or iceberg had passed over them and scored them in a manner similar to that so 
often undergone by the solid rocks below the glacial drift. It is possible, as 
Mr. Geikie conjectures, that this second striation of the boulders may be 
referable to floating ice. (Geikie Transactions of the Geological Society of 
Glasgow volume 1 part 2 page 68 1863.)

CONTORTED STRATA IN DRIFT.

(FIGURE 115. Section of contorted drift overlying till, seen on left bank of 
South Esk, near Cortachie, in 1840. Height of section seen, from a to d, about 
50 feet.
a, b. Gravel and sand.
f, g. Contorted drift.
Till.)

In Scotland the till is often covered with stratified gravel, sand, and clay, 
the beds of which are sometimes horizontal and sometimes contorted for a 
thickness of several feet. Such contortions are not uncommon in Forfarshire, 
where I observed them, among other places, in a vertical cutting made in 1840 
near the left bank of the South Esk, east of the bridge of Cortachie. The 
convolutions of the beds of fine and coarse sand, gravel, and loam, extend 
through a thickness of no less than 25 feet vertical, or from b to c, Figure 
115, the horizontal stratification being resumed very abruptly at a short 
distance, as to the right of f, g. The overlying coarse gravel and sand, a, is 
in some places horizontal, in others it exhibits cross bedding, and does not 
partake of the disturbances which the strata b, c, have undergone. The 
underlying till is exposed for a depth of about 20 feet; and we may infer from 
sections in the neighbourhood that it is considerably thicker.

In some cases I have seen fragments of stratified clays and sands, bent in like 
manner, in the middle of a great mass of till. Mr. Trimmer has suggested, in 
explanation of such phenomena, the intercalation in the glacial period of large 
irregular masses of snow or ice between layers of sand and gravel. Some of the 
cliffs near Behring's Straits, in which the remains of elephants occur, consist 
of ice mixed with mud and stones; and Middendorf describes the occurrence in 
Siberia of masses of ice, found at various depths from the surface after digging 
through drift. Whenever the intercalation of snow and ice with drift, whether 
stratified or unstratified, has taken place, the melting of the ice will cause 
such a failure of support as may give rise to flexures, and sometimes to the 
most complicated foldings. But in many cases the strata may have been bent and 
deranged by the mechanical pressure of an advancing glacier, or by the sideway 
thrust of huge islands of ice running aground against sandbanks; in which case, 
the position of the beds forming the foundation of the banks may not be at all 
disturbed by the shock.

There are indeed many signs in Scotland of the action of floating ice, as might 
have been expected where proofs of submergence in the Glacial Period are not 
wanting. Among these are the occurrence of large erratic blocks, frequently in 
clusters at or near the tops of hills or ridges, places which may have formed 
islets or shallows in the sea where floating ice would mostly ground and 
discharge its cargo on melting. Glaciers or land-ice would, on the contrary, 
chiefly discharge their cargoes at the bottom of valleys. Traces of an earlier 
and independent glaciation have also been observed in some regions where the 
striation, apparently produced by ice proceeding from the north-west, is not 
explicable by the radiation of land-ice from a central mountainous region. 
(Milne Home Transactions of the Royal Society Edinburgh volume 25 1868-9.)

GLACIATION OF WALES AND ENGLAND.

The mountains of North Wales were recognised, in 1842, by Dr. Buckland, as 
having been an independent centre of the dispersion of erratics-- great 
glaciers, long since extinct, having radiated from the Snowdonian heights in 
Carnarvonshire, through seven principal valleys towards as many points of the 
compass, carrying with them large stony fragments, and grooving the subjacent 
rocks in as many directions.

Besides this evidence of land-glaciers, Mr. Trimmer had previously, in 1831, 
detected the signs of a great submergence in Wales in the Post-pliocene period. 
He had observed stratified drift, from which he obtained about a dozen species 
of marine shells, near the summit of Moel Tryfaen, a hill 1400 feet high, on the 
south side of the Menai Straits. I had an opportunity of examining in the summer 
of 1863, together with the Reverend W.S. Symonds, a long and deep cutting made 
through this drift by the Alexandra Mining Company in search of slates. At the 
top of the hill above-mentioned we saw a stratified mass of incoherent sand and 
gravel 35 feet thick, from which no less than 54 species of mollusca, besides 
three characteristic arctic varieties-- in all 57 forms-- have been obtained by 
Mr. Darbishire. They belong without exception to species still living in British 
or more northern seas; eleven of them being exclusively arctic, four common to 
the arctic and British seas, and a large proportion of the remainder having a 
northward range, or, if found at all in the southern seas of Britain, being 
comparatively less abundant. In the lowest beds of the drift were large heavy 
boulders of far-transported rocks, glacially polished and scratched on more than 
one side. Underneath the whole we saw the edges of vertical slates exposed to 
view, which here, like the rocks in other parts of Wales, both at greater and 
less elevations, exhibit beneath the drift unequivocal marks of prolonged 
glaciation. The whole deposit has much the appearance of an accumulation in 
shallow water or on a beach, and it probably acquired its thickness during the 
gradual subsidence of the coast-- an hypothesis which would require us to 
ascribe to it a high antiquity, since we must allow time, first for its sinking, 
and then for its re-elevation.

The height reached by these fossil shells on Moel Tryfaen is no less than 1300 
feet-- a most important fact when we consider how very few instances we have on 
record beyond the limits of Wales, whether in Europe or North America, of marine 
shells having been found in glacial drift at half the height above indicated. A 
marine molluscous fauna, however, agreeing in character with that of Moel 
Tryfaen, and comprising as many species, has been found in drift at Macclesfield 
and other places in central England, sometimes reaching an elevation of 1200 
feet.

Professor Ramsay estimated the probable amount of submergence during some part 
of the glacial period at about 2300 feet; for he was unable to distinguish the 
superficial sands and gravel which reached that high elevation from the drift 
which, at Moel Tryfaen and at lower points, contains shells of living species. 
The evidence of the marine origin of the highest drift is no doubt inconclusive 
in the absence of shells, so great is the resemblance of the gravel and sand of 
a sea beach and of a river's bed, when organic remains are wanting; but, on the 
other hand, when we consider the general rarity of shells in drift which we know 
to be of marine origin, we can not suppose that, in the shelly sands of Moel 
Tryfaen, we have hit upon the exact uppermost limit of marine deposition, or, in 
other words, a precise measure of the submergence of the land beneath the sea 
since the glacial period.

We are gradually obtaining proofs of the larger part of England, north of a line 
drawn from the mouth of the Thames to the Bristol Channel, having been under the 
sea and traversed by floating ice since the commencement of the glacial epoch. 
Among recent observations illustrative of this point, I may allude to the 
discovery, by Mr. J.F. Bateman, near Blackpool, in Lancashire, fifty miles from 
the sea, and at the height of 568 feet above its level, of till containing 
rounded and angular stones and marine shells, such as Turritella communis, 
Purpura lapillus, Cardium edule, and others, among which Trophon clathratum 
(=Fusus Bamffius), though still surviving in North British seas, indicates a 
cold climate.

ERRATICS NEAR CHICHESTER.

The most southern memorials of ice-action and of a Post-pliocene fauna in Great 
Britain is on the coast of the county of Sussex, about 25 miles west of 
Brighton, and 15 south of Chichester. A marine deposit exposed between high and 
low tide occurs on both sides of the promontory called Selsea Bill, in which Mr. 
Godwin-Austen found thirty-eight species of shells, and the number has since 
been raised to seventy.

This assemblage is interesting because on the whole, while all the species are 
recent, they have a somewhat more southern aspect than those of the present 
British Channel. It is true that about forty of them range from British to high 
northern latitudes; but several of them, as, for example, Lutraria rugosa and 
Pecten polymorphous, which are abundant, are not known at present to range 
farther north than the coast of Portugal, and seem to indicate a warmer 
temperature than now prevails on the coast where we find them fossil. What 
renders this curious is the fact that the sandy loam in which they occur is 
overlaid by yellow clayey gravel with large erratic blocks which must have been 
drifted into their present position by ice when the climate had become much 
colder. These transported fragments of granite, syenite, and greenstone, as well 
as of Devonian and Silurian rocks, may have come from the coast of Normandy and 
Brittany, and are many of them of such large size that we must suppose them to 
have been drifted into their present site by coast-ice. I measured one of 
granite, at Pagham, 21 feet in circumference. In the gravel of this drift with 
erratics are a few littoral shells of living species, indicating an ancient 
coast-line.

GLACIAL FORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA.

In the western hemisphere, both in Canada and as far south as the 40th and even 
38th parallel of latitude in the United States, we meet with a repetition of all 
the peculiarities which distinguish the European boulder formation. Fragments of 
rock have travelled for great distances, especially from north to south: the 
surface of the subjacent rock is smoothed, striated, and fluted; unstratified 
mud or TILL containing boulders is associated with strata of loam, sand, and 
clay, usually devoid of fossils. Where shells are present, they are of species 
still living in northern seas, and not a few of them identical with those 
belonging to European drift, including most of those already given in Figures 
107 to 112. The fauna also of the glacial epoch in North America is less rich in 
species than that now inhabiting the adjacent sea, whether in the Gulf of St. 
Lawrence, or off the shores of Maine, or in the Bay of Massachusetts.

The extension on the American continent of the range of erratics during the 
Post-pliocene period to lower latitudes than they reached in Europe, agrees well 
with the present southward deflection of the isothermal lines, or rather the 
lines of equal winter temperature. It seems that formerly, as now, a more 
extreme climate and a more abundant supply of ice prevailed on the western side 
of the Atlantic. Another resemblance between the distribution of the drift 
fossils in Europe and North America has yet to be pointed out. In Canada and the 
United States, as in Europe, the marine shells are generally confined to very 
moderate elevations above the sea (between 100 and 700 feet), while the erratic 
blocks and the grooved and polished surfaces of rock extend to elevations of 
several thousand feet.

I have already mentioned that in Europe several quadrupeds of living, as well as 
extinct, species were common to pre-glacial and post-glacial times. In like 
manner there is reason to suppose that in North America much of the ancient 
mammalian fauna, together with nearly all the invertebrata, lived through the 
ages of intense cold. That in the United States the Mastodon giganteus was very 
abundant after the drift period, is evident from the fact that entire skeletons 
of this animal are met with in bogs and lacustrine deposits occupying hollows in 
the glacial drift. They sometimes occur in the bottom even of small ponds 
recently drained by the agriculturist for the sake of the shell-marl. In 1845 no 
less than six skeletons of the same species of Mastodon were found in Warren 
county, New Jersey, six feet below the surface, by a farmer who was digging out 
the rich mud from a small pond which he had drained. Five of these skeletons 
were lying together, and a large part of the bones crumbled to pieces as soon as 
they were exposed to the air.

It would be rash, however, to infer from such data that these quadrupeds were 
mired in MODERN times, unless we use that term strictly in a geological sense. I 
have shown that there is a fluviatile deposit in the valley of the Niagara, 
containing shells of the genera Melania, Lymnea, Planorbis, Velvata, Cyclaz, 
Unio, Helix, etc., all of recent species, from which the bones of the great 
Mastodon have been taken in a very perfect state. Yet the whole excavation of 
the ravine, for many miles below the Falls, has been slowly effected since that 
fluviatile deposit was thrown down. Other extinct animals accompany the Mastodon 
giganteus in the post-glacial deposits of the United States, and this, taken 
with the fact that so few of the mollusca, even of the commencement of the cold 
period, differ from species now living is important, as refuting the hypothesis, 
for which some have contended, that the intensity of the glacial cold 
annihilated all the species in temperate and arctic latitudes.

CONNECTION OF THE PREDOMINANCE OF LAKES WITH GLACIAL ACTION.

It was first pointed out by Professor Ramsay in 1862, that lakes are exceedingly 
numerous in those countries where erratics, striated blocks, and other signs of 
ice-action abound; and that they are comparatively rare in tropical and sub-
tropical regions. Generally in countries where the winter cold is intense, such 
as Canada, Scandinavia, and Finland, even the plains and lowlands are thickly 
strewn with innumerable ponds and small lakes, together with some others of a 
larger size; while in more temperate regions, such as Great Britain, Central and 
Southern Europe, the United States, and New Zealand, lake districts occur in all 
such mountainous tracts as can be proved to have been glaciated in times 
comparatively modern or since the geographical configuration of the surface bore 
a considerable resemblance to that now prevailing. In the same countries, beyond 
the glaciated regions, lakes abruptly cease, and in warmer and tropical 
countries are either entirely absent, or consist, as in equatorial Africa, of 
large sheets of water unaccompanied so far as we yet know by numerous smaller 
ponds and tarns.

The southern limits of the lake districts of the Northern Hemisphere are found 
at about 40 degrees N. latitude on the American continent, and about 50 degrees 
in Europe, or where the Alps intervene four degrees farther south. A large 
proportion of the smaller lakes are dammed up by barriers of unstratified drift, 
having the exact character of the moraines of glaciers, and are termed by 
geologists "morainic," but some of them are true rock-basins, and would hold 
water even if all the loose drift now resting on their margins were removed.

In a paper read before the Geological Society of London in 1862, Professor 
Ramsay maintained that the first formation of most existing lakes took place 
during the glacial epoch, and was due, not to elevation or subsidence, but to 
actual erosion of their basins by glaciers. M. Mortillet in the same year 
advanced the theory that after the Alpine lake-basins had been filled up with 
loose fluviatile deposits, they were re-excavated by the great glaciers which 
passed down the valleys at the time of the greatest cold, a doctrine which would 
attribute to moving ice almost as great a capacity of erosion as that which 
assumed that the original basins were scooped out of solid rock by glaciers. It 
is impossible to deny that the mere geographical distribution of lakes points to 
the intimate connection of their origin with the abundance of ice during a 
former excess of cold, but how far the erosive action of moving ice has been the 
sole or even the principal cause of lake-basins, is a question still open to 
discussion.

The lakes of Switzerland and the north of Italy are some of them twenty and 
thirty miles in length, and so deep that their bottoms are in some cases from 
1000 to 2000 feet beneath the level of the sea. It is admitted on all hands that 
they were once filled with ice, and as the existing glaciers polish and grind 
down, as before stated, the surface of the rocks, we are prepared to find that 
every lake-basin in countries once covered by ice should bear the marks of 
superficial glaciation, and also that the ice during its advance and retreat 
should have left behind it much transported matter as well as some evidence of 
its having enlarged the pre-existing cavity. But much more than this is demanded 
by the advocates of glacial erosion. They suggest that as the old extinct 
glaciers were several thousand feet thick, they were able in some places 
gradually to scoop out of the solid rock cavities twenty or thirty miles in 
length, and as in the case of Lago Maggiore from a thousand to two thousand six 
hundred feet below the previous level of the river-channel, and also that the 
ice had the power to remove from the cavity formed by its grinding action all 
the materials of the missing rocks. A constant supply, it is argued, of fine mud 
issues from the termination of every glacier in the stream which is produced by 
the melting of the ice, and this result of friction is exhibited both during 
winter and summer, affording evidence of the continual deepening and widening of 
the valleys through which glaciers pass. As the fine mud is carried away by a 
river from the deep pool which is formed from the base of every cataract, so it 
seems to be imagined that lake-basins may be gradually emptied of the mud formed 
by abrasion during the glacial period.

I am by no means disposed to object to this theory on the ground of the 
insufficiency of the time during which the extreme cold endured, but we must 
carefully consider whether that same time is not so vast as to make it probable 
that other forces, besides the motion of glaciers, must have cooperated in 
converting some parts of the ancient valley courses into lake-basins. They who 
have formed the most exalted conceptions of the erosive energy of moving ice do 
not deny that during the period termed "Glacial" there have been movements of 
the earth's crust sufficient to produce oscillations of level in Europe 
amounting to 1000 feet or more in both directions. M. Charpentier, indeed, 
attributed some of the principal changes of climate in Switzerland, during the 
glacial period, to a depression of the central Alps to the extent of 3000 feet, 
and Swiss geologists have long been accustomed to attribute their lake basins, 
in part, to those convulsions by which the shape and course of the valleys may 
have been modified. Our experience, in the lifetime of the present generation, 
of the changes of level witnessed in New Zealand during great earthquakes is 
entirely opposed to the notion that the movements, whether upward or downward, 
are uniform in amount or direction throughout areas of indefinite extent. On the 
contrary, the land has been permanently raised in one region several feet or 
yards, and the rise has been found gradually to die out, so as to be 
imperceptible at a distance of twenty miles, and in some areas is even exchanged 
for a simultaneous downward movement of several feet.

But, it is asked, if such inequality of movement can have contributed towards 
the production of lake basins, does it not leave unexplained the comparative 
rarity of lakes in tropical and subtropical countries. In reply to this question 
it may be observed that in our endeavour to estimate the effects of subterranean 
movements in modifying the superficial geography of a country we must remember 
that each convulsion effects a very slight change. If it interferes with the 
drainage, whether by raising the lower or sinking the higher portion of a 
hydrographical basin, the upheaval or depression will only amount to a few feet 
at a time, and there may be an interval of years or centuries before any further 
movement takes place in the same region. In the mean time an incipient lake if 
produced may be filled up with sediment, and the recently-formed barrier will 
then be cut through by the river, whereas in a country where glacial conditions 
prevail no such obliteration of the temporary lake-basin would take place; for 
however deep it became by repeated sinking of the upper or rising of the lower 
extremity, being always filled with ice it might remain, throughout the greater 
part of its extent, free from sediment or drift until the ice melted at the 
close of the glacial period.

One of the most serious objections to the exclusive origin by ice-erosion of 
wide and deep lake-basins arises from their capricious distribution, as for 
example in Piedmont, both to the eastward and westward of Turin, where great 
lakes are wanting (Antiquity of Man page 313.), although some of the largest 
extinct glaciers descending from Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa came down from the 
Alps, leaving their gigantic moraines in the low country. Here, therefore, we 
might have expected to find lakes of the first magnitude rivalling the 
contiguous Lago Maggiore in importance.

A still more striking illustration of the same absence of lakes where large 
glaciers abound is afforded by the Caucasus, a chain more than 300 miles long, 
and the loftiest peaks of which attain heights from 16,000 to 18,000 feet. This 
greatest altitude is reached by Elbruz, a mountain in latitude 43 degrees north 
three degrees south of Mont Blanc, but on the other hand 3000 feet higher. The 
present Caucasian glaciers are equal or superior in dimensions to those of 
Switzerland, and like them give rise occasionally to temporary lakes by 
obstructing the course of rivers, and causing great floods when the icy barriers 
give way. Mr. Freshfield, a careful observer, writing in 1869, says: "A total 
absence of lakes on both sides of the chains is the most marked feature. Not 
only are there no great subalpine sheets of water, like Como or Geneva, but 
mountain tarns, such as the Dauben See on the Gemmi, or the Klonthal See near 
Glarus, are equally wanting." (Travels in Central Caucasus 1869 page 452.) The 
same author states on the authority of the eminent Swiss geologist, Mons. E. 
Favre, who also explored the Caucasus in 1868, that moraines of great height and 
huge erratics of granite and other rocks "justify the assertion that the present 
glaciers of the Caucasus, like those of the Alps, are only the shadows of their 
former selves."

It seems safe to assume that the chain of lakes, of which the Albert Nyanza 
forms one in equatorial Africa, was due to causes other than glacial. Yet if we 
could imagine a glacial period to visit that region filling the lakes with ice 
and scoring the rocks which form their sides and bottoms, we should be unable to 
decide how much the capacity of the basins had been enlarged and the surface 
modified by glacial erosion. The same may be true of the Lago Maggiore and Lake 
Superior, although the present basins of both of them afford abundant 
superficial markings due to ice-action.

But to whatever combination of causes we attribute the great Alpine lakes one 
thing is clear, namely, that they are, geologically speaking, of modern origin. 
Every one must admit that the upper valley of the Rhone has been chiefly caused 
by fluviatile denudation, and it is obvious that the quantity of matter removed 
from that valley previous to the glacial period would have been amply sufficient 
to fill up with sediment the basin of the Lake of Geneva, supposing it to have 
been in existence, even if its capacity had been many times greater than it is 
now. (See Principles volume 1 page 420 10th edition 1867.)

On the whole, it appears to me, in accordance with the views of Professor 
Ramsay, M. Mortillet, Mr. Geikie, and others, that the abrading action of ice 
has formed some mountain tarns and many morainic lakes; but when it is a 
question of the origin of larger and deeper lakes, like those of Switzerland or 
the north of Italy, or inland fresh-water seas, like those of Canada, it will 
probably be found that ice has played a subordinate part in comparison with 
those movements by which changes of level in the earth's crust are gradually 
brought about.


TERTIARY OR CAINOZOIC PERIOD.


CHAPTER XIII.

PLIOCENE PERIOD.

Glacial Formations of Pliocene Age.
Bridlington Beds.
Glacial Drifts of Ireland.
Drift of Norfolk Cliffs.
Cromer Forest-bed.
Aldeby and Chillesford Beds.
Norwich Crag.
Older Pliocene Strata.
Red Crag of Suffolk.
Coprolitic Bed of Red Crag.
White or Coralline Crag.
Relative Age, Origin, and Climate of the Crag Deposits.
Antwerp Crag.
Newer Pliocene Strata of Sicily.
Newer Pliocene Strata of the Upper Val d'Arno.
Older Pliocene of Italy.
Subapennine Strata.
Older Pliocene Flora of Italy.

It will be seen in the description given in the last chapter of the Post-
pliocene formations of the British Isles that they comprise a large proportion 
of those commonly termed glacial, characterised by shells which, although 
referable to living species, usually indicate a colder climate than that now 
belonging to the latitudes where they occur fossil. But in parts of England, 
more especially in Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk, there are superficial 
formations of clay with glaciated boulders, and of sand and pebbles, containing 
occasional, though rare, patches of shells, in which the marine fauna begins to 
depart from that now inhabiting the neighbouring sea, and comprises some species 
of mollusca not yet known as living, as well as extinct varieties of others, 
entitling us to class them as Newer Pliocene, although belonging to the close of 
that period and chronologically on the verge of the later or Post-pliocene 
epoch.

BRIDLINGTON DRIFT.

To this era belongs the well-known locality of Bridlington, near the mouth of 
the Humber, in Yorkshire, where about seventy species or well-marked varieties 
of shells have been found on the coast, near the sea-level, in a bed of sand 
several feet thick resting on glacial clay with much chalk debris, and covered 
by a deposit of purple clay with glaciated boulders. More than a third of the 
species in this drift are now inhabitants of arctic regions, none of them 
extending southward to the British seas; which is the more remarkable as 
Bridlington is situated in latitude 54 degrees north. Fifteen species are 
British and Arctic, a very few belong to those species which range south of our 
British seas. Five species or well-marked varieties are not known living, 
namely, the variety of Astarte borealis (called A. Withami); A. mutabilis; the 
sinistral form of Tritonium carinatum, Cardita analis, and Tellina obliqua, 
Figure 120. Mr. Searles Wood also inclines to consider Nucula Cobboldiae, Figure 
119, now absent from the European seas and the Atlantic, as specifically 
distinct from a closely-allied shell now living in the seas surrounding 
Vancouver's Island, which some conchologists regard as a variety. Tellina 
obliqua also approaches very near to a shell now living in Japan.

GLACIAL DRIFT OF IRELAND.

Marine drift containing the last-mentioned Nucula and other glacial shells 
reaches a height of from 1000 to 1200 feet in the county of Wexford, south of 
Dublin. More than eighty species have already been obtained from this formation, 
of which two, Conovulus pyramidalis and Nassa monensis, are not known as living; 
while Turritella incrassata and Cypraea lucida no longer inhabit the British 
seas, but occur in the Mediterranean. The great elevation of these shells, and 
the still greater height to which the surface of the rocks in the mountainous 
regions of Ireland have been smoothed and striated by ice-action, has led 
geologists to the opinion that that island, like the greater part of England and 
Scotland, after having been united with the continent of Europe, from whence it 
received the plants and animals now inhabiting it, was in great part submerged. 
The conversion of this and other parts of Great Britain into an archipelago was 
followed by a re-elevation of land and a second continental period. After all 
these changes the final separation of Ireland from Great Britain took place, and 
this event has been supposed to have preceded the opening of the straits of 
Dover. (See Antiquity of Man chapter 14.)

DRIFT OF NORFOLK CLIFFS.

(FIGURE 116. Tellina balthica (T. solidula).)

There are deposits of boulder clay and till in the Norfolk cliffs principally 
made up of the waste of white chalk and flints which, in the opinion of Mr. 
Searles Wood, jun., and others, are older than the Bridlington drift, and 
contain a larger proportion of shells common to the Norwich and Red Crag, 
including a certain number of extinct forms, but also abounding in Tellina 
balthica (T. solidula, Figure 116), which is found fossil at Bridlington, and 
living in our British seas, but wanting in all the formations, even the newest, 
afterwards to be described as Crag. As the greater part of these drifts are 
barren of organic remains, their classification is at present a matter of great 
uncertainty.

They can nowhere be so advantageously studied as on the coast between 
Happisburgh and Cromer. Here we may see vertical cliffs, sometimes 300 feet and 
more in height, exposed for a distance of fifty miles, at the base of which the 
chalk with flints crops out in nearly horizontal strata. Beds of gravel and sand 
repose on this undisturbed chalk. They are often strangely contorted, and 
envelop huge masses or erratics of chalk with layers of vertical flint. I 
measured one of these fragments in 1839 at Sherringham, and found it to be 
eighty feet in its longest diameter. It has been since entirely removed by the 
waves of the sea. In the floor of the chalk beneath it the layers of flint were 
horizontal. Such erratics have evidently been moved bodily from their original 
site, probably by the same glacial action which has polished and striated some 
of the accompanying granitic and other boulders, occasionally six feet in 
diameter, which are imbedded in the drift.

CROMER FOREST-BED.

Intervening between these glacial formations and the subjacent chalk lies what 
has been called the Cromer Forest-bed. This buried forest has been traced from 
Cromer to near Kessingland, a distance of more than forty miles, being exposed 
at certain seasons between high and low water mark. It is the remains of an old 
land and estuarine deposit, containing the submerged stumps of trees standing 
erect with their roots in the ancient soil. Associated with the stumps and 
overlying them, are lignite beds with fresh-water shells of recent species, and 
laminated clay without fossils. Through the lignite and forest-bed are scattered 
cones of the Scotch and spruce firs with the seeds of recent plants, and the 
bones of at least twenty species of terrestrial mammalia. Among these are two 
species of elephant, E. meridionalis, Nesti, and E. antiquus, the former found 
in the Newer Pliocene beds of the Val d'Arno, near Florence. In the same bed 
occur Hippopotamus major, Rhinoceros etruscus, both of them also Val d'Arno 
species, many species of deer considered by Mr. Boyd Dawkins to be 
characteristic of warmer countries, and also a horse, beaver, and field-mouse. 
Half of these mammalia are extinct, and the rest still survive in Europe. The 
vegetation taken alone does not imply a temperature higher than that now 
prevailing in the British Isles. There must have been a subsidence of the forest 
to the amount of 400 or 500 feet, and a re-elevation of the same to an equal 
extent in order to allow the ancient surface of the chalk or covering of soil, 
on which the forest grew, to be first covered with several hundred feet of 
drift, and then upheaved so that the trees should reach their present level. 
Although the relative antiquity of the forest-bed to the overlying glacial till 
is clear, there is some difference of opinion as to its relation to the crag 
presently to be described.

CHILLESFORD AND ALDEBY BEDS.

(FIGURE 117. Natica helicoides, Johnson.)

It is in the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, that we obtain our most 
valuable information respecting the British Pliocene strata, whether newer or 
older. They have obtained in those counties the provincial name of "Crag," 
applied particularly to masses of shelly sand which have long been used in 
agriculture to fertilise soils deficient in calcareous matter. At Chillesford, 
between Woodbridge and Aldborough in Suffolk, and Aldeby, near Beccles, in the 
same county, there occur stratified deposits, apparently older than any of the 
preceding drifts of Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk. They are composed at 
Chillesford of yellow sands and clays, with much mica, forming horizontal beds 
about twenty feet thick. Messrs. Prestwich and Searles Wood, senior, who first 
described these beds, point out that the shells indicate on the whole a colder 
climate than the Red Crag; two-thirds of them being characteristic of high 
latitudes. Among these are Cardium Groenlandicum, Leda limatula, Tritonium 
carinatum, and Scalaria Groenlandica. In the upper part of the laminated clays a 
skeleton of a whale was found associated with casts of the characteristic 
shells, Nucula Cobboldiae and Tellina obliqua, already referred to as no longer 
inhabiting our seas, and as being extinct varieties if not species. The same 
shells occur in a perfect state in the lower part of the formation. Natica 
helicoides (Figure 117) is an example of a species formerly known only as 
fossil, but which has now been found living in our seas.

At Aldeby, where beds occur decidedly similar in mineral character as well as 
fossil remains, Messrs. Crowfoot and Dowson have now obtained sixty-six species 
of mollusca, comprising the Chillesford species and some others. Of these about 
nine-tenths are recent. They are in a perfect state, clearly indicating a cold 
climate; as two-thirds of them are now met with in arctic regions. As a rule, 
the lamellibranchiate molluscs have both valves united, and many of them, such 
as Mya arenaria, stand with the siphonal end upward, as when in a living state. 
Tellina balthica, before mentioned (Figure 116) as so characteristic of the 
glacial beds, including the drift of Bridlington, has not yet been found in 
deposits of Chillesford and Aldeby age, whether at Sudbourn, East Bavent, 
Horstead, Coltishall, Burgh, or in the highest beds overlying the Norwich Crag 
proper at Bramerton and Thorpe.

NORWICH OR FLUVIO-MARINE CRAG.

(FIGURE 118. Mastodon arvernensis, third milk molar, left side, upper jaw; 
grinding surface, natural size. Norwich Crag, Postwick, also found in Red Crag, 
see below.)

The beds above alluded to ought, perhaps, to be regarded as beds of passage 
between the glacial formations and those called from a provincial name "Crag," 
the newest member of which has been commonly called the "Norwich Crag." It is 
chiefly seen in the neighbourhood of Norwich, and consists of beds of incoherent 
sand, loam, and gravel, which are exposed to view on both banks of the Yare, as 
at Bramerton and Thorpe. As they contain a mixture of marine, land, and fresh-
water shells, with bones of fish and mammalia, it is clear that these beds have 
been accumulated at the bottom of a sea near the mouth of a river. They form 
patches rarely exceeding twenty feet in thickness, resting on white chalk. At 
their junction with the chalk there invariably intervenes a bed called the 
"Stone-bed," composed of unrolled chalk-flints, commonly of large size, mingled 
with the remains of a land fauna comprising Mastodon arvernensis, Elephas 
meridionalis, and an extinct species of deer. The mastodon, which is a species 
characteristic of the Pliocene strata of Italy and France, is the most abundant 
fossil, and one not found in the Cromer forest before mentioned. When these 
flints, probably long exposed in the atmosphere, became submerged, they were 
covered with barnacles, and the surface of the chalk became perforated by the 
Pholas crispata, each fossil shell still remaining at the bottom of its 
cylindrical cavity, now filled up with loose sand from the incumbent crag. This 
species of Pholas still exists, and drills the rocks between high and low water 
on the British coast. The name of "Fluvio-marine" has often been given to this 
formation, as no less than twenty species of land and fresh-water shells have 
been found in it. They are all of living species; at least only one univalve, 
Paludina lenta, has any, and that a very doubtful, claim to be regarded as 
extinct.

(FIGURE 119. Nucula Cobboldiae.)

(FIGURE 120. Tellina obliqua.)

Of the marine shells, 124 in number, about 18 per cent are extinct, according to 
the latest estimate given me by Mr. Searles Wood; but, for reasons presently to 
be mentioned, this percentage must be only regarded as provisional. It must also 
be borne in mind that the proportion of recent shells would be augmented if the 
uppermost beds at Bramerton, near Norwich, which belong to the most modern or 
Chillesford division of the Crag, had been included, as they were formerly, by 
Mr. Woodward and myself, in the Norwich series. Arctic shells, which formed so 
large a proportion in the Chillesford and Aldeby beds, are more rare in the 
Norwich Crag, though many northern species-- such as Rhynchonella psittacea, 
Scalaria Groenlandica, Astarte borealis, Panopaea Norvegia, and others-- still 
occur. The Nucula Cobboldiae and Tellina obliqua, Figures 119 and 120, before 
mentioned, are frequent in these beds, as are also Littorina littorea, Cardium 
edule, and Turritella communis, of our seas, proving the littoral origin of the 
beds.

OLDER PLIOCENE STRATA.

RED CRAG.

(FIGURE 121. Section through (left) sea, Red Crag, London Clay and Chalk 
(right).)

Among the English Pliocene beds the next in antiquity is the Red Crag, which 
often rests immediately on the London Clay, as in the county of Essex, 
illustrated in Figure 121.

It is chiefly in the county of Suffolk that it is found, rarely exceeding twenty 
feet in thickness, and sometimes overlying another Pliocene deposit, the 
Coralline Crag, to be mentioned in the sequel. It has yielded-- exclusive of 25 
species regarded by Mr. Wood as derivative-- 256 species of mollusca, of which 
65, or 25 per cent, are extinct. Thus, apart from its order of superposition, 
its greater antiquity than the Norwich and glacial beds, already described, is 
proved by the greater departure from the fauna of our seas. It may also be 
observed that in most of the deposits of this Red Crag, the northern forms of 
the Norwich Crag, and of such glacial formations as Bridlington, are less 
numerous, while those having a more southern aspect begin to make their 
appearance. Both the quartzose sand, of which it chiefly consists, and the 
included shells, are most commonly distinguished by a deep ferruginous or 
ochreous colour, whence its name. The shells are often rolled, sometimes 
comminuted, and the beds have much the appearance of having been shifting sand-
banks, like those now forming on the Dogger-bank, in the sea, sixty miles east 
of the coast of Northumberland. Cross stratification is almost always present, 
the planes of the strata being sometimes directed towards one point of the 
compass, sometimes to the opposite, in beds immediately overlying. That such a 
structure is not deceptive or due to any subsequent concretionary rearrangement 
of particles, or to mere bands of colour produced by the iron, is proved by each 
bed being made up of flat pieces of shell which lie parallel to the planes of 
the smaller strata.

(FIGURE 122. Purpura tetragona, Sowerby; natural size.)

(FIGURE 123. Voluta Lamberti, Sowerby. Variety characteristic of Suffolk Crag. 
Pliocene.)

(FIGURE 124. Voluta Lamberti, young individual, Cor. and Red Crag.)

It has long been suspected that the different patches of Red Crag are not all of 
the same age, although their chronological relation can not be decided by 
superposition. Separate masses are characterised by shells specifically distinct 
or greatly varying in relative abundance, in a manner implying that the deposits 
containing them were separated by intervals of time. At Butley, Tunstall, 
Sudbourn, and in the Red Crag of Chillesford, the mollusca appear to assume 
their most modern aspect when the climate was colder than when the earliest 
deposits of the same period were formed. At Butley, Nucula Cobboldiae, so common 
in the Norwich and certain glacial beds, is found, and Purpura tetragona (Figure 
122) is very abundant. On the other hand, at Walton-on-the-Naze, in Essex, we 
seem to have an exhibition of the oldest phase of the Red Crag; and a warmer 
climate seems indicated, not only by the absence of many northern forms, but 
also by the abundance of some now living in the British seas and the 
Mediterranean. Voluta Lamberti (see Figures 123 and 124), an extinct form, which 
seems to have flourished chiefly in the antecedent Coralline Crag period, is 
still represented here by individuals of every age.

(FIGURE 125. Trophon antiquum, Muller. (Fusus contrarius) half natural size.)

The reversed whelk (Figure 125) is common at Walton, where the dextral form of 
that shell is unknown. Here also we find most frequently specimens of 
lamellibranchiate molluscs, with both the valves united, showing that they 
belonged to this sea of the Upper Crag, and were not washed in from an older 
bed, such as the Coralline, in which case the ligament would not have held 
together the valves in strata so often showing signs of the boisterous action of 
the waves. No less than forty species of lamellibranchiate molluscs, with double 
valves, have been collected by Mr. Bell from the various localities of the Red 
Crag.

At and near the base of the Red Crag is a loose bed of brown nodules, first 
noticed by Professor Henslow as containing a large percentage of earthy 
phosphates. This bed of coprolites (as it is called, because they were 
originally supposed to be the faeces of animals) does not always occur at one 
level, but is generally in largest quantity at the junction of the Crag and the 
underlying formation. In thickness it usually varies from six to eighteen 
inches, and in some rare cases amounts to many feet. It has been much used in 
agriculture for manure, as not only the nodules, but many of the separate bones 
associated with them, are largely impregnated with phosphate of lime, of which 
there is sometimes as much as sixty per cent. They are not unfrequently covered 
with barnacles, showing that they were not formed as concretions in the stratum 
where they now lie buried, but had been previously consolidated. The phosphatic 
nodules often collect fossil crabs and fishes from the London Clay, together 
with the teeth of gigantic sharks. In the same bed have been found many ear-
bones of whales, and the teeth of Mastodon arvernensis, Rhinoceros 
Schleiermacheri, Tapirus priscus, and Hipparion (a quadruped of the horse 
family), and antlers of a stag, Cervus anoceros. Organic remains also of the 
older chalk and Lias are met with, showing how great was the denudation of 
previous formations during the Pliocene period. As the older White Crag, 
presently to be mentioned, contains similar phosphatic nodules near its base, 
those of the Red Crag may be partly derived from this source.

WHITE OR CORALLINE CRAG.

The lower or Coralline Crag is of very limited extent, ranging over an area 
about twenty miles in length, and three or four in breadth, between the rivers 
Stour and Alde, in Suffolk. It is generally calcareous and marly-- often a mass 
of comminuted shells, and the remains of bryozoa (or polyzoa), passing 
occasionally into a soft building-stone. (Ehrenberg proposed in 1831 the term 
Bryozoum, or "Moss-animal," for the molluscous or ascidian form of polyp, 
characterised by having two openings to the digestive sack, as in Eschara, 
Flustra, Retepora, and other zoophytes popularly included in the corals, but now 
classed by naturalists as mollusca. The term Polyzoum, synonymous with Bryozoum, 
was, it seems, proposed in 1830, or the year before, by Mr. J.O. Thompson.) At 
Sudbourn and Gedgrave, near Orford, this building-stone has been largely 
quarried. At some places in the neighbourhood the softer mass is divided by thin 
flags of hard limestone, and bryozoa placed in the upright position in which 
they grew. From the abundance of these coralloid mollusca the lowest or White 
Crag obtained its popular name, but true corals, as now defined, or zoantharia, 
are very rare in this formation.

The Coralline Crag rarely, if ever, attains a thickness of thirty feet in any 
one section. Mr. Prestwich imagines that if the beds found at different 
localities were united in the probable order of their succession, they might 
exceed eighty feet in thickness, but Mr. Searles Wood does not believe in the 
possibility of establishing such a chronological succession by aid of the 
organic remains, and questions whether proof could be obtained of more than 
forty feet. I was unable to come to any satisfactory opinion on the subject, 
although at Orford, especially at Gedgrave, in the neighbourhood of that place, 
I saw many sections in pits, where this crag is cut through. These pits are so 
unconnected, and of such limited extent, that no continuous section of any 
length can be obtained, so that speculations as to the thickness of the whole 
deposit must be very vague. At the base of the formation at Sutton a bed of 
phosphatic nodules, very similar to that before alluded to in the Red Crag, with 
remains of mammalia, has been met with.

(FIGURE 126. Section near Woodbridge, in Suffolk.
Through Sutton (left), Shottisham Creek, Ramsholt (right) and R. Deben.
a. Red Crag.
b. Coralline Crag.
c. London Clay.)

Whenever the Red and Coralline Crag occur in the same district, the Red Crag 
lies uppermost; and in some cases, as in the section represented in Figure 126, 
which I had an opportunity of seeing exposed to view in 1839, it is clear that 
the older deposit, or Coralline Crag, b, had suffered denudation, before the 
newer formation, a, was thrown down upon it. At D there was not only seen a 
distinct cliff, eight or ten feet high, of Coralline Crag, running in a 
direction N.E. and S.W., against which the Red Crag abuts with its horizontal 
layers, but this cliff occasionally overhangs. The rock composing it is drilled 
everywhere by Pholades, the holes which they perforated having been afterwards 
filled with sand, and covered over when the newer beds were thrown down. The 
older formation is shown by its fossils to have accumulated in a deeper sea, and 
contains none of those littoral forms such as the limpet, Patella, found in the 
Red Crag. So great an amount of denudation could scarcely take place, in such 
incoherent materials, without some of the fossils of the inferior beds becoming 
mixed up with the overlying crag, so that considerable difficulty must be 
occasionally experienced by the palaeontologist in deciding which species belong 
severally to each group.

(FIGURE 127. Fascicularia aurantium, Milne Edwards. Family, Tubuliporidae, of 
same author. Bryozoan of extinct genus, from the inferior or Coralline Crag, 
Suffolk.
a. Exterior.
b. Vertical section of interior.
c. Portion of exterior magnified.
d. Portion of interior magnified, showing that it is made up of long, thin, 
straight tubes, united in conical bundles.)

(FIGURE 128. Astarte omalii, laj.; species common to Upper and lower crag.)

Mr. Searles Wood estimates the total number of marine testaceous mollusca of the 
Coralline Crag at 350, of which 110 are not known as living, being in the 
proportion of thirty-one per cent extinct. No less than 130 species of bryozoa 
have been found in the Coralline Crag, and some belong to genera unknown in the 
living creation, and of a very peculiar structure; as, for example, that 
represented in Figure 127, which is one of several species having a globular 
form. Among the testacea the genus Astarte (see Figure 128) is largely 
represented, no less than fourteen species being known, and many of these being 
rich in individuals. There is an absence of genera peculiar to hot climates, 
such as Conus, Oliva, Fasciolaria, Crassatella, and others. The absence also of 
large cowries (Cyprea), those found belonging exclusively to the section Trivia, 
is remarkable. The large volute, called Voluta Lamberti (Figure 123), may seem 
an exception; but it differs in form from the volutes of the torrid zone, and, 
like the living Voluta Magellanica, must have been fitted for an extra-tropical 
climate.

(FIGURE 129. Lingula Dumortieri, Nyst; Suffolk and Antwerp Crag.)

(FIGURE 130. Pyrula reticulata, Lam.; Coralline Crag, Ramsholt.)

(FIGURE 131. Temnechinus excavatus, Forbes; Temnopleurus excavatus, Wood; 
Coralline Crag, Ramsholt.)

The occurrence of a species of Lingula at Sutton (see Figure 129) is worthy of 
remark, as these Brachiopoda seem now confined to more equatorial latitudes; and 
the same may be said still more decidedly of a species of Pyrula, supposed by 
Mr. Wood to be identical with P. reticulata (Figure 130), now living in the 
Indian Ocean. A genus also of echinoderms, called by Professor Forbes 
Temnechinus (Figure 131), occurs in the Red and Coralline Crag of Suffolk, and 
until lately was unknown in a living state, but it has been brought to light as 
an existing form by the deep-sea dredgings, both of the United States survey, 
off Florida, at a depth of from 180 to 480 feet, and more recently (1869), in 
the British seas, during the explorations of the "Porcupine."

CLIMATE OF THE CRAG DEPOSITS.

One of the most interesting conclusions deduced from a careful comparison of the 
shells of the British Pliocene strata and the fauna of our present seas has been 
pointed out by Professor E. Forbes. It appears that, during the Glacial period, 
a period intermediate, as we have seen, between that of the Crag and our own 
time, many shells, previously established in the temperate zone, retreated 
southward to avoid an uncongenial climate, and they have been found fossil in 
the Newer Pliocene strata of Sicily, Southern Italy, and the Grecian 
Archipelago, where they may have enjoyed, during the era of floating icebergs, a 
climate resembling that now prevailing in higher European latitudes. (E. Forbes 
Mem. Geological Survey of Great Britain volume 1 page 386.) The Professor gave a 
list of fifty shells which inhabited the British seas while the Coralline and 
Red Crag were forming, and which, though now living in our seas, were wanting, 
as far as was then known, in the glacial deposits. Some few of these species 
have subsequently been found in the glacial drift, but the general conclusion of 
Forbes remains unshaken.

The transport of blocks by ice, when the Red Crag was being deposited, appears 
to me evident from the large size of some huge, irregular, quite unrounded chalk 
flints, retaining their white coating, and 2 feet long by 18 inches broad, in 
beds worked for phosphatic nodules at Foxhall, four miles south-east of Ipswich. 
These must have been tranquilly drifted to the spot by floating ice. Mr. 
Prestwich also mentions the occurrence of a large block of porphyry in the base 
of the Coralline Crag at Sutton, which would imply that the ice-action had begun 
in our seas even in this older period. The cold seems to have gone on increasing 
from the time of the Coralline to that of the Norwich Crag, and became more and 
more severe, not perhaps without some oscillations of temperature, until it 
reached its maximum in what has been called the Glacial period, or at the close 
of the Newer Pliocene, and in the Post-pliocene periods.

RELATION OF THE FAUNA OF THE CRAG TO THAT OF THE RECENT SEAS.

By far the greater number of the recent marine species occurring in the several 
Crag formations are still inhabitants of the British seas; but even these differ 
considerably in their relative abundance, some of the commonest of the Crag 
shells being now extremely scarce-- as, for example, Buccinum Dalei-- while 
others, rarely met with in a fossil state, are now very common, as Murex 
erinaceus and Cardium echinatum. Some of the species also, the identity of which 
with the living would not be disputed by any conchologist, are nevertheless 
distinguishable as varieties, whether by slight deviations in form or a 
difference in average dimensions. Since Mr. Searles Wood first described the 
marine testacea of the Crags, the additions made to that fossil fauna have not 
been considerable, whereas we have made in the same period immense progress in 
our knowledge of the living testacea of the British and arctic seas, and of the 
Mediterranean. By this means the naturalist has been enabled to identify with 
existing species many forms previously supposed to be extinct.

In the forthcoming supplement to the invaluable monograph communicated by Mr. 
Wood to the Palaeontographical Society, in which he has completed his figures 
and descriptions of the British crag shells of every age, list will be found of 
all the fossil shells, of which a summary is given in the table below.

TABLE OF NUMBER OF KNOWN SPECIES OF MARINE TESTACEA IN THE CRAG.

COLUMN 1: KNOWN SPECIES.
COLUMN 2: TOTAL NUMBER OF KNOWN SPECIES.
COLUMN 3: NUMBER OF SPECIES NOT KNOWN AS LIVING.

CHILLESFORD AND ALDEBY BEDS:
Bivalves: 61 : 4.
Univalves: 33 : 5.
Brachiopods: 0 : 0.
PERCENTAGE OF SHELLS NOT KNOWN AS LIVING : 9.5.

NORWICH OR FLUVIO-MARINE CRAG:
Bivalves: 61 : 10.
Univalves: 64 : 12.
Brachiopods: 1 : 0.
PERCENTAGE OF SHELLS NOT KNOWN AS LIVING : 17.5.

RED CRAG (Exclusive of many derivative shells):
Bivalves: 128 : 31.
Univalves: 127 : 33.
Brachiopods: 1 : 1.
PERCENTAGE OF SHELLS NOT KNOWN AS LIVING : 25.0.

CORALLINE CRAG:
Bivalves: 161 : 47.
Univalves: 184 : 60
Brachiopods: 5 : 3
PERCENTAGE OF SHELLS NOT KNOWN AS LIVING : 31.5

To begin with the uppermost or Chillesford beds, it will be seen that about 9 
per cent only are extinct, or not known as living, whereas in the Norwich, which 
succeeds in the descending order, seventeen in a hundred are extinct. Formerly, 
when the Norwich or Fluvio-marine Crag was spoken of, both these formations were 
included under the same head, for both at Bramerton and Thorpe, the chief 
localities where the Norwich Crag was studied, an overlying deposit occurs 
referable to the Chillesford age. If now the two were fused together as of old, 
their shells would, according to Mr. Wood, yield a percentage of fifteen in a 
hundred of species extinct or not known as living.

To come next to the Red Crag, the reader will observe that a percentage of 25 is 
given of shells unknown as living, and this increases to 31 in the antecedent 
Coralline Crag. But the gap between these two stages of our Pliocene deposits is 
really wider than these numbers would indicate, for several reasons. In the 
first place, the Coralline Crag is more strictly the product of a single period, 
the Red Crag, as we have seen, consisting of separate and independent patches, 
slightly varying in age, of which the newest is probably not much anterior to 
the Norwich Crag. Secondly, there was a great change of conditions, both as to 
the depth of the sea and climate, between the periods of the Coralline and Red 
Crag, causing the fauna in each to differ far more widely than would appear from 
the above numerical results.

The value of the analysis given in the above table of the shells of the Red and 
Coralline Crags is in no small degree enhanced by the fact that they were all 
either collected by Mr. Wood himself, or obtained by him direct from their 
discoverers, so that he was enabled in each case to test their authenticity, and 
as far as possible to avoid those errors which arise from confounding together 
shells belonging to the sea of a newer deposit, and those washed into it from a 
formation of older date. The danger of this confusion may be conceived when we 
remember that the number of species rejected from the Red Crag as derivative by 
Mr. Wood is no less than 25. Some geologists have held that on the same grounds 
it is necessary to exclude as spurious some of the species found in the Norwich 
Crag proper; but Mr. Wood does not entertain this view, believing that the 
spurious shells which have sometimes found their way into the lists of this crag 
have been introduced by want of care from strata of Red Crag.

There can be no doubt, on the other hand, that conchologists have occasionally 
rejected from the Red and Norwich Crags, as derivative, shells which really 
belonged to the seas of those periods, because they were extinct or unknown as 
living, which in their eyes afforded sufficient ground for suspecting them to be 
intruders. The derivative origin of a species may sometimes be indicated by the 
extreme scarcity of the individuals, their colour, and worn condition; whereas 
an opposite conclusion may be arrived at by the integrity of the shells, 
especially when they are of delicate and tender structure, or their abundance, 
and, in the case of the lamellibranchiata, by their being held together by the 
ligament, which often happens when the shells have been so broken that little 
more than the hinges of the two valves are preserved. As to the univalves, I 
have seen from a pit of Red Crag, near Woodbridge, a large individual of the 
extinct Voluta Lamberti, seven inches in length, of which the lip, then perfect, 
had in former stages of its growth been frequently broken, and as often 
repaired. It had evidently lived in the sea of the Red Crag, where it had been 
exposed to rough usage, and sustained injuries like those which the reversed 
whelk, Trophon antiquum, so characteristic of the same formation, often 
exhibits. Additional proofs, however, have lately been obtained by Mr. Searles 
Wood that this shell had not died out in the era of the Red Crag by the 
discovery of the same fossil near Southwold, in beds of the later Norwich Crag.

ANTWERP CRAG.

Strata of the same age as the Red and Coralline Crag of Suffolk have been long 
known in the country round Antwerp, and on the banks of the Scheldt, below that 
city; and the lowest division, or Black Crag, there found, is shown by the 
shells to be somewhat more ancient than any of our British series, and probably 
forms the first links of a downward passage from the strata of the Pliocene to 
those of the Upper Miocene period.

NEWER PLIOCENE STRATA OF SICILY.

(FIGURE 132. Murex vaginatus, Phil.)

At several points north of Catania, on the eastern sea-coast of Sicily-- as at 
Aci-Castello, for example, Trezza, and Nizzeti-- marine strata, associated with 
volcanic tuffs and basaltic lavas, are seen, which belong to a period when the 
first igneous eruptions of Mount Etna were taking place in a shallow bay of the 
Mediterranean. They contain numerous fossil shells, and out of 142 species that 
have been collected all but eleven are identical with species now living. Some 
few of these eleven shells may possibly still linger in the depths of the 
Mediterranean, like Murex vaginatus, see Figure 132. The last-mentioned shell 
had already become rare when the associated marine and volcanic strata above 
alluded to were formed. On the whole, the modern character of the testaceous 
fauna under consideration is expressed not only by the small proportion of 
extinct species, but by the relative number of individuals by which most of the 
other species are represented, for the proportion agrees with that observed in 
the present fauna of the Mediterranean. The rarity of individuals in the extinct 
species is such as to imply that they were already on the point of dying out, 
having flourished chiefly in the earlier Pliocene times, when the Subapennine 
strata were in progress.

Yet since the accumulation of these Newer Pliocene sands and clays, the whole 
cone of Etna, 11,000 feet in height and about 90 miles in circumference at its 
base, has been slowly built up; an operation requiring many tens of thousands of 
years for its accomplishment, and to estimate the magnitude of which it is 
necessary to study in detail the internal structure of the mountain, and to see 
the proofs of its double axis, or the evidence of the lavas of the present great 
centre of eruption having gradually overwhelmed and enveloped a more ancient 
cone, situated 3 1/2 miles to the east of the present one. (See a Memoir on the 
Lavas and Mode of Origin of Mount Etna by the Author in Philosophical 
Transactions 1858.)

It appears that while Etna was increasing in bulk by a series of eruptions, its 
whole mass, comprising the foundations of subaqueous origin above alluded to, 
was undergoing a slow upheaval, by which those marine strata were raised to the 
height of 1200 feet above the sea, as seen at Catera, and perhaps to greater 
heights, for we can not trace their extension westward, owing to the dense and 
continuous covering of modern lava under which they are buried. During the 
gradual rise of these Newer Pliocene formations (consisting of clays, sands, and 
basalts) other strata of Post-pliocene date, marine as well as fluviatile, 
accumulated round the base of the mountain, and these, in their turn, partook of 
the upward movement, so that several inland cliffs and terraces at low levels, 
due partly to the action of the sea and partly to the river Simeto, originated 
in succession. Fossil remains of the elephant, and other extinct quadrupeds, 
have been found in these Post-Pliocene strata, associated with recent shells.

There is probably no part of Europe where the Newer Pliocene formations enter so 
largely into the structure of the earth's crust, or rise to such heights above 
the level of the sea, as Sicily. They cover nearly half the island, and near its 
centre, at Castrogiovanni, reach an elevation of 3000 feet. They consist 
principally of two divisions, the upper calcareous and the lower argillaceous, 
both of which may be seen at Syracuse, Girgenti, and Castrogiovanni. According 
to Philippi, to whom we are indebted for the best account of the tertiary shells 
of this island, thirty-five species out of one hundred and twenty-four obtained 
from the beds in central Sicily are extinct.

A geologist, accustomed to see nearly all the Newer Pliocene formations in the 
north of Europe occupying low grounds and very incoherent in texture, is 
naturally surprised to behold formations of the same age so solid and stony, of 
such thickness, and attaining so great an elevation above the level of the sea. 
The upper or calcareous member of this group in Sicily consists in some places 
of a yellowish-white stone, like the Calcaire Grossier of Paris; in others, of a 
rock nearly as compact as marble. Its aggregate thickness amounts sometimes to 
700 or 800 feet. It usually occurs in regular horizontal beds, and is 
occasionally intersected by deep valleys, such as those of Sortino and 
Pentalica, in which are numerous caverns. The fossils are in every stage of 
preservation, from shells retaining portions of their animal matter and colour 
to others which are mere casts. The limestone passes downward into a sandstone 
and conglomerate, below which is clay and blue marl, from which perfect shells 
and corals may be disengaged. The clay sometimes alternates with yellow sand.

South of the plain of Catania is a region in which the tertiary beds are 
intermixed with volcanic matter, which has been for the most part the product of 
submarine eruptions. It appears that, while the clay, sand, and yellow limestone 
before mentioned were in course of deposition at the bottom of the sea, 
volcanoes burst out beneath the waters, like that of Graham Island, in 1831, and 
these explosions recurred again and again at distant intervals of time. Volcanic 
ashes and sand were showered down and spread by the waves and currents so as to 
form strata of tuff, which are found intercalated between beds of limestone and 
clay containing marine shells, the thickness of the whole mass exceeding 2000 
feet. The fissures through which the lava rose may be seen in many places, 
forming what are called DIKES.

(FIGURE 133. Pecten jacobaeus; half natural size.)

No shell is more conspicuous in these Sicilian strata than the great scallop, 
Pecten jacobaeus (Figure 133), now so common in the neighbouring seas. The more 
we reflect on the preponderating number of this and other recent shells, the 
more we are surprised at the great thickness, solidity, and height above the sea 
of the rocky masses in which they are entombed, and the vast amount of 
geographical change which has taken place since their origin. It must be 
remembered that, before they began to emerge, the uppermost strata of the whole 
must have been deposited under water. In order, therefore, to form a just 
conception of their antiquity, we must first examine singly the innumerable 
minute parts of which the whole is made up, the successive beds of shells, 
corals, volcanic ashes, conglomerates, and sheets of lava; and we must 
afterwards contemplate the time required for the gradual upheaval of the rocks, 
and the excavation of the valleys. The historical period seems scarcely to form 
an appreciable unit in this computation, for we find ancient Greek temples, like 
those of Girgenti (Agrigentum), built of the modern limestone of which we are 
speaking, and resting on a hill composed of the same; the site having remained 
to all appearances unaltered since the Greeks first colonised the island.

It follows, from the modern geological date of these rocks, that the fauna and 
flora of a large part of Sicily are of higher antiquity than the country itself. 
The greater part of the island has been raised above the sea since the epoch of 
existing species, and the animals and plants now inhabiting it must have 
migrated from adjacent countries, with whose productions the species are now 
identical. The average duration of species would seem to be so great that they 
are destined to outlive many important changes in the configuration of the 
earth's surface, and hence the necessity for those innumerable contrivances by 
which they are enabled to extend their range to new lands as they are formed, 
and to escape from those which sink beneath the sea.

NEWER PLIOCENE STRATA OF THE UPPER VAL D'ARNO.

When we ascend the Arno for about ten miles above Florence, we arrive at a deep 
narrow valley called the Upper Val d'Arno, which appears once to have been a 
lake, at a time when the valley below Florence was an arm of the sea. The 
horizontal lacustrine strata of this upper basin are twelve miles long and two 
broad. The depression which they fill has been excavated out of Eocene and 
Cretaceous rocks, which form everywhere the sides of the valley in highly 
inclined stratification. The thickness of the more modern and unconformable beds 
is about 750 feet, of which the upper 200 feet consist of Newer Pliocene strata, 
while the lower are Older Pliocene. The newer series are made up of sands and a 
conglomerate called "sansino." Among the imbedded fossil mammalia are Mastodon 
arvernensis, Elephas meridionalis, Rhinoceros etruscus, Hippopotamus major, and 
remains of the genera bear, hyaena, and felis, nearly all of which occur in the 
Cromer forest-bed (see Chapter 13).

In the same upper strata are found, according to M. Gaudin, the leaves and cones 
of Glyptostrobus europaeus, a plant closely allied to G. heterophyllus, now 
inhabiting the north of China and Japan. This conifer had a wide range in time, 
having been traced back to the Lower Miocene strata of Switzerland, and being 
common at Oeningen in the Upper Miocene, as we shall see in the sequel (Chapter 
14.)

OLDER PLIOCENE OF ITALY.-- SUBAPENNINE STRATA.

The Apennines, it is well-known, are composed chiefly of Secondary or Mesozoic 
rocks, forming a chain which branches off from the Ligurian Alps and passes down 
the middle of the Italian peninsula. At the foot of these mountains, on the side 
both of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, are found a series of tertiary 
strata, which form, for the most part, a line of low hills occupying the space 
between the older chain and the sea. Brocchi was the first Italian geologist who 
described this newer group in detail, giving it the name of the Subapennine. 
Though chiefly composed of Older Pliocene strata, it belongs, nevertheless, in 
part, both to older and newer members of the tertiary series. The strata, for 
example, of the Superga, near Turin, are Miocene; those of Asti and Parma Older 
Pliocene, as is the blue marl of Sienna; while the shells of the incumbent 
yellow sand of the same territory approach more nearly to the recent fauna of 
the Mediterranean, and may be Newer Pliocene.

We have seen that most of the fossil shells of the Older Pliocene strata of 
Suffolk which are of recent species are identical with testacea now living in 
British seas, yet some of them belong to Mediterranean species, and a few even 
of the genera are those of warmer climates. We might therefore expect, in 
studying the fossils of corresponding age in countries bordering the 
Mediterranean, to find among them some species and genera of warmer latitudes. 
Accordingly, in the marls belonging to this period at Asti, Parma, Sienna, and 
parts of the Tuscan and Roman territories, we observe the genera Conus, Cypraea, 
Strombus, Pyrula, Mitra, Fasciolaria, Sigaretus, Delphinula, Ancillaria, Oliva, 
Terebellum, Terebra, Perna, Plicatula, and Corbis, some characteristic of 
tropical seas, others represented by species more numerous or of larger size 
than those now proper to the Mediterranean.

OLDER PLIOCENE FLORA OF ITALY.

(FIGURE 134. Oreodaphne Heerii.
Leaf half natural size. (Feuilles fossiles de la Toscane.))

I have already alluded to the Newer Pliocene deposits of the Upper Val d'Arno 
above Florence, and stated that below those sands and conglomerates, containing 
the remains of the Elephas meridionalis and other associated quadrupeds, lie an 
older horizontal and conformable series of beds, which may be classed as Older 
Pliocene. They consist of blue clays with some subordinate layers of lignite, 
and exhibit a richer flora than the overlying Newer Pliocene beds, and one 
receding farther from the existing vegetation of Europe. They also comprise more 
species common to the antecedent Miocene period. Among the genera of flowering 
plants, M. Gaudin enumerates pine, oak, evergreen oak, plum, plane, alder, elm, 
fig, laurel, maple, walnut, birch, buckthorn, hickory, sumach, sarsaparilla, 
sassafras, cinnamon, Glyptostrobus, Taxodium, Sequoia, Persea, Oreodaphne 
(Figure 134), Cassia, and Psoralea, and some others. This assemblage of plants 
indicates a warm climate, but not so subtropical an one as that of the Upper 
Miocene period, which will presently be considered.

(FIGURE 135. Liquidambar europaeum, var. trilobatum, A. Br. (sometimes four-
lobed, and more commonly five-lobed).
a. Leaf, half natural size.
b. Part of same, natural size.
c. Fruit, natural size.
d. Seed, natural size. Oeningen.)

M. Gaudin, jointly with the Marquis Strozzi, has thrown much light on the botany 
of beds of the same age in another part of Tuscany, at a place called Montajone, 
between the rivers Elsa and Evola, where, among other plants, is found the 
Oreodaphne Heerii, Gaud. (See Figure 134), which is probably only a variety of 
Oreodaphne foetens, or the laurel called the Til in Madeira, where, as in the 
Canaries, it constitutes a large portion of the native woods, but can not now 
endure the climate of Europe. In the fossil specimens the same glands or 
protuberances are preserved (see Figure 134) as those which are seen in the 
axils of the primary veins of the leaves in the recent Til. (Contributions a la 
Flore fossile Italienne. Gaudin and Strozzi. Plate 11 Figure 3. Gaudin page 22.) 
Another plant also indicating a warmer climate is the Liquidambar europaeum, 
Brong. (see Figure 135), a species nearly allied to L. styracifluum, L., which 
flourishes in most places in the Southern States of North America, on the 
borders of the Gulf of Mexico.


CHAPTER XIV.

MIOCENE PERIOD.-- UPPER MIOCENE.

Upper Miocene Strata of France.-- faluns of Touraine.
Tropical Climate implied by Testacea.
Proportion of recent Species of Shells.
faluns more ancient than the Suffolk Crag.
Upper Miocene of Bordeaux and the South of France.
Upper Miocene of Oeningen, in Switzerland.
Plants of the Upper Fresh-water Molasse.
Fossil Fruit and Flowers as well as Leaves.
Insects of the Upper Molasse.
Middle or Marine Molasse of Switzerland.
Upper Miocene Beds of the Bolderberg, in Belgium.
Vienna Basin.
Upper Miocene of Italy and Greece.
Upper Miocene of India; Siwalik Hills.
Older Pliocene and Miocene of the United States.

UPPER MIOCENE STRATA OF FRANCE.-- FALUNS OF TOURAINE.

The strata which we meet with next in the descending order are those called by 
many geologists "Middle Tertiary," for which in 1833 I proposed the name of 
Miocene, selecting the "faluns" of the valley of the Loire, in France, as my 
example or type. I shall now call these falunian deposits Upper Miocene, to 
distinguish them from others to which the name of Lower Miocene will be given.

No British strata have a distinct claim to be regarded as Upper Miocene, and as 
the Lower Miocene are also but feebly represented in the British Isles, we must 
refer to foreign examples in illustration of this important period in the 
earth's history. The term "faluns" is given provincially by French 
agriculturists to shelly sand and marl spread over the land in Touraine, just as 
similar shelly deposits were formerly much used in Suffolk to fertilise the 
soil, before the coprolitic or phosphatic nodules came into use. Isolated masses 
of such faluns occur from near the mouth of the Loire, in the neighbourhood of 
Nantes, to as far inland as a district south of Tours. They are also found at 
Pontlevoy, on the Cher, about seventy miles above the junction of that river 
with the Loire, and thirty miles south-east of Tours. Deposits of the same age 
also appear under new mineral conditions near the towns of Dinan and Rennes, in 
Brittany. I have visited all the localities above enumerated, and found the beds 
on the Loire to consist principally of sand and marl, in which are shells and 
corals, some entire, some rolled, and others in minute fragments. In certain 
districts, as at Doue, in the Department of Maine and Loire, ten miles south-
west of Saumur, they form a soft building-stone, chiefly composed of an 
aggregate of broken shells, bryozoa, corals, and echinoderms, united by a 
calcareous cement; the whole mass being very like the Coralline Crag near 
Aldborough, and Sudbourn in Suffolk. The scattered patches of faluns are of 
slight thickness, rarely exceeding fifty feet; and between the district called 
Sologne and the sea they repose on a great variety of older rocks; being seen to 
rest successively upon gneiss, clay-slate, various secondary formations, 
including the chalk; and, lastly, upon the upper fresh-water limestone of the 
Parisian tertiary series, which, as before mentioned (Chapter 9), stretches 
continuously from the basin of the Seine to that of the Loire.

(FIGURE 136. Dinotherium giganteum, Kaup.)

At some points, as at Louans, south of Tours, the shells are stained of a 
ferruginous colour, not unlike that of the Red Crag of Suffolk. The species are, 
for the most part, marine, but a few of them belong to land and fluviatile 
genera. Among the former, Helix turonensis (Figure 38, Chapter 3) is the most 
abundant. Remains of terrestrial quadrupeds are here and there intermixed, 
belonging to the genera Dinotherium (Figure 136), Mastodon, Rhinoceros, 
Hippopotamus, Chaeropotamus, Dichobune, Deer, and others, and these are 
accompanied by cetacea, such as the Lamantin, Morse, Sea-calf, and Dolphin, all 
of extinct species.

The fossil testacea of the faluns of the Loire imply, according to the late 
Edward Forbes, that the beds were formed partly on the shore itself at the level 
of low water, and partly at very moderate depths, not exceeding ten fathoms 
below that level. The molluscan fauna is, on the whole, much more littoral than 
that of the Pliocene Red and Coralline Crag of Suffolk, and implies a shallower 
sea. It is, moreover, contrasted with the Suffolk Crag by the indications it 
affords of an extra-European climate. Thus it contains seven species of Cypraea, 
some larger than any existing cowry of the Mediterranean, several species of 
Oliva, Ancillaria, Mitra, Terebra, Pyrula, Fasciolaria, and Conus. Of the cones 
there are no less than eight species, some very large, whereas the only European 
cone now living is of diminutive size. The genus Nerita, and many others, are 
also represented by individuals of a type now characteristic of equatorial seas, 
and wholly unlike any Mediterranean forms. These proofs of a more elevated 
temperature seem to imply the higher antiquity of the faluns as compared with 
the Suffolk Crag, and are in perfect accordance with the fact of the smaller 
proportion of testacea of recent species found in the faluns.

Out of 290 species of shells, collected by myself in 1840 at Pontlevoy, Louans, 
Bossee, and other villages twenty miles south of Tours, and at Savigne, about 
fifteen miles north-west of that place, seventy-two only could be identified 
with recent species, which is in the proportion of twenty-five per cent. A large 
number of the 290 species are common to all the localities, those peculiar to 
each not being more numerous than we might expect to find in different bays of 
the same sea.

The total number of species of testaceous mollusca from the faluns in my 
possession is 302, of which forty-five only, or fourteen per cent, were found by 
Mr. Wood to be common to the Suffolk Crag. The number of corals, including 
bryozoa and zoantharia, obtained by me at Doue and other localities before 
adverted to, amounts to forty-three, as determined by Mr. Lonsdale, of which 
seven (one of them a zoantharian) agree specifically with those of the Suffolk 
Crag. Some of the genera occurring fossil in Touraine, as the corals Astrea and 
Dendrophyllia, and the bryozoan Lunulites, have not been found in European seas 
north of the Mediterranean; nevertheless, the zoantharia of the faluns do not 
seem to indicate, on the whole, so warm a climate as would be inferred from the 
shells.

It was stated that, on comparing about 300 species of Touraine shells with about 
450 from the Suffolk Crag, forty-five only were found to be common to both, 
which is in the proportion of only fifteen per cent. The same small amount of 
agreement is found in the corals also. I formerly endeavoured to reconcile this 
marked difference in species with the supposed co-existence of the two faunas, 
by imagining them to have severally belonged to distinct zoological provinces or 
two seas, the one opening to the north and the other to the south, with a 
barrier of land between them, like the Isthmus of Suez, now separating the Red 
Sea and the Mediterranean. But I now abandon that idea for several reasons; 
among others, because I succeeded in 1841 in tracing the Crag fauna southward in 
Normandy to within seventy miles of the Falunian type, near Dinan, yet found 
that both assemblages of fossils retained their distinctive characters, showing 
no signs of any blending of species or transition of climate.

The principal grounds, however, for referring the English Crag to the older 
Pliocene and the French faluns to the Upper Miocene epochs, consist in the 
predominance of fossil shells in the British strata identifiable with species 
not only still living, but which are now inhabitants of neighbouring seas, while 
the accompanying extinct species are of genera such as characterise Europe. In 
the faluns, on the contrary, the recent species are in a decided minority; and 
most of them are now inhabitants of the Mediterranean, the coast of Africa, and 
the Indian Ocean; in a word, less northern in character, and pointing to the 
prevalence of a warmer climate. They indicate a state of things receding farther 
from the present condition of Central Europe in physical geography and climate, 
and doubtless, therefore, receding farther from our era in time.

(FIGURE 137. Voluta Lamberti, Sowerby. Variety characteristic of Faluns of 
Touraine. Miocene.)

Among the conspicuous fossils common to the faluns of the Loire and the Suffolk 
Crag is a variety of the Voluta Lamberti, a shell already alluded to (Figure 
123). The specimens of this shell which I have myself collected in Touraine, or 
have seen in museums, are thicker and heavier than British individuals of the 
same species, and shorter in proportion to their width, and have the folds on 
the columella less oblique, as represented in Figure 137.

UPPER MIOCENE OF BORDEAUX AND THE SOUTH OF FRANCE.

A great extent of country between the Pyrenees and the Gironde is overspread by 
tertiary deposits of various ages, and chiefly of Miocene date. Some of these, 
near Bordeaux, coincide in age with the faluns of Touraine, already mentioned, 
but many of the species of shells are peculiar to the south. The succession of 
beds in the basin of the Gironde implies several oscillations of level by which 
the same wide area was alternately converted into sea and land and into 
brackish-water lagoons, and finally into fresh-water ponds and lakes.

Among the fresh-water strata of this age near the base of the Pyrenees are 
marls, limestones and sands, in which the eminent comparative anatomist, M. 
Lartet, has obtained a great number of fossil mammalia common to the faluns of 
the Loire and the Upper Miocene beds of Switzerland, such as Dinotherium 
giganteum and Mastodon angustidens; also the bones of quadrumana, or of the ape 
and monkey tribe, which were discovered in 1837, the first of that order of 
quadrupeds detected in Europe. They were found near Auch, in the Department of 
Gers, in latitude 43 degrees 39' N. About forty miles west of Toulouse. They 
were referred by MM. Lartet and Blainville to a genus closely allied to the 
Gibbon, to which they gave the name of Pliopithecus. Subsequently, in 1856, M. 
Lartet described another species of the same family of long-armed apes 
(Hylobates), which he obtained from strata of the same age at Saint-Gaudens, in 
the Haute Garonne. The fossil remains of this animal consisted of a portion of a 
lower jaw with teeth and the shaft of a humerus. It is supposed to have been a 
tree-climbing frugivorous ape, equalling man in stature. As the trunks of oaks 
are common in the lignite beds in which it lay, it has received the generic name 
of Dryopithecus. The angle formed by the ascending ramus of the jaw and the 
alveolar border is less open, and therefore more like the human subject, than in 
the Chimpanzee, and what is still more remarkable, the fossil, a young but adult 
individual, had all its milk teeth replaced by the second set, while its last 
true molar (or wisdom-tooth) was still undeveloped, or only existed as a germ in 
the jaw-bone. In the mode, therefore, of the succession of its teeth (which, as 
in all the old-World apes, exactly agree in number with those in man) it 
differed from the Gorilla and Chimpanzee, and corresponded with the human 
species.

UPPER MIOCENE BEDS OF OENINGEN, IN SWITZERLAND.

The faluns of the Loire first served, as already stated, as the type of the 
Miocene formations in Europe. They yielded a plentiful harvest of marine fossil 
shells and corals, but were entirely barren of plants and insects. In 
Switzerland, on the other hand, deposits of the same age have been discovered, 
remarkable for their botanical and entomological treasures. We are indebted to 
Professor Heer, of Zurich, for the description, restoration, and classification 
of several hundred species and varieties of these fossil plants, the whole of 
which he has illustrated by excellent figures in his "Flora Tertiaria 
Helvetiae." This great work, and those of Adolphe Brongniart, Unger, Goppert and 
others, show that this class of fossils is beginning to play the same important 
part in the classification of the tertiary strata containing lignite or brown 
coal as an older flora has long played in enabling us to understand the ancient 
coal or carboniferous formation. No small skepticism has always prevailed among 
botanists as to whether the leaves alone and the wood of plants could ever 
afford sufficient data for determining even genera and families in the vegetable 
kingdom. In truth, before such remains could be rendered available a new science 
had to be created. It was necessary to study the outlines, nervation, and 
microscopic structure of the leaves, with a degree of care which had never been 
called for in the classification of living plants, where the flower and fruit 
afforded characters so much more definite and satisfactory. As geologists, we 
can not be too grateful to those who, instead of despairing when so difficult a 
task was presented to them, or being discouraged when men of the highest 
scientific attainments treated the fossil leaves as worthless, entered with full 
faith and enthusiasm into this new and unexplored field. That they should 
frequently have fallen into errors was unavoidable, but it is remarkable, 
especially if we inquire into the history of Professor Heer's researches, how 
often early conjectures as to the genus and family founded on the leaves alone 
were afterwards confirmed when fuller information was obtained. As examples to 
be found on comparing Heer's earlier and later works, I may instance the 
chestnut, elm, maple, cinnamon, magnolia, buckbean or Menyanthes, vine, 
buckthorn (Rhamnus), Andromeda and Myrica, and among the conifers Sequoia and 
Taxodium. In all these cases the plants were first recognised by their leaves, 
and the accuracy of the determination was afterwards confirmed when the fruit, 
and in some instances both fruit and flower, were found attached to the same 
stem as the leaves.

But let us suppose that no fruit, seed, or flower had ever been met with in a 
fossil state, we should still have been indebted to the persevering labours of 
botanical palaeontologists for one of the grandest scientific discoveries for 
which the present century is remarkable-- namely, the proofs now established of 
the prevalence of a mild climate and a rich arborescent flora in the arctic 
regions in that Miocene epoch on the history of which we are now entering. It 
may be useful if I endeavour to give the reader in a few words some idea of the 
nature of the evidence of these important conclusions, to show how far they may 
be safely based on fossil leaves alone. When we begin by studying the fossils of 
the Newer Pliocene deposits, such as those of the Upper Val d'Arno, before 
alluded to, we perceive that the fossil foliage agrees almost entirely with the 
trees and shrubs of a modern European forest. In the plants of the Older 
Pliocene strata of the same region we observe a larger proportion of species and 
genera which, although they may agree with well-known Asiatic or other foreign 
types, are at present wanting in Italy. If we then examine the Miocene 
formations of the same country, exotic forms become more abundant, especially 
the palms, whether they belong to the European or American fan-palms, Chamaerops 
and Sabal, or to the more tropical family of the date-palms or Phoenicites, 
which last are conspicuous in the Lower Miocene beds of Central Europe. Although 
we have not found the fruit or flower of these palms in a fossil state, the 
leaves are so characteristic that no one doubts the family to which they belong, 
or hesitates to accept them as indications of a warm and sub-tropical climate.

When the Miocene formations are traced to the northward of the 50th degree of 
latitude, the fossil palms fail us, but the greater proportion of the leaves, 
whether identical with those of existing European trees or of forms now unknown 
in Europe, which had accompanied the Miocene palms, still continue to 
characterise rocks of the same age, until we meet with them not only in Iceland, 
but in Greenland, in latitude 70 degrees N., and in Spitzbergen, latitude 78 
degrees 56', or within about 11 degrees of the pole, and under circumstances 
which clearly show them to have been indigenous in those regions, and not to 
have been drifted from the south (see Chapter 15). Not only, therefore, has the 
botanist afforded the geologist much palaeontological assistance in identifying 
distinct tertiary formations in distant places by his power of accurately 
discriminating the forms, veining, and microscopic structure of leaves or wood, 
but, independently of that exact knowledge derivable from the organs of 
fructification, we are indebted to him for one of the most novel, unexpected 
results of modern scientific inquiry.

The Miocene formations of Switzerland have been called MOLASSE, a term derived 
from the French MOL, and applied to a SOFT, incoherent, greenish sandstone, 
occupying the country between the Alps and the Jura. This molasse comprises 
three divisions, of which the middle one is marine, and being closely related by 
its shells to the faluns of Touraine, may be classed as Upper Miocene. The two 
others are fresh-water, the upper of which may be also grouped with the faluns, 
while the lower must be referred to the Lower Miocene, as defined in the next 
chapter.

UPPER FRESH-WATER MOLASSE.

This formation is best seen at Oeningen, in the valley of the Rhine, between 
Constance and Schaffhausen, a locality celebrated for having produced in the 
year 1700 the supposed human skeleton called by Scheuchzer "homo diluvii 
testis," a fossil afterwards demonstrated by Cuvier to be a reptile, or aquatic 
salamander, of larger dimensions than even its great living representative, the 
salamander of Japan.

The Oeningen strata consist of a series of marls and limestones, many of them 
thinly laminated, and which appear to have slowly accumulated in a lake probably 
fed by springs holding carbonate of lime in solution. The elliptical area over 
which this fresh-water formation has been traced extends, according to Sir 
Roderick Murchison, for a distance of ten miles east and west from Berlingen, on 
the right bank of the river to Wangen, and to Oeningen, near Stein, on the left 
bank. The organic remains have been chiefly derived from two quarries, the lower 
of which is about 550 feet above the level of the Lake of Constance, while the 
upper quarry is 150 feet higher. In this last, a section thirty feet deep 
displays a great succession of beds, most of them splitting into slabs and some 
into very thin laminae. Twenty-one beds are enumerated by Professor Heer, the 
uppermost a bluish-grey marl seven feet thick, with organic remains, resting on 
a limestone with fossil plants, including leaves of poplar, cinnamon, and pond-
weed (Potamogeton), together with some insects; while in the bed No. 4, below, 
is a bituminous rock, in which the Mastodon tapiroides, a characteristic Upper 
Miocene quadruped, has been met with. The 5th bed, two or three inches thick, 
contains fossil fish, e.g., Leuciscus (roach), and the larvae of dragon-flies, 
with plants such as the elm (Ulmus), and the aquatic Chara. Below this are other 
plant-beds; and then, in No. 9, the stone in which the great salamander (Andrias 
Scheuchzeri) and some fish were found. Below this other strata occur with fish, 
tortoises, the great salamander before alluded to, fresh-water mussels, and 
plants. In No. 16 the fossil fox of Oeningen, galecynus Oeningensis, Owen, was 
obtained by Sir R. Murchison. To this succeed other beds with mammalia 
(Lagomys), reptiles, (Emys), fish, and plants, such as walnut, maple, and 
poplar. In the 19th bed are numerous fish, insects, and plants, below which are 
marls of a blue indigo colour.

In the lower quarry eleven beds are mentioned, in which, as in the upper, both 
land and fresh-water plants and many insects occur. In the 6th, reckoning from 
the top, many plants have been obtained, such as Liquidambar, Daphnogene, 
Podogonium, and Ulmus, together with tortoises, besides the bones and teeth of a 
ruminant quadruped, named by H. von Meyer Palaeomeryx eminens. No. 9 is called 
the insect-bed, a layer only a few inches thick, which, when exposed to the 
frost, splits into leaves as thin as paper. In these thin laminae plants such as 
Liquidambar, Daphnogene, and Glyptostrobus, occur, with innumerable insects in a 
wonderful state of preservation, usually found singly. Below this is an indigo-
blue marl, like that at the bottom of the higher quarry, resting on yellow marl 
ascertained to be at least thirty feet thick.

(FIGURE 138. Cinnamomum polymorphum, Ad. Brong. Upper and Lower Miocene.
a. Leaf.
b. Flower, natural size; Heer Plate 93 Figure 28.
c. Ripe fruit of Cinnamomum polymorphum, from Oeningen; Heer, Plate 94 Figure 
14.
d. Fruit of recent Cinnamomum camphorum of Japan; Heer, Plate 152 Figure 18.)

All the above fossil-bearing strata were evidently formed with extreme slowness. 
Although the fossiliferous beds are, in the aggregate, no more than a few yards 
in thickness, and have only been examined in the small area comprised in the two 
quarries just alluded to, they give us an insight into the state of animal and 
vegetable life in part of the Upper Miocene period, such as no other region in 
the world has elsewhere supplied. In the year 1859, Professor Heer had already 
determined no less than 475 species of plants and more than 800 insects from 
these Oeningen beds. He supposes that a river entering a lake floated into it 
some of the leaves and land insects, together with the carcasses of quadrupeds, 
among others a great Mastodon. Occasionally, during tempests, twigs and even 
boughs of trees with their leaves were torn off and carried for some distance so 
as to reach the lake. Springs, containing carbonate of lime, seem at some points 
to have supplied calcareous matter in solution, giving origin locally to a kind 
of travertin, in which organic bodies sinking to the bottom became hermetically 
sealed up. The laminae, says Heer, which immediately succeed each other were not 
all formed at the same season, for it can be shown that, when some of them 
originated, certain plants were in flower, whereas, when the next of these 
layers was produced, the same plants had ripened their fruit. This inference is 
confirmed by independent proofs derived from insects. The principal insect-bed 
is rarely two inches thick, and is composed, says Heer, of about 250 leaf-like 
laminae, some of which were deposited in the spring, when the Cinnamomum 
polymorphum (Figure 138) was in flower, others in summer, when winged ants were 
numerous, and when the poplar and willow had matured their seed; others, again, 
in autumn, when the same Cinnamomum polymorphum (Figure 138) was in fruit, as 
well as the liquidambar, oak, clematis, and many other plants. The ancient lake 
seems to have had a belt of poplars and willows round its borders, countless 
leaves of which were imbedded in mud, and together with them, at some points, a 
species of reed, Arundo, which was very common.

One of the most characteristic shrubs is a papilionaceous and leguminous plant 
of an extinct genus, called by Heer Podogonium, of which two species are known. 
Entire twigs have been found with flowers, and always without leaves, as the 
flowers evidently came out, as in the poplar and willow tribe, before any leaves 
made their appearance. Other specimens have been obtained with ripe fruits 
accompanied by leaves, which resemble those of the tamarind, to which it was 
evidently allied, being of the family Caesalpineae, now proper to warmer 
regions.

(FIGURE 139. Acer trilobatum, normal form; Heer, Flora Tert. Helv. Plate 114 
Figure 2. Size 1/2 diam. (Part only of the long stalk of the original fossil 
specimen is here given ). Upper Miocene, Oeningen; also found in Lower Miocene 
of Switzerland.)

(FIGURE 140. Acer trilobatum.
a. Abnormal variety of leaf; Heer, Plate 110 Figure 16.
b. Flower and bracts, normal form; Heer, Plate 111 Figure 21.
c. Half a seed-vessel; Heer, Plate 111 Figure 5.)

(FIGURE 141. Platanus aceroides, Gopp.; Heer, Plate 88 Figures 5-8. Size 2/3 
diam. Upper Miocene, Oeningen.
a. Leaf.
b. The core of a bundle of pericarps.
c. Single fruit or pericarp, natural size.)

The Upper Miocene flora of Oeningen is peculiarly important, in consequence of 
the number of genera of which not merely the leaves, but, as in the case of the 
Podogonium just mentioned, the fruit also and even the flower are known. Thus 
there are nineteen species of maple, ten of which have already been found with 
fruit. Although in no one region of the globe do so many maples now flourish, we 
need not suspect Professor Heer of having made too many species in this genus 
when we consider the manner in which he has dealt with one of them, Acer 
trilobatum, Figures 139 and 140. Of this plant the number of marked varieties 
figured and named is very great, and no less than three of them had been 
considered as distinct species by other botanists, while six of the others might 
have laid claim, with nearly equal propriety, to a like distinction. The common 
form, called Acer trilobatum, Figure 139, may be taken as a normal 
representative of the Oeningen fossil, and Figure 140, as one of the most 
divergent varieties, having almost four lobes in the leaf instead of three.

(FIGURE 142. Smilax sagittifera; Heer, Plate 30 Figure 7. Size 1/2 diameter.
a. Leaf.
b. Flower magnified, one of the six petals wanting at d. Upper Miocene, 
Oeningen.
c. Smilax obtusifolia; Heer, Plate 30 Figure 9; natural size. Upper Miocene, 
Oeningen.)

(FIGURE 143. Fruit of the fossil and recent species of Hakea, a genus of 
Proteaceae.
a. Leaf of fossil species, Hakea salicina. Upper Miocene, Oeningen; Heer Plate 
97 Figure 29. 1/3 diameter.
b. Impression of woody fruit of same, showing thick stalk. 2/3 diameter.
c. Seed of same, natural size.
d. Fruit of living Australian species, Hakea saligna, R. Brown. 1/2 diameter.
e. Seed of same, natural size.)

Among the conspicuous genera which abounded in the Miocene period in Europe is 
the plane-tree, Platanus, the fossil species being considered by Heer to come 
nearer to the American P. occidentalis than to P. orientalis of Greece and Asia 
Minor. In some of the fossil specimens the male flowers are preserved. Among 
other points of resemblance with the living plane-trees, as we see them in the 
parks and squares of London, fossil fragments of the trunk are met with, having 
pieces of their bark peeling off.

The vine of Oeningen, Vitis teutonica, Ad. Brong, is of a North American type. 
Both the leaves and seeds have been found at Oeningen, and bunches of compressed 
grapes of the same species have been met with in the brown coal of Wetteravia in 
Germany. No less than eight species of smilax, a monocotyledonous genus, occur 
at Oeningen and in other Upper Miocene localities, the flowers of some of them, 
as well as the leaves, being preserved; as in the case of the very common 
fossil, S. sagittifera, Figure 142, a. 

Leaves of plants supposed to belong to the order Proteaceae have been obtained 
partly from Oeningen and partly from the lacustrine formation of the same age at 
Locle in the Jura. They have been referred to the genera Banksia, Grevillea, 
Hakea, and Persoonia. Of Hakea there is the impression of a supposed seed-
vessel, with its characteristic thick stalk and seeds, but as the fruit is 
without structure, and has not yet been found attached to the same stem as the 
leaf, the proof is incomplete.

To whatever family the foliage hitherto regarded as proteaceous by many able 
palaeontologists may eventually be shown to belong, we must be careful not to 
question their affinity to that order of plants on those geographical 
considerations which have influenced some botanists. The nearest living 
Proteaceae now feel the in Abyssinia in latitude 20 degrees N., but the greatest 
number are confined to the Cape and Australia. The ancestors, however, of the 
Oeningen fossils ought not to be looked for in such distant regions, but from 
that European land which in Lower Miocene times bore trees with similar foliage, 
and these had doubtless an Eocene source, for cones admitted by all botanists to 
be proteaceous have been met with in one division of that older Tertiary group 
(see Figure 206 Chapter 16). The source of these last, again, must not be sought 
in the antipodes, for in the white chalk of Aix-la-Chapelle leaves like those of 
Grevillea and other proteaceous genera have been found in abundance, and, as we 
shall see in Chapter 17, in a most perfect state of preservation. All geologists 
agree that the distribution of the Cretaceous land and sea had scarcely any 
connection with the present geography of the globe.

(FIGURE 144. Glyptostrobus Europaeus.
Branch with ripe fruit; Heer, Plate 20 Figure 1. Upper Miocene, Oeningen.)

In the same beds with the supposed Proteaceae there occurs at Locle a fan-palm 
of the American type Sabal (for genus see Figure 151), a genus which ranges 
throughout the low country near the sea from the Carolinas to Florida and 
Louisiana. Among the Coniferae of Upper Miocene age is found a deciduous cypress 
nearly allied to the Taxodium distichum of North America, and a Glyptostrobus 
(Figure 144), very like the Japanese G. heterophyllus, now common in our 
shrubberies.

Before the appearance of Heer's work on the Miocene Flora of Switzerland, Unger 
and Goppert had already pointed out the large proportion of living North 
American genera which distinguished the vegetation of the Miocene period in 
Central Europe. Next in number, says Heer, to these American forms at Oeningen 
the European genera preponderate, the Asiatic ranking in the third, the African 
in the fourth, and the Australian in the fifth degree. The American forms are 
more numerous than in the Italian Pliocene flora, and the whole vegetation 
indicates a warmer climate than the Pliocene, though not so high a temperature 
as that of the older or Lower Miocene period.

The conclusions drawn from the insects are for the most part in perfect harmony 
with those derived from the plants, but they have a somewhat less tropical and 
less American aspect, the South European types being more numerous. On the 
whole, the insect fauna is richer than that now inhabiting any part of Europe. 
No less than 844 species are reckoned by Heer from the Oeningen beds alone, the 
number of specimens which he has examined being 5080. The entire list of Swiss 
species from the Upper and Lower Miocene together amount to 1322. Almost all the 
living families of Coleoptera are represented, but, as we might have anticipated 
from the preponderance of arborescent and ligneous plants, the wood-eating 
beetles play the most conspicuous part, the Buprestidae and other long-horned 
beetles being particularly abundant.

(FIGURE 145. Harpactor maculipes, Heer. Upper Miocene, Oeningen.)

The patterns and some remains of the colours both of Coleoptera and Hemiptera 
are preserved at Oeningen, as, for example in Harpactor (Figure 145), in which 
the antennae, one of the eyes, and the legs and wings are retained. The 
characters, indeed, of many of the insects are so well defined as to incline us 
to believe that if this class of the invertebrata were not so rare and local, 
they might be more useful than even the plants and shells in settling 
chronological points in geology.

MIDDLE OR MARINE MOLASSE (UPPER MIOCENE) OF SWITZERLAND.

It was before stated that the Miocene formation of Switzerland consisted of, 
first, the upper fresh-water molasse, comprising the lacustrine marls of 
Oeningen; secondly, the marine molasse, corresponding in age to the faluns of 
Touraine; and thirdly, the lower fresh-water molasse. Some of the beds of the 
marine or middle series reach a height of 2470 feet above the sea. A large 
number of the shells are common to the faluns of Touraine, the Vienna basin, and 
other Upper Miocene localities. The terrestrial plants play a subordinate part 
in the fossiliferous beds, yet more than ninety of them are enumerated by Heer 
as belonging to this falunian division, and of these more than half are common 
to subjacent Lower Miocene beds, while a proportion of about forty-five in one 
hundred are common to the overlying Oeningen flora. Twenty-six of the ninety-two 
species are peculiar.

UPPER MIOCENE OF THE BOLDERBERG, IN BELGIUM.

(FIGURE 146. Oliva Dufresnii, Bast. Bolderberg, Belgium; natural size.
a. Front view.
b. Back view.)

In a small hill or ridge called the Bolderberg, which I visited in 1851, 
situated near Hasselt, about forty miles E.N.E. of Brussels, strata of sand and 
gravel occur, to which M. Dumont first called attention as appearing to 
constitute a northern representative of the faluns of Touraine. On the whole, 
they are very distinct in their fossils from the two upper divisions of the 
Antwerp Crag before mentioned (Chapter 13), and contain shells of the genera 
Oliva, Conus, Ancillaria, Pleurotoma, and Cancellaria in abundance. The most 
common shell is an Olive (Figure 146), called by Nyst Oliva Dufresnii; and 
constituting, as M. Bosquet observes, a smaller and shorter variety of the 
Bordeaux species.

So far as the shells of the Bolderberg are known, the proportion of recent 
species agrees with that in the faluns of Touraine, and the climate must have 
been warmer than that of the Coralline Crag of England.

UPPER MIOCENE BEDS OF THE VIENNA BASIN.

In South Germany the general resemblance of the shells of the Vienna tertiary 
basin with those of the faluns of Touraine has long been acknowledged. In the 
late Dr. Hornes's excellent work on the fossil mollusca of that formation, we 
see accurate figures of many shells, clearly of the same species as those found 
in the falunian sands of Touraine.

According to Professor Suess, the most ancient and purely marine of the Miocene 
strata in this basin consist of sands, conglomerates, limestones, and clays, and 
they are inclined inward, or from the borders of the trough towards the centre, 
their outcropping edges rising much higher than the newer beds, whether Miocene 
or Pliocene, which overlie them, and which occupy a smaller area at an inferior 
elevation above the sea. M. Hornes has described no less than 500 species of 
gasteropods, of which he identifies one-fifth with living species of the 
Mediterranean, Indian, or African seas, but the proportion of existing species 
among the lamellibranchiate bivalves exceeds this average. Among many univalves 
agreeing with those of Africa on the eastern side of the Atlantic are Cypraea 
sanguinolenta, Buccinum lyratum, and Oliva flammulata. In the lowest marine beds 
of the Vienna basin the remains of several mammalia have been found, and among 
them a species of Dinotherium, a Mastodon of the Trilophodon family, a 
Rhinoceros (allied to R. megarhinus, Christol), also an animal of the hog tribe, 
Listriodon, von Meyer, and a carnivorous animal of the canine family. The Helix 
turonensis (Figure 38 Chapter 3), the most common land shell of the French 
faluns, accompanies the above land animals. In a higher member of the Vienna 
Miocene series are found Dinotherium giganteum (Figure 136 Chapter 14), Mastodon 
longirostris, Rhinoceros Schleiermacheri, Acerotherium incisivum, and 
Hippotherium gracile, all of them equally characteristic of an Upper Miocene 
deposit occurring at Eppelsheim, in Hesse Darmstadt; a locality also remarkable 
as having furnished in latitude 49 degrees 50 north the bone of a large ape of 
the Gibbon kind, the most northerly example yet discovered of a quadrumanous 
animal.

(FIGURE 147. Amphistegina Hauerina, d'Orbigny. Upper Miocene strata, Vienna.)

M. Alcide d'Orbigny has shown that the foraminifera of the Vienna basin differ 
alike from the Eocene and Pliocene species, and agree with those of the faluns, 
so far as the latter are known. Among the Vienna foraminifera, the genus 
Amphistegina (Figure 147) is very characteristic, and is supposed by d'Archiac 
to take the same place among the Rhizopods of the Upper Miocene era which the 
Nummulites occupy in the Eocene period.

The flora of the Vienna basin exhibits some species which have a general range 
through the whole Miocene period, such as Cinnamomum polymorphum (Figure 138 
Chapter 14), and C. Scheuchzeri, also Planera Richardi, Mich., Liquidambar 
europaeum (Figure 135 Chapter 13) Juglans bilinica, Cassia ambigua, and C. 
lignitum. Among the plants common to the Upper Miocene beds of Oeningen, in 
Switzerland, are Platanus aceroides (Figure 141 Chapter 14), Myrica 
vindobonensis, and others.

UPPER MIOCENE STRATA OF ITALY.

We are indebted to Signor Michelotti for a valuable work on the Miocene shells 
of Northern Italy. Those found in the hill called the Superga, near Turin, have 
long been known to correspond in age with the faluns of Touraine, and they 
contain so many species common to the Upper Miocene strata of Bordeaux as to 
lead to the conclusion that there was a free communication between the northern 
part of the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay in the Upper Miocene period.

UPPER MIOCENE FORMATIONS OF GREECE.

At Pikerme, near Athens, MM. Wagner and Roth have described a deposit in which 
they found the remains of the genera Mastodon, Dinotherium, Hipparion, two 
species of Giraffe, Antelope, and others, some living and some extinct. With 
them were also associated fossil bones of the Semnopithecus, showing that here, 
as in the south of France, the quadrumana were characteristic of this period. 
The whole fauna attests the former extension of a vast expanse of grassy plains 
where we have now the broken and mountainous country of Greece; plains, which 
were probably united with Asia Minor, spreading over the area where the deep 
Aegean Sea and its numerous islands are now situated. We are indebted to M. 
Gaudry, who visited Pikerme, for a treatise on these fossil bones, showing how 
many data they contribute to the theory of a transition from the mammalia of the 
Upper Miocene through the Pliocene and Post-pliocene forms to those of living 
genera and species.

UPPER MIOCENE OF INDIA. SIWALIK HILLS.

The Siwalik Hills lie at the southern foot of the Himalayan chain, rising to the 
height of 2000 and 3000 feet. Between the Jumna and the Ganges they consist of 
inclined strata of sandstone, shingle, clay, and marl. We are indebted to the 
indefatigable researches of Dr. Falconer and Sir Proby Cautley, continued for 
fifteen years, for the discovery in these marls and sandstones of a great 
variety of fossil mammalia and reptiles, together with many fresh-water shells. 
Out of fifteen species of shells of the genera Paludina, Melania, Ampullaria, 
and Unio, all are extinct or unknown species with the exception of four, which 
are still inhabitants of Indian rivers. Such a proportion of living to extinct 
mollusca agrees well with the usual character of an Upper Miocene or Falunian 
fauna, as observed in Touraine, or in the basin of Vienna and elsewhere.

The genera of mammalia point in the same direction. One of them, of the genus 
Chalicotherium (or Anisodon of Lartet), is a pachyderm intermediate between the 
Rhinoceros and Anoplothere, and characteristic of the Upper Miocene strata of 
Eppelsheim, and of the south of France. With it occurs also an extinct form of 
Hippopotamus, called Hexaprotodon, and a species of Hippotherium and pig, also 
two species of Mastodon, two of elephant, and three other elephantine 
proboscidians; none of them agreeing with any fossil forms of Europe, and being 
intermediate between the genera Elephas and Mastodon, constituting the sub-genus 
Stegodon of Falconer. With these are associated a monkey, allied to the 
Semnopithecus entellus, now living in the Himalaya, and many ruminants. Among 
these last, besides the giraffe, camel, antelope, stag, and others, we find a 
remarkable new type, the Sivatherium, like a gigantic four-horned deer. There 
are also new forms of carnivora, both feline and canine, the Machairodus among 
the former, also hyaenas, and a subursine form called the Hyaenarctos, and a 
genus allied to the otter (Enhydriodon), of formidable size.

The giraffe, camel, and a large ostrich may be cited as proofs that there were 
formerly extensive plains where now a steep chain of hills, with deep ravines, 
runs for many hundred miles east and west. Among the accompanying reptiles are 
several crocodiles, some of huge dimensions, and one not distinguishable, says 
Dr. Falconer, from a species now living in the Ganges (C. Gangeticus); and there 
is still another saurian which the same anatomist has identified with a species 
now inhabiting India. There was also an extinct species of tortoise of gigantic 
proportions (Colossochelys Atlas), the curved shell of which was twelve feet 
three inches long and eight feet in diameter, the entire length of the animal 
being estimated at eighteen feet, and its probable height seven feet.

Numerous fossils of the Siwalik type have also been found in Perim Island, in 
the Gulf of Cambay, and among these a species of Dinotherium, a genus so 
characteristic of the Upper Miocene period in Europe.

OLDER PLIOCENE AND MIOCENE FORMATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES.

Between the Alleghany Mountains, formed of older rocks, and the Atlantic, there 
intervenes, in the United States, a low region occupied principally by beds of 
marl, clay, and sand, consisting of the cretaceous and tertiary formations, and 
chiefly of the latter. The general elevation of this plain bordering the 
Atlantic does not exceed 100 feet, although it is sometimes several hundred feet 
high. Its width in the middle and southern states is very commonly from 100 to 
150 miles. It consists, in the South, as in Georgia, Alabama, and South 
Carolina, almost exclusively of Eocene deposits; but in North Carolina, 
Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, more modern strata predominate, of the age of the 
English Crag and faluns of Touraine. (Proceedings of the Geological Society 
volume 4 part 3 1845 page 547.)

(FIGURE 148. Fulgur canaliculatus. Maryland.)

(FIGURE 149. Fusus quadricostatus, Say. Maryland.)

In the Virginian sands, we find in great abundance a species of Astarte (A. 
undulata, Conrad), which resembles closely, and may possibly be a variety of, 
one of the commonest fossils of the Suffolk Crag (A. Omalii); the other shells 
also, of the genera Natica, Fissurella, Artemis, Lucina, Chama, Pectunculus, and 
Pecten, are analagous to shells both of the English Crag and French faluns, 
although the species are almost all distinct. Out of 147 of these American 
fossils I could only find thirteen species common to Europe, and these occur 
partly in the Suffolk Crag, and partly in the faluns of Touraine; but it is an 
important characteristic of the American group, that it not only contains many 
peculiar extinct forms, such as Fusus quadricostatus, Say (see Figure 149), and 
Venus tridacnoides, abundant in these same formations, but also some shells 
which, like Fulgur carica of Say and F. canaliculatus (see Figure 148), 
Calyptraea costata, Venus mercenaria, Lam., Modiola glandula, Totten, and Pecten 
magellanicus, Lam., are recent species, yet of forms now confined to the western 
side of the Atlantic-- a fact implying that some traces of the beginning of the 
present geographical distribution of mollusca date back to a period as remote as 
that of the Miocene strata.

Of ten species of corals which I procured on the banks of the James River, one 
agrees generically with a coral now living on the coast of the United States. 
Mr. Lonsdale regarded these corals as indicating a temperature exceeding that of 
the Mediterranean, and the shells would lead to similar conclusions. Those 
occurring on the James River are in the 37th degree of N. latitude, while the 
French faluns are in the 47th; yet the forms of the American fossils would 
scarcely imply so warm a climate as must have prevailed in France when the 
Miocene strata of Touraine originated.

(FIGURE 150. Astrangia lineata, Lonsdale. Syn. Anthophyllum lineatum. 
Williamsburg, Virginia.)

Among the remains of fish in these post-eocene strata of the United States are 
several large teeth of the shark family, not distinguishable specifically from 
fossils of the faluns of Touraine.


CHAPTER XV.

LOWER MIOCENE (OLIGOCENE OF BEYRICH).

Lower Miocene Strata of France.
Line between Miocene and Eocene.
Lacustrine Strata of Auvergne.
Fossil mammalia of the Limagne d'Auvergne.
Lower Molasse of Switzerland.
Dense Conglomerates and Proofs of Subsidence.
Flora of the Lower Molasse.
American Character of the Flora.
Theory of a Miocene Atlantis.
Lower Miocene of Belgium.
Rupelian Clay of Hermsdorf near Berlin.
Mayence Basin.
Lower Miocene of Croatia.
Oligocene Strata of Beyrich.
Lower Miocene of Italy.
Lower Miocene of England.
Hempstead Beds.
Bovey Tracey Lignites in Devonshire.
Isle of Mull Leaf-Beds.
Arctic Miocene Flora.
Disco Island.
Lower Miocene of United States.
Fossils of Nebraska.

LINE BETWEEN MIOCENE AND EOCENE FORMATIONS.

The marine faluns of the valley of the Loire have been already described as 
resting in some places on a fresh-water tertiary limestone, fragments of which 
have been broken off and rolled on the shores and in the bed of the Miocene sea. 
Such pebbles are frequent at Pontlevoy on the Cher, with hollows drilled in them 
in which the perforating marine shells of the Falunian period still remain. Such 
a mode of superposition implies an interval of time between the origin of the 
fresh-water limestone and its submergence beneath the waters of the Upper 
Miocene sea. The limestone in question forms a part of the formation called the 
Calcaire de la Beauce, which constitutes a large table-land between the basins 
of the Loire and the Seine. It is associated with marls and other deposits, such 
as may have been formed in marshes and shallow lakes in the newest part of a 
great delta. Beds of flint, continuous or in nodules, accumulated in these 
lakes, and aquatic plants called Charae, left their stems and seed-vessels 
imbedded both in the marl and flint, together with fresh-water and land shells. 
Some of the siliceous rocks of this formation are used extensively for mill-
stones. The flat summits or platforms of the hills round Paris, and large areas 
in the forest of Fontainebleau, as well as the Plateau de la Beauce, already 
alluded to, are chiefly composed of these fresh-water strata. Next to these in 
the descending order are marine sands and sandstone, commonly called the Gres de 
Fontainebleau, from which a considerable number of shells, very distinct from 
those of the faluns, have been obtained at Etampes, south of Paris, and at 
Montmartre and other hills in Paris itself, or in its suburbs. At the bottom of 
these sands a green clay occurs, containing a small oyster, Ostrea cyathula, 
Lam., which, although of slight thickness, is spread over a wide area. This clay 
rests immediately on the Paris gypsum, or that series of beds of gypsum and 
gypseous marl from which Cuvier first obtained several species of Palaeotherium 
and other extinct mammalia. (Bulletin 1856 Journal volume 12 page 768.)

At this junction of the clay and the gypsum the majority of French geologists 
have always drawn the line between the Middle and Lower Tertiary, or between the 
Miocene and Eocene formations, regarding the Fontainebleau sands and the Ostrea 
cyathula clay as the base of the Miocene, and the gypsum, with its mammalia, as 
the top of the Eocene group. I formerly dissented from this division, but I now 
find that I must admit it to be the only one which will agree with the 
distribution of the Miocene mammalia, while even the mollusca of the 
Fontainebleau sands, which were formerly supposed to present at preponderance of 
affinities to an Eocene fauna, have since been shown to agree more closely with 
the fossils of certain deposits always regarded as Middle Tertiary at Mayence 
and in Belgium. In fact, we are now arriving at that stage of progress when the 
line, wherever it be drawn between Miocene and Eocene, will be an arbitrary one, 
or one of mere convenience, as I shall have an opportunity of showing when the 
Upper Eocene formations in the Isle of Wight are described in the sixteenth 
chapter.

LOWER MIOCENE OF CENTRAL FRANCE.

Lacustrine strata, belonging, for the most part, to the same Miocene system as 
the Calcaire de la Beauce, are again met with farther south in Auvergne, Cantal, 
and Velay. They appear to be the monuments of ancient lakes, which, like some of 
those now existing in Switzerland, once occupied the depressions in a 
mountainous region, and have been each fed by one or more rivers and torrents. 
The country where they occur is almost entirely composed of granite and 
different varieties of granitic schist, with here and there a few patches of 
Secondary strata, much dislocated, and which have suffered great denudation. 
There are also some vast piles of volcanic matter, the greater part of which is 
newer than the fresh-water strata, and is sometimes seen to rest upon them, 
while a small part has evidently been of contemporaneous origin. Of these 
igneous rocks I shall treat more particularly in the sequel.

The study of these regions possesses a peculiar interest very distinct in kind 
from that derivable from the investigation either of the Parisian or English 
Tertiary areas. For we are presented in Auvergne with the evidence of a series 
of events of astonishing magnitude and grandeur, by which the original form and 
features of the country have been greatly changed, yet never so far obliterated 
but that they may still, in part at least, be restored in imagination. Great 
lakes have disappeared-- lofty mountains have been formed, by the reiterated 
emission of lava, preceded and followed by showers of sand and scoriae-- deep 
valleys have been subsequently furrowed out through masses of lacustrine and 
volcanic origin-- at a still later date, new cones have been thrown up in these 
valleys-- new lakes have been formed by the damming up of rivers-- and more than 
one assemblage of quadrupeds, birds, and plants, Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene, 
have followed in succession; yet the region has preserved from first to last its 
geographical identity; and we can still recall to our thoughts its external 
condition and physical structure before these wonderful vicissitudes began, or 
while a part only of the whole had been completed. There was first a period when 
the spacious lakes, of which we still may trace the boundaries, lay at the foot 
of mountains of moderate elevation, unbroken by the bold peaks and precipices of 
Mont Dor, and unadorned by the picturesque outline of the Puy de Dome, or of the 
volcanic cones and craters now covering the granitic platform. During this 
earlier scene of repose deltas were slowly formed; beds of marl and sand, 
several hundred feet thick, deposited; siliceous and calcareous rocks 
precipitated from the waters of mineral springs; shells and insects imbedded, 
together with the remains of the crocodile and tortoise, the eggs and bones of 
water-birds, and the skeletons of quadrupeds, most of them of genera and species 
characteristic of the Miocene period. To this tranquil condition of the surface 
succeeded the era of volcanic eruptions, when the lakes were drained, and when 
the fertility of the mountainous district was probably enhanced by the igneous 
matter ejected from below, and poured down upon the more sterile granite. During 
these eruptions, which appear to have taken place towards the close of the 
Miocene epoch, and which continued during the Pliocene, various assemblages of 
quadrupeds successively inhabited the district, among which are found the genera 
mastodon, rhinoceros, elephant, tapir, hippopotamus, together with the ox, 
various kinds of deer, the bear, hyaena, and many beasts of prey which ranged 
the forest or pastured on the plain, and were occasionally overtaken by a fall 
of burning cinders, or buried in flows of mud, such as accompany volcanic 
eruptions. Lastly, these quadrupeds became extinct, and gave place in their turn 
to the species now existing. There are no signs, during the whole time required 
for this series of events, of the sea having intervened, nor of any denudation 
which may not have been accomplished by currents in the different lakes, or by 
rivers and floods accompanying repeated earthquakes, or subterranean movements, 
during which the levels of the district have in some places been materially 
modified, and perhaps the whole upraised relatively to the surrounding parts of 
France.

AUVERGNE.

The most northern of the fresh-water groups is situated in the valley-plain of 
the Allier, which lies within the department of the Puy de Dome, being the tract 
which went formerly by the name of the Limagne d'Auvergne. The average breadth 
of this tract is about twenty miles; and it is for the most part composed of 
nearly horizontal strata of sand, sandstone, calcareous marl, clay, and 
limestone, none of which observe a fixed and invariable order of superposition. 
The ancient borders of the lake wherein the fresh-water strata were accumulated 
may generally be traced with precision, the granite and other ancient rocks 
rising up boldly from the level country. The actual junction, however, of the 
lacustrine beds and the granite is rarely seen, as a small valley usually 
intervenes between them. The fresh-water strata may sometimes be seen to retain 
their horizontality within a very slight distance of the border-rocks, while in 
some places they are inclined, and in few instances vertical. The principal 
divisions into which the lacustrine series may be separated are the following:-- 
first, Sandstone, grit, and conglomerate, including red marl and red sandstone; 
secondly, Green and white foliated marls; thirdly, Limestone, or travertin, 
often oolitic in structure; fourthly, Gypseous marls.

The relations of these different groups can not be learnt by the study of any 
one section; and the geologist who sets out with the expectation of finding a 
fixed order of succession may perhaps complain that the different parts of the 
basin give contradictory results. The arenaceous division, the marls, and the 
limestone may all be seen in some places to alternate with each other; yet it 
can by no means be affirmed that there is no order of arrangement. The sands, 
sandstone, and conglomerate constitute in general a littoral group; the foliated 
white and green marl, a contemporaneous central deposit more than 700 feet 
thick, and thinly foliated, a character which often arises from the innumerable 
thin shells or carapace valves shed by the small crustacean called Cypris in the 
ancient lakes of Auvergne; and lastly the limestone is for the most part 
subordinate to the newer portions of both the above formations.

It seems that, when the ancient lake of the Limagne first began to be filled 
with sediment, no volcanic action had yet produced lava and scoriae on any part 
of the surface of Auvergne. No pebbles, therefore, of lava were transported into 
the lake-- no fragments of volcanic rocks imbedded in the conglomerate. But at a 
later period, when a considerable thickness of sandstone and marl had 
accumulated, eruptions broke out, and lava and tuff were deposited, at some 
spots, alternately with the lacustrine strata. It is not improbable that cold 
and thermal springs, holding different mineral ingredients in solution, became 
more numerous during the successive convulsions attending this development of 
volcanic agency, and thus deposits of carbonate and sulphate of lime, silex, and 
other minerals were produced. Hence these minerals predominate in the uppermost 
strata. The subterranean movements may then have continued until they altered 
the relative levels of the country, and caused the waters of the lakes to be 
drained off, and the further accumulation of regular fresh-water strata to 
cease.

LOWER MIOCENE MAMMALIA OF THE LIMAGNE.

It is scarcely possible to determine the age of the oldest part of the fresh-
water series of the Limagne, large masses both of the sandy and marly strata 
being devoid of fossils. Some of the lowest beds may be of Upper Eocene date, 
although, according to M. Pomel, only one bone of a Palaeotherium has been 
discovered in Auvergne. But in Velay, in strata containing some species of 
fossil mammalia common to the Limagne, no less than four species of Palaeothere 
have been found by M. Aymard, and one of these is generally supposed to be 
identical with Palaeotherium magnum, an undoubted Upper Eocene fossil, of the 
Paris gypsum, the other three being peculiar.

Not a few of the other mammalia of the Limagne belong undoubtedly to genera and 
species elsewhere proper to the Lower Miocene. Thus, for example, the 
Cainotherium of Bravard, a genus not far removed from the Anoplotherium, is 
represented by several species, one of which, as I learn from Mr. Waterhouse, 
agrees with Microtherium Renggeri of the Mayence basin. In like manner, the 
Amphitragulus elegans of Pomel, an Auvergne fossil, is identified by Waterhouse 
with Dorcatherium nanum of Kaup, a Rhenish species from Weissenau, near Mayence. 
A small species, also, of rodent, of the genus Titanomys of H. von Meyer, is 
common to the Lower Miocene of Mayence and the Limagne d'Auvergne, and there are 
many other points of agreement which the discordance of nomenclature tends to 
conceal. A remarkable carnivorous genus, the Hyaenodon of Laizer, is represented 
by more than one species. The same genus has also been found in the Upper Eocene 
marls of Hordwell Cliff, Hampshire, just below the level of the Bembridge 
Limestone, and therefore a formation older than the Gypsum of Paris. Several 
species of opossum (Didelphis) are met with in the same strata of the Limagne. 
The total number of mammalia enumerated by M. Pomel as appertaining to the Lower 
Miocene fauna of the Limagne and Velay falls little short of a hundred, and with 
them are associated some large crocodiles and tortoises, and some Ophidian and 
Batrachian reptiles.

LOWER MOLASSE OF SWITZERLAND.

The two upper divisions of the Swiss Molasse-- the one fresh-water, the other 
marine-- have already been described in the preceding chapter. I shall now 
proceed to treat of the third division, which is of Lower Miocene age. Nearly 
the whole of this Lower Molasse is fresh-water, yet some of the inferior beds 
contain a mixture of marine and fluviatile shells, the Cerithium margaritaceum, 
a well-known Lower Miocene fossil, being one of the marine species. 
Notwithstanding, therefore, that some of these Lower Miocene strata consist of 
old shingle-beds several thousand feet in thickness, as in the Rigi, near 
Lucerne, and in the Speer, near Wesen, mountains 5000 and 7000 feet above the 
sea, the deposition of the whole series must have begun at or below the sea-
level.

The conglomerates, as might be expected, are often very unequal in thickness, in 
closely adjoining districts, since in a littoral formation accumulations of 
pebbles would swell out in certain places where rivers entered the sea, and 
would thin out to comparatively small dimensions where no streams or only small 
ones came down to the coast. For ages, in spite of a gradual depression of the 
land and adjacent sea-bottom, the rivers continued to cover the sinking area 
with their deltas; until finally, the subsidence being in excess, the sea of the 
Middle Molasse gained upon the land, and marine beds were thrown down over the 
dense mass of fresh-water and brackish-water deposit, called the Lower Molasse, 
which had previously accumulated.

FLORA OF THE LOWER MOLASSE.

In part of the Swiss Molasse, which belongs exclusively to the Lower Miocene 
period, the number of plants has been estimated at more than 500 species, 
somewhat exceeding those which were before enumerated as occurring in the two 
upper divisions. The Swiss Lower Miocene may best be studied on the northern 
borders of the Lake of Geneva, between Lausanne and Vevay, where the contiguous 
villages of Monod and Rivaz are situated. The strata there, which I have myself 
examined, consist of alternations of conglomerate, sandstone, and finely 
laminated marls with fossil plants. A small stream falls in a succession of 
cascades over the harder beds of pudding-stone, which resist, while the 
sandstone and plant-bearing shales and marls give way. From the latter no less 
than 193 species of plants have been obtained by the exertions of MM. Heer and 
Gaudin, and they are considered to afford a true type of the vegetation of the 
Lower Miocene formations of Switzerland-- a vegetation departing farther in its 
character from that now flourishing in Europe than any of the higher members of 
the series before alluded to, and yet displaying so much affinity to the flora 
of Oeningen as to make it natural for the botanist to refer the whole to one and 
the same Miocene period. There are, indeed, no less than 81 species of these 
Older Miocene plants which pass up into the flora of Oeningen.

This fact is important as bearing on the propriety of classing the Lower Molasse 
of Switzerland as belonging to the Miocene rather than to the latter part of the 
Eocene period. There are, indeed, so many types among the fossils, both specific 
and generic, which have a wide range through the whole of the Molasse, that a 
unity of character is thereby stamped on the whole flora, in spite of the 
contrast between the plants of the uppermost and lowest formations, or between 
Oeningen and Monod. The proofs of a warmer climate, and the excess of 
arborescent over herbaceous plants, and of evergreen trees over deciduous 
species, are characters common to the whole flora, but which are intensified as 
we descend to the inferior deposits.

(FIGURE 151. Sabal major, Unger sp. Vevay. Lower Miocene; Heer, Plate 41.)

Nearly all the plants at Monod are contained in three layers of marl separated 
by two of soft sandstone. The thickness of the marls is ten feet, and vegetable 
matter predominates so much in some layers as to form an imperfect lignite. One 
bed is filled with large leaves of a species of fig (Ficus populina), and of a 
hornbeam (Carpinus grandis), the strength of the wind having probably been great 
when they were blown into the lake; whereas another contiguous layer contains 
almost exclusively smaller leaves, indicating, apparently, a diminished strength 
in the wind. Some of the upper beds at Monod abound in leaves of Proteaceae, 
Cyperaceae, and ferns, while in some of the lower ones Sequoia, Cinnamomum, and 
Sparganium are common. In one bed of sandstone the trunk of a large palm-tree 
was found unaccompanied by other fossils, and near Vevay, in the same series of 
Lower Miocene strata, the leaves of a palm of the genus Sabal (Figure 151), a 
genus now proper to America, were obtained.

Among other genera of the same class is a Flabellaria occurring near Lausanne, 
and a magnificent Phoenicites allied to the date palm. When these plants 
flourished the climate must have been much hotter than now. The Alps were no 
doubt much lower, and the palms now found fossil in strata elevated 2000 feet 
above the sea grew nearly at the sea-level, as is demonstrated by the brackish-
water character of some of the beds into which they were carried by winds or 
rivers from the adjoining coast.

(FIGURE 152. Banksia.
a. Fruit of fossil Banksia.
b. Leaf of Banksia Deekiana.)

In the same plant-bearing deposits of the Lower Molasse in Switzerland leaves 
have been found which have been ascribed to the order Proteaceae already spoken 
of as well represented in the Oeningen beds (see Chapter 14). The Proteas and 
other plants of this family now flourish at the Cape of Good Hope; while the 
Banksias, and a set of genera distinct from those of Africa, grow most 
luxuriantly in the southern and temperate parts of Australia. They were probably 
inhabitants, says Heer, of dry hilly ground, and the stiff leathery character of 
their leaves must have been favourable to their preservation, allowing them to 
float on a river for great distances without being injured, and then to sink, 
when water-logged, to the bottom. It has been objected that the fruit of the 
Proteaceae is of so tough and enduring a texture that it ought to have been more 
commonly met with; but in the first place we must not forget the numerous cones 
found in the Eocene strata of Sheppey, which all admit to be proteaceous and to 
belong to at least two species (see Chapter 14). Secondly, besides the fruit of 
Hakea before mentioned (Chapter 14), Heer found associated with fossil leaves, 
having the exact form and nervation of Banksia, fruit precisely such as may have 
come from a cone of that plant, and lately he has received another similar fruit 
from the Lower Miocene strata of Lucerne. They may have fallen out of a decayed 
cone in the same way as often happens to the seeds of the spruce fir, Pinus 
abies, found scattered over the ground in our woods. It is a known fact that 
among the living Proteaceae the cones are very firmly attached to the branches, 
so that the seeds drop out without the cone itself falling to the ground, and 
this may perhaps be the reason why, in some instances in which fossil seeds have 
been found, no traces of the cone have been observed.

(FIGURE 153. Sequoia Langsdorfii. Ad. Brong., 1/3 natural size. Rivaz, near 
Lausanne; Heer, Plate 21 Figure 4. Upper and Lower Miocene and Lower Pliocene, 
Val d'Arno.
a. Branch with leaves.
b. Young cone.)

Among the Coniferae the Sequoia here figured is common at Rivaz, and is one of 
the most universal plants in the Lowest Miocene of Switzerland, while it also 
characterises the Miocene Brown Coals of Germany and certain beds of the Val 
d'Arno, which I have called Older Pliocene, Chapter 13.

(FIGURE 154. Lastraea stiriaca, Unger; Heer's Flora, Plate 143 Figure 8. Natural 
size. Lower and Upper Miocene, Switzerland.
a. Specimen from Monod, showing the position of the sori on the middle of the 
tertiary nerves.
b. More common appearance, where the sori remain and the nerves are 
obliterated.)

Among the ferns met with in profusion at Monod is the Lastraea stiriaca, Unger, 
which has a wide range in the Miocene period from strata of the age of Oeningen 
to the lowest part of the Swiss Molasse. In some specimens, as shown in Figure 
154, the fructification is distinctly seen.

(FIGURE 155. Cinnamomum Rossmassleri, Heer. Daphnogene cinnamomifolia, Unger. 
Upper and Lower Miocene, Switzerland and Germany.)

Among the laurels several species of Cinnamomum are very conspicuous. Besides 
the C. polymorphum, before figured, Chapter 14, another species also ranges from 
the Lower to the Upper Molasse of Switzerland, and is very characteristic of 
different deposits of Brown Coal in Germany. It has been called Cinnamomum 
Rossmassleri by Heer (see Figure 155). The leaves are easily recognised as 
having two side veins, which run up uninterruptedly to their point.

AMERICAN CHARACTER OF THE FLORA.

If we consider not merely the number of species but those plants which 
constitute the mass of the Lower Miocene vegetation, we find the European part 
of the fossil flora very much less prominent than in the Oeningen beds, while 
the foreground is occupied by American forms, by evergreen oaks, maples, 
poplars, planes, Liquidambar, Robinia, Sequoia, Taxodium, and ternate-leaved 
pines. There is also a much greater fusion of the characters now belonging to 
distinct botanical provinces than in the Upper Miocene flora, and we shall find 
this fusion still more strikingly exemplified as we go back to the antecedent 
Eocene and Cretaceous periods.

Professor Heer has advocated the doctrine, first advanced by Unger to explain 
the large number of American genera in the Miocene flora of Europe, that the 
present basin of the Atlantic was occupied by land over which the Miocene flora 
could pass freely. But other able botanists have shown that it is far more 
probable that the American plants came from the east and not from the west, and 
instead of reaching Europe by the shortest route over an imaginary Atlantis, 
migrated in an opposite direction, crossing the whole of Asia.

ARCTIC MIOCENE FLORA.

But when we indulge in speculations as to the geographical origin of the Miocene 
plants of Central Europe, we must take into account the discoveries recently 
made of a rich terrestrial flora having flourished in the Arctic Regions in the 
Miocene period from which many species may have migrated from a common centre so 
as to reach the present continents of Europe, Asia, and America. Professor Heer 
has examined the various collections of fossil plants that have been obtained in 
North Greenland (latitude 70 degrees), Iceland, Spitzbergen, and other parts of 
the Arctic regions, and has determined that they are of Miocene age and indicate 
a temperate climate. (Heer "Miocene baltische Flora" and "Fossil-flora von 
Alaska" 1869.) Including the collections recently brought from Greenland by Mr. 
Whymper, the Arctic Miocene flora now comprises 194 species, and that of 
Greenland 137 species, of which 46, or exactly one-third, are identical with 
plants found in the Miocene beds of Central Europe. Considerably more than half 
the number are trees, which is the more remarkable since, at the present day, 
trees do not exist in any part of Greenland even 10 degrees farther south.

More than thirty species of Coniferae have been found, including several 
Sequoias (allied to the gigantic Wellingtonia of California), with species of 
Thujopsis and Salisburia now peculiar to Japan. There are also beeches, oaks, 
planes, poplars, maples, walnuts, limes, and even a magnolia, two cones of which 
have recently been obtained, proving that this splendid evergreen not only lived 
but ripened its fruit within the Arctic circle. Many of the limes, planes, and 
oaks were large-leaved species, and both flowers and fruit, besides immense 
quantities of leaves, are in many cases preserved. Among the shrubs were many 
evergreens, as Andromeda, and two extinct genera, Daphnogene and M'Clintockia, 
with fine leathery leaves, together with hazel, blackthorn, holly, logwood, and 
hawthorn. A species of Zamia (Zamites) grew in the swamps, with Potamogeton, 
Sparganium, and Menyanthes, while ivy and vines twined around the forest trees 
and broad-leaved ferns grew beneath their shade. Even in Spitzbergen, as far 
north as latitude 78 degrees 56', no less than ninety-five species of fossil 
plants have been obtained, including Taxodium of two species, hazel, poplar, 
alder, beech, plane-tree, and lime. Such a vigorous growth of trees within 12 
degrees of the pole, where now a dwarf willow and a few herbaceous plants form 
the only vegetation, and where the ground is covered with almost perpetual snow 
and ice, is truly remarkable.

The identity of so many of the fossils with Miocene species of Central Europe 
and Italy not only proves that the climate of Greenland was much warmer than it 
is now, but also renders it probable that a much more uniform climate prevailed 
over the entire northern hemisphere. This is also indicated by the whole 
character of the Upper Miocene flora of Central Europe, which does not 
necessitate a mean temperature very much greater than exists at present, if we 
suppose such absence of winter cold as is proper to insular climates. Professor 
Heer believes that the mean temperature of North Greenland must have been at 
least 30 degrees higher than at present, while an addition of 10 degrees to the 
mean temperature of Central Europe would probably be as much as was required. 
The chief locality where this wonderful flora is preserved is at Atanekerdluk in 
North Greenland (latitude 70 degrees), on a hill at an elevation of about 1200 
feet above the sea. There is here a considerable succession of sedimentary 
strata pierced by volcanic rocks. Fossil plants occur in all the beds, and the 
erect trunks as thick as a man's body which are sometimes found, together with 
the abundance of specimens of flowers and fruit in good preservation, 
sufficiently prove that the plants grew where they are now found. At Disco 
island and other localities on the same part of the coast, good coal is 
abundant, interstratified with beds of sandstone, in some of which fossil plants 
have also been found, similar to those at Atanekerdluk.

LOWER MIOCENE, BELGIUM.

(FIGURE 156. Leda (Nucula) Deshayesiana, Nyst.)

(FIGURE 157. Vanessa pluto; natural size. Lower Miocene, Radaboj, Croatia.)

The Upper Miocene Bolderberg beds, mentioned in Chapter 14, rest on a Lower 
Miocene formation called the Rupelian of Dumont. This formation is best seen at 
the villages of Rupelmonde and Boom, ten miles south of Antwerp, on the banks of 
the Scheldt and near the junction with it of a small stream called the Rupel. A 
stiff clay abounding in fossils is extensively worked at the above localities 
for making tiles. It attains a thickness of about 100 feet, and though very 
different in age, much resembles in mineral character the "London clay," 
containing, like it, septaria or concretions of argillaceous limestone traversed 
by cracks in the interior, which are filled with calc-spar. The shells, 
referable to about forty species, have been described by MM. Nyst and De 
Koninck. Among them Leda (or Nucula) Deshayesiana (see Figure 156) is by far the 
most abundant; a fossil unknown as yet in the English tertiary strata, but when 
young much resembling Leda amygdaloides of the London Clay proper (see Figure 
213 Chapter 16). Among other characteristic shells are Pecten Hoeninghausii, and 
a species of Cassidaria, and several of the genus Pleurotoma. Not a few of these 
testacea agree with English Eocene species, such as Actaeon simulatus, Sowb, 
Cancellaria evulsa, Brander, Corbula pisum (Figure 157), and Nautilus (Aturia) 
ziczac. They are accompanied by many teeth of sharks, as Lamna contortidens, 
Ag., Oxyrhinaxiphodon, Ag., Carcharodon angustidens (see Figure 196 Chapter 16), 
Ag., and other fish, some of them common to the Middle Eocene strata.

KLEYN SPAWEN BEDS.

The succession of the Lower Miocene strata of Belgium can be best studied in the 
environs of Kleyn Spawen, a village situated about seven miles west of 
Maestricht, in the old province of Limburg in Belgium. In that region, about 200 
species of testacea, marine and fresh-water, have been obtained, with many 
foraminifera and remains of fish. In none of the Belgian Lower Miocene strata 
could I find any nummulites; and M. d'Archiac had previously observed that these 
foraminifera characterise his "Lower Tertiary Series," as contrasted with the 
Middle, and they therefore serve as a good test of age between Eocene and 
Miocene, at least in Belgium and the North of France. (D'Archiac Monograph pages 
79, 100.) Between the Bolderberg beds and the Rupelian clay there is a great gap 
in Belgium, which seems, according to M. Beyrich, to be filled up in the North 
of Germany by what he calls the Sternberg beds, and which, had Dumont found them 
in Belgium, he might probably have termed Upper Rupelian.

LOWER MIOCENE OF GERMANY.

RUPELIAN CLAY OF HERMSDORF, NEAR BERLIN.

Professor Beyrich has described a mass of clay, used for making tiles, within 
seven miles of the gates of Berlin, near the village of Hermsdorf, rising up 
from beneath the sands with which that country is chiefly overspread. This clay 
is more than forty feet thick, of a dark bluish-grey colour, and, like that of 
Rupelmonde, contains septaria. Among other shells, the Leda Deshayesiana, before 
mentioned (Figure 156), abounds, together with many species of Pleurotoma, 
Voluta, etc., a certain proportion of the fossils being identical in species 
with those of Rupelmonde.

MAYENCE BASIN.

An elaborate description has been published by Dr. F. Sandberger of the Mayence 
tertiary area, which occupies a tract from five to twelve miles in breadth, 
extending for a great distance along the left bank of the Rhine from Mayence to 
the neighbourhood of Manheim, and which is also found to the east, north, and 
south-west of Frankfort. M. De Koninck, of Liege, first pointed out to me that 
the purely marine portion of the deposit contained many species of shells common 
to the Kleyn Spawen beds, and to the clay of Rupelmonde, near Antwerp. Among 
these he mentioned Cassidaria depressa, Tritonium argutum, Brander (T. 
flandricum, De Koninck), Tornatella simulata, Aporrhais Sowbyi, Leda 
Deshayesiana (Figure 156), Corbula pisum, (Figure 158) and others.

LOWER MIOCENE BEDS OF CROATIA.

The Brown Coal of Radaboj, near Angram in Croatia, not far from the borders of 
Styria, is covered, says Von Buch, by beds containing the marine shells of the 
Vienna basin, or, in other words, by Upper Miocene or Falunian strata. They 
appear to correspond in age to the Mayence basin, or to the Rupelian strata of 
Belgium. They have yielded more than 200 species of fossil plants, described by 
the late Professor Unger. These plants are well preserved in a hard marlstone, 
and contain several palms; among them the Sabal, Figure 151, and another genus 
allied to the date-palm Phoenicites spectabilis. The only abundant plant among 
the Radaboj fossils which is characteristic of the Upper Miocene period is the 
Populus mutabilis, whereas no less than fifty of the Radaboj species are common 
to the more ancient flora of the Lower Molasse of Switzerland.

The insect fauna is very rich, and, like the plants, indicates a more tropical 
climate than do the fossils of Oeningen presently to be mentioned. There are ten 
species of Termites, or white ants, some of gigantic size, and large dragon-
flies with speckled wings, like those of the Southern States in North America; 
there are also grasshoppers of considerable size, and even the Lepidoptera are 
not unrepresented. In one instance, the pattern of a butterfly's wing has 
escaped obliteration in the marl-stone of Radaboj; and when we reflect on the 
remoteness of the time from which it has been faithfully transmitted to us, this 
fact may inspire the reader with some confidence as to the reliable nature of 
the characters which other insects of a more durable texture, such as the 
beetles, may afford for specific determination. The Vanessa above figured 
retains, says Heer, some of its colours, and corresponds with Vanessa Hadena of 
India.

Professor Beyrich has made known to us the existence of a long succession of 
marine strata in North Germany, which lead by an almost gradual transition from 
beds of Upper Miocene age to others of the age of the base of the Lower Miocene. 
Although some of the German lignites called Brown Coal belong to the upper parts 
of this series, the most important of them are of Lower Miocene date, as, for 
example, those of the Siebengebirge, near Bonn, which are associated with 
volcanic rocks.

Professor Beyrich confines the term "Miocene" to those strata which agree in age 
with the faluns of Touraine, and he has proposed the term "Oligocene" for those 
older formations called Lower Miocene in this work.

LOWER MIOCENE OF ITALY.

In the hills of which the Superga forms a part there is a great series of 
Tertiary strata which pass downward into the Lower Miocene. Even in the Superga 
itself there are some fossil plants which, according to Heer, have never been 
found in Switzerland so high as the marine Molasse, such as Banksia longifolia, 
and Carpinus grandis. In several parts of the Ligurian Apennines, as at Dego and 
Carcare, the Lower Miocene appears, containing some nummulites, and at Cadibona, 
north of Savona, fresh-water strata of the same age occur, with dense beds of 
lignite inclosing remains of the Anthracotherium magnum and Anthracotherium 
minimum, besides other mammalia enumerated by Gastaldi. In these beds a great 
number of the Lower Miocene plants of Switzerland have been discovered.

LOWER MIOCENE OF ENGLAND-- HEMPSTEAD BEDS.

We have already stated that the Upper Miocene formation is nowhere represented 
in the British Isles; but strata referable to the Lower Miocene period are found 
both in England, Scotland, and Ireland. In the Hampshire basin these occupy a 
very small superficial area, having been discovered by the late Edward Forbes at 
Hempstead near Yarmouth, in the northern part of the Isle of Wight, where they 
are 170 feet thick, and rich in characteristic marine shells. They overlie the 
uppermost of an extensive series of Eocene deposits of marine, brackish, and 
fresh-water formations, which rest on the Chalk and terminate upward in strata 
corresponding in age to the Paris gypsum, and containing the same extinct genera 
of quadrupeds, Palaeotherium, Anoplotherium, and others which Cuvier first 
described. The following is the succession of these Lower Miocene strata, most 
of them exposed in a cliff east of Yarmouth:

(FIGURE 158. Corbula pisum. Hempstead Beds, Isle of Wight.)

(FIGURE 159. Cyrena semistriata. Hempstead Beds.)

1. The uppermost or Corbula beds, consisting of marine sands and clays, contain 
Voluta Rathieri, a characteristic Lower Miocene shell; Corbula pisum (Figure 
158), a species common to the Upper Eocene clay of Barton; Cyrena semistriata 
(Figure 159), several Cerithia, and other shells peculiar to this series.

(FIGURE 160. Cerithium plicatum, Lam., Hempstead.)

(FIGURE 161. Cerithium elegans. Hempstead.)

(FIGURE 162. Rissoa Chastelii, Nyst, sp. Hempstead, Isle of Wight.)

(FIGURE 163. Paludina lenta. Hempstead Bed.)

2. Next below are fresh-water and estuary marls and carbonaceous clays in the 
brackish-water portion of which are found abundantly Cerithium plicatum, Lam. 
(Figure 160), Cerithium elegans (Figure 161), and Cerithium tricinctum; also 
Rissoa Chastelii (Figure 162), a very common Kleyn Spawen shell, and which 
occurs in each of the four subdivisions of the Hempstead series down to its 
base, where it passes into the Bembridge beds. In the fresh-water portion of the 
same beds Paludina lenta (Figure 163) occurs; a shell identified by some 
conchologists with a species now living, Paludina unicolor; also several species 
of Lymneus, Planorbis, and Unio.

3. The next series, or middle fresh-water and estuary marls, are distinguished 
by the presence of Melania fasciata, Paludina lenta, and clays with Cypris; the 
lowest bed contains Cyrena semistriata (Figure 159), mingled with Cerithia and a 
panopaea.

4. The lower fresh-water and estuary marls contain Melania costata, Sowerby, 
Melanopsis, etc. The bottom bed is carbonaceous, and called the "Black band," in 
which Rissoa Chastelii (Figure 162), before alluded to, is common. This bed 
contains a mixture of Hempstead shells with those of the underlying Upper Eocene 
or Bembridge series. The mammalia, among which is Hyopotamus bovinus, differ, so 
far as they are known, from those of the Bembridge beds. Among the plants, 
Professor Heer has recognised four species common to the lignite of Bovey 
Tracey, a Lower Miocene formation presently to be described: namely, Sequoia 
Couttsiae, Heer; Andromeda reticulata, Ettings.; Nelumbium (Nymphoea) doris, 
Heer; and Carpolithes Websteri, Brong. (Pengelly, preface to The Lignite 
Formation of Bovey Tracey page 17. London 1863.) The seed-vessels of Chara 
medicaginula, Brong, and Chara helicteres are characteristic of the Hempstead 
beds generally.

The Hyopotamus belongs to the hog tribe, or the same family as the 
Anthracotherium, of which seven species, varying in size from the hippopotamus 
to the wild boar, have been found in Italy and other part of Europe associated 
with the lignites of the Lower Miocene period.

LIGNITES AND CLAYS OF BOVEY TRACEY, DEVONSHIRE.

Surrounded by the granite and other rocks of the Dartmoor hills in Devonshire, 
is a formation of clay, sand, and lignite, long known to geologists as the Bovey 
Coal formation, respecting the age of which, until the year 1861, opinions were 
very unsettled. This deposit is situated at Bovey Tracey, a village distant 
eleven miles from Exeter in a south-west, and about as far from Torquay in a 
north-west direction. The strata extend over a plain nine miles long, and they 
consist of the materials of decomposed and worn-down granite and vegetable 
matter, and have evidently filled up an ancient hollow or lake-like expansion of 
the valleys of the Bovey and Teign.

The lignite is of bad quality for economical purposes, as there is a great 
admixture in it of iron pyrites, and it emits a sulphurous odour, but it has 
been successfully applied to the baking of pottery, for which some of the fine 
clays are well adapted. Mr. Pengelly has confirmed Sir H. De la Beche's opinion 
that much of the upper portion of this old lacustrine formation has been removed 
by denudation. (Philosophical Transactions 1863. Paper by W. Pengelly F.R.S. and 
Dr. Oswald Heer.)

At the surface is a dense covering of clay and gravel with angular stones 
probably of the Post-pliocene period, for in the clay are three species of 
willow and the dwarf birch, Betula nana, indicating a climate colder than that 
of Devonshire at the present day.

Below this are Lower Miocene strata about 300 feet in thickness, in the upper 
part of which are twenty-six beds of lignite, clay, and sand, and at their base 
a ferruginous quartzose sand, varying in thickness from two to twenty-seven 
feet. Below this sand are forty-five beds of alternating lignite and clay. No 
shells or bones of mammalia, and no insect, with the exception of one fragment 
of a beetle (Buprestis); in a word, no organic remains, except plants, have as 
yet been found. These plants occur in fourteen of the beds-- namely, in two of 
the clays, and the rest in the lignites. One of the beds is a perfect mat of the 
debris of a coniferous tree, called by Heer Sequoia Couttsiae, intermixed with 
leaves of ferns. The same Sequoia (before mentioned as a Hempstead fossil) is 
spread through all parts of the formation, its cones, and seeds, and branches of 
every age being preserved. It is a species supplying a link between Sequoia 
Langsdorfii (see Figure 153) and Sequoia Sternbergi, the widely spread fossil 
representatives of the two living trees Sequoia sempervirens and Sequoia 
gigantea (or Wellingtonia), both now confined to California. Another bed is full 
of the large rhizomes of ferns, while two others are rich in dicotyledonous 
leaves. In all, Professor Heer enumerates forty-nine species of plants, twenty 
of which are common to the Miocene beds of the Continent, a majority of them 
being characteristic of the Lower Miocene. The new species, also of Bovey, are 
allied to plants of the older Miocene deposits of Switzerland, Germany, and 
other Continental countries. The grape-stones of two species of vine occur in 
the clays, and leaves of the fig and seeds of a water-lily. The oak and laurel 
have supplied many leaves. Of the triple-nerved laurels several are referred to 
Cinnamomum. There are leaves also of a palm of which the genus is not 
determined. Leaves also of proteaceous forms, like some of the Continental 
fossils before mentioned, occur, and ferns like the well-known Lastraea stiriaca 
(Figure 154), displaying at Bovey, as in Switzerland, its fructification.

The croziers of some of the young ferns are very perfect, and were at first 
mistaken by collectors for shells of the genus Planorbis. On the whole, the 
vegetation of Bovey implies the existence of a sub-tropical climate in 
Devonshire, in the Lower Miocene period.

SCOTLAND: ISLE OF MULL.

In the sea-cliffs forming the headland of Ardtun, on the west coast of Mull, in 
the Hebrides, several bands of tertiary strata containing leaves of 
dicotyledonous plants were discovered in 1851 by the Duke of Argyll. (Quarterly 
Geological Journal 1851 page 19.) From his description it appears that there are 
three leaf-beds, varying in thickness from 1 1/2 to 5 1/2 feet, which are 
interstratified with volcanic tuff and trap, the whole mass being about 130 feet 
in thickness. A sheet of basalt 40 feet thick covers the whole; and another 
columnar bed of the same rock, ten feet thick, is exposed at the bottom of the 
cliff. One of the leaf-beds consists of a compressed mass of leaves 
unaccompanied by any stems, as if they had been blown into a marsh where a 
species of Equisetum grew, of which the remains are plentifully imbedded in 
clay.

It is supposed by the Duke of Argyll that this formation was accumulated in a 
shallow lake or marsh in the neighbourhood of a volcano, which emitted showers 
of ashes and streams of lava. The tufaceous envelope of the fossils may have 
fallen into the lake from the air as volcanic dust, or have been washed down 
into it as mud from the adjoining land. Even without the aid of organic remains 
we might have decided that the deposit was newer than the chalk, for chalk-
flints containing cretaceous fossils were detected by the duke in the principal 
mass of volcanic ashes or tuff. (Quarterly Geological Journal 1851 page 90.)

The late Edward Forbes observed that some of the plants of this formation 
resembled those of Croatia, described by Unger, and his opinion has been 
confirmed by Professor Heer, who found that the conifer most prevalent was the 
Sequoia Langsdorfii (Figure 153), also Corylus grossedentata, a Lower Miocene 
species of Switzerland and of Menat in Auvergne. There is likewise a plane-tree, 
the leaves of which seem to agree with those of Platanus aceroides (Figure 141 
Chapter 14), and a fern which is as yet peculiar to Mull, Filicites hebridica, 
Forbes.

These interesting discoveries in Mull led geologists to suspect that the basalt 
of Antrim, in Ireland, and of the celebrated Giant's Causeway, might be of the 
same age. The volcanic rocks that overlie the chalk, and some of the strata 
associated with and interstratified between masses of basalt, contain leaves of 
dicotyledonous plants, somewhat imperfect, but resembling the beech, oak, and 
plane, and also some coniferae of the genera pine and Sequoia. The general 
dearth of strata in the British Isles, intermediate in age between the formation 
of the Eocene and Pliocene periods, may arise, says Professor Forbes, from the 
extent of dry land which prevailed in that vast interval of time. If land 
predominated, the only monuments we are likely ever to find of Miocene date are 
those of lacustrine and volcanic origin, such as the Bovey Coal in Devonshire, 
the Ardtun beds in Mull, or the lignites and associated basalts in Antrim.

LOWER MIOCENE, UNITED STATES: NEBRASKA.

In the territory of Nebraska, on the Upper Missouri, near the Platte River, 
latitude 42 degrees N., a tertiary formation occurs, consisting of white 
limestone, marls, and siliceous clay, described by Dr. D. Dale Owen (David Dale 
Owen Geological Survey of Wisconsin etc. Philadelphia 1852.), in which many 
bones of extinct quadrupeds, and of chelonians of land or fresh-water forms, are 
met with. Among these, Dr. Leidy describes a gigantic quadruped, called by him 
Titanotherium, nearly allied to the Palaeotherium, but larger than any of the 
species found in the Paris gypsum. With these are several species of the genus 
Oreodon, Leidy, uniting the characters of pachyderms and ruminants also; 
Eucrotaphus, another new genus of the same mixed character; two species of 
rhinoceros of the sub-genus Acerotherium, a Lower Miocene form of Europe before 
mentioned; two species of Archaeotherium, a pachyderm allied to Chaeropotamus 
and Hyracotherium; also Paebrotherium, an extinct ruminant allied to 
Dorcatherium, Kaup; also Agriochoerus, of Leidy, a ruminant allied to 
Merycopotamus of Falconer and Cautley; and, lastly, a large carnivorous animal 
of the genus Machairodus, the most ancient example of which in Europe occurs in 
the Lower Miocene strata of Auvergne, but of which some species are found in 
Pliocene deposits. The turtles are referred to the genus Testudo, but have some 
affinity to Emys. On the whole, the Nebraska formation is probably newer than 
the Paris gypsum, and referable to the Lower Miocene period, as above defined.


CHAPTER XVI.

EOCENE FORMATIONS.

Eocene Areas of North of Europe.
Table of English and French Eocene Strata.
Upper Eocene of England.
Bembridge Beds.
Osborne or St. Helen's Beds.
Headon Series.
Fossils of the Barton Sands and Clays.
Middle Eocene of England.
Shells, Nummulites, Fish and Reptiles of the Bracklesham Beds and Bagshot Sands.
Plants of Alum Bay and Bournemouth.
Lower Eocene of England.
London Clay Fossils.
Woolwich and Reading Beds formerly called "Plastic Clay."
Fluviatile Beds underlying Deep-sea Strata.
Thanet Sands.
Upper Eocene Strata of France.
Gypseous Series of Montmartre and Extinct Quadrupeds.
Fossil Footprints in Paris Gypsum.
Imperfection of the Record.
Calcaire Silicieux.
Gres de Beauchamp.
Calcaire Grossier.
Miliolite Limestone.
Soissonnais Sands.
Lower Eocene of France.
Nummulitic Formations of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Eocene Strata in the United States.
Gigantic Cetacean.

EOCENE AREAS OF THE NORTH OF EUROPE.

(FIGURE 164. Map of the principal Eocene areas of North-western Europe, showing:
Shaded dotted: Hypogene rocks and strata older than the Devonian.
Shaded horizontal lines: Eocene formations.
NB.-- the space left blank is occupied by fossiliferous formations from the 
Devonian to the chalk inclusive.)

The strata next in order in the descending series are those which I term Eocene.

In the map in Figure 164, the position of several Eocene areas in the north of 
Europe is pointed out. When this map was constructed I classed as the newer part 
of the Eocene those Tertiary strata which have been described in the last 
chapter as Lower Miocene, and to which M. Beyrich has given the name of 
Oligocene. None of these occur in the London Basin, and they occupy in that of 
Hampshire, as we have seen in Chapter 15, too insignificant a superficial area 
to be noticed in a map on this scale. They fill a larger space in the Paris 
Basin between the Seine and the Loire, and constitute also part of the northern 
limits of the area of the Netherlands which are shaded in the map.

TABLE 16.1. TABLE OF ENGLISH AND FRENCH EOCENE STRATA.

COLUMN 1: NAME OF STRATA.

COLUMN 2: ENGLISH SUBDIVISIONS.

COLUMN 3: FRENCH EQUIVALENTS.

UPPER EOCENE.

A.1: Bembridge series, Isle of Wight: Gypseous series of Montmartre.

A.2: Osborne or St. Helen's series, Isle of Wight: Calcaire siliceux, or 
Travertin Inferieur.

A.3: Headon series, Isle of Wight: Calcaire siliceux, or Travertin Inferieur.

A.4: Barton series. Sands and clays of Barton Cliff, Hants: Gres de Beauchamp, 
or Sables Moyens.

MIDDLE EOCENE.

B.1: Bracklesham series: Calcaire Grossier.

B.2: Alum Bay and Bournemouth beds: Wanting in France?

B.2: Wanting in England?: Soissonnais Sands, or Lits Coquilliers.

LOWER EOCENE.

C.1: London Clay: Argile de Londres, Cassel, near Dunkirk.

C.2: Woolwich and Reading series: Argile plastique and lignite.

C.3: Thanet sands: Sables de Bracheux.


It is in the northern part of the Isle of Wight that we have the uppermost beds 
of the true Eocene best exhibited-- namely, those which correspond in their 
fossils with the celebrated gypsum of the Paris basin before alluded to in 
Chapter 15 (see Table 16.1). That gypsum has been selected by almost all 
Continental geologists as affording the best line of demarkation between the 
Middle and Lower Tertiary, or, in other words, between the Lower Miocene and 
Eocene formations.

In reference to Table 16.1 I may observe, that the correlation of the French and 
English subdivisions here laid down is often a matter of great doubt and 
difficulty, notwithstanding their geographical proximity. This arises from 
various circumstances, partly from the former prevalence of marine conditions in 
one basin simultaneously with fluviatile or lacustrine in the other, and 
sometimes from the existence of land in one area causing a break or absence of 
all records during a period when deposits may have been in progress in the other 
basin. As bearing on this subject, it may be stated that we have unquestionable 
evidence of oscillations of level shown by the superposition of salt or 
brackish-water strata to fluviatile beds; and those of deep-sea origin to strata 
formed in shallow water. Even if the upward and downward movements were uniform 
in amount and direction, which is very improbable, their effect in producing the 
conversion of sea into land or land into sea would be different, according to 
the previous shape and varying elevation of the land and bottom of the sea. 
Lastly, denudation, marine and subaerial, has frequently caused the absence of 
deposits in one basin of corresponding age to those in the other, and this 
destructive agency has been more than ordinarily effective on account of the 
loose and unconsolidated nature of the sands and clays.

UPPER EOCENE OF ENGLAND.

BEMBRIDGE SERIES, A.1.

These beds are about 120 feet thick, and, as stated in Chapter 15, lie 
immediately under the Hempstead beds, near Yarmouth, in the Isle of Wight, being 
conformable with those Lower Miocene strata. They consist of marls, clays, and 
limestones of fresh-water, brackish, and marine origin. Some of the most 
abundant shells, as Cyrena semistriata var., and Paludina lenta, Figure 163 
Chapter 15, are common to this and to the overlying Hempstead series; but the 
majority of the species are distinct. The following are the subdivisions 
described by the late Professor Forbes:

(FIGURE 165. Melania turritissima, Forbes. Bembridge.)

a. Upper marls, distinguished by the abundance of Melania turritissima, Forbes 
(Figure 165).

(FIGURE 166. Fragment of carapace of Trionyx. Bembridge Beds, Isle of Wight.)

b. Lower marls, characterised by Cerithium mutabile, Cyrena pulchra, etc., and 
by the remains of Trionyx (see Figure 166).

c. Green marls, often abounding in a peculiar species of oyster, and accompanied 
by Cerithium, Mytilus, Arca, nucula, etc.)

(FIGURE 167. Bulimus ellipticus, Sowerby. Bembridge Limestone. 1/2 natural 
size.)

(FIGURE 168. Helix occlusa, Edwards. Bembridge Limestone, Isle of Wight.)

(FIGURE 169. Paludina orbicularis. Bembridge.)

(FIGURE 170. Planorbis discus, Edwards. Bembridge. 1/2 diameter.)

(FIGURE 171. Lymnea longiscata, Brand. Natural size.)

(FIGURE 172. Chara tuberculata, seed-vessel. Bembridge Limestone, Isle of 
Wight.)

d. Bembridge limestones, compact cream-coloured limestones alternating with 
shales and marls, in all of which land-shells are common, especially at Sconce, 
near Yarmouth, as described by Mr. F. Edwards. The Bulimus ellipticus, Figure 
167, and Helix occlusa, Figure 168, are among its best known land-shells. 
Paludina orbicularis, Figure 169, is also of frequent occurrence. One of the 
bands is filled with a little globular Paludina. Among the fresh-water 
pulmonifera, Lymnea longiscata (Figure 171) and Planorbis discus (Figure 170) 
are the most generally distributed: the latter represents or takes the place of 
the Planorbis euomphalus (see Figure 175) of the more ancient Headon series. 
Chara tuberculata (Figure 172) is the characteristic Bembridge gyrogonite or 
seed-vessel.

(FIGURE 173. Anoplotherium commune. Binstead, Isle of Wight.
Lower molar tooth, natural size.)

(FIGURE 174. Palaeotherium magnum, Cuvier.)

(FIGURE 175. Planorbis euomphalus, Sowerby. Headon Hill. 1/2 diameter.)

From this formation on the shores of Whitecliff Bay, Dr. Mantell obtained a fine 
specimen of a fan palm, Flabellaria Lamanonis, Brong., a plant first obtained 
from beds of corresponding age in the suburbs of Paris. The well-known building-
stone of Binstead, near Ryde, a limestone with numerous hollows caused by 
Cyrenae which have disappeared and left the moulds of their shells, belongs to 
this subdivision of the Bembridge series. In the same Binstead stone Mr. Pratt 
and the Reverend Darwin Fox first discovered the remains of mammalia 
characteristic of the gypseous series of Paris, as Palaeotherium magnum (Figure 
174), Palaeotherium medium, Palaeotherium minus, Palaeotherium minimum, 
Palaeotherium curtum, Palaeotherium crassum; also Anoplotherium commune (Figure 
173), Anoplotherium secundarium, Dichobune cervinum, and Chaeropotamus Cuvieri. 
The Palaeothere above alluded to resembled the living tapir in the form of the 
head, and in having a short proboscis, but its molar teeth were more like those 
of the rhinoceros. Palaeotherium magnum was of the size of a horse, three or 
four feet high. The woodcut, Figure 174, is one of the restorations which Cuvier 
attempted of the outline of the living animal, derived from the study of the 
entire skeleton. As the vertical range of particular species of quadrupeds, so 
far as our knowledge extends, is far more limited than that of the testacea, the 
occurrence of so many species at Binstead, agreeing with fossils of the Paris 
gypsum, strengthens the evidence derived from shells and plants of the 
synchronism of the two formations.

OSBORNE OR ST. HELEN'S SERIES, A.2.

This group is of fresh and brackish-water origin, and very variable in mineral 
character and thickness. Near Ryde, it supplies a freestone much used for 
building, and called by Professor Forbes the Nettlestone grit. In one part 
ripple-marked flagstones occur, and rocks with fucoidal markings. The Osborne 
beds are distinguished by peculiar species of Paludina, Melania, and Melanopsis, 
as also of Cypris and the seeds of Chara.

HEADON SERIES A.3.

These beds are seen both in Whitecliff Bay, Headon Hill, and Alum Bay, or at the 
east and west extremities of the Isle of Wight. The upper and lower portions are 
fresh-water, and the middle of mixed origin, sometimes brackish and marine. 
Everywhere Planorbis euomphalus, Figure 175, characterises the fresh-water 
deposits, just as the allied form, Planorbis discus, Figure 170, does the 
Bembridge limestone. The brackish-water beds contain Potamomya plana, Cerithium 
mutabile, and Potamides cinctus (Figure 37 Chapter 3), and the marine beds Venus 
(or Cytherea) incrassata, a species common to the Limburg beds and Gres de 
Fontainebleau, or the Lower Miocene series. The prevalence of salt-water remains 
is most conspicuous in some of the central parts of the formation.

(FIGURE 176. Helix labyrinthica, Say. Headon Hill, Isle of Wight; and Hordwell 
Cliff, Hants-- also recent.)

(FIGURE 177. Neritina concava, Sowerby. Headon series.)

(FIGURE 178. Lymnea caudata, Edw. Headon series.)

(FIGURE 179. Cerithium concavum, Sowerby. Headon series.)

Among the shells which are widely distributed through the Headon series are 
Neritina concava (Figure 177), Lymnea caudata (Figure 178), and Cerithium 
concavum (Figure 179). Helix labyrinthica, Say (Figure 176), a land-shell now 
inhabiting the United States, was discovered in this series by Mr. Searles Wood 
in Hordwell Cliff. It is also met with in Headon Hill, in the same beds. At 
Sconce, in the Isle of Wight, it occurs in the Bembridge series, and affords a 
rare example of an Eocene fossil of a species still living, though, as usual in 
such cases, having no local connection with the actual geographical range of the 
species. The lower and middle portion of the Headon series is also met with in 
Hordwell Cliff (or Hordle, as it is often spelt), near Lymington, Hants. Among 
the shells which abound in this cliff are Paludina lenta and various species of 
Lymnea, Planorbis, Melania, Cyclas, Unio, Potamomya, Dreissena, etc.

Among the chelonians we find a species of Emys, and no less than six species of 
Trionyx; among the saurians an alligator and a crocodile; among the ophidians 
two species of land-snakes (Paleryx, Owen); and among the fish Sir P. Egerton 
and Mr. Wood have found the jaws, teeth, and hard shining scales of the genus 
Lepidosteus, or bony pike of the American rivers. This same genus of fresh-water 
ganoids has also been met with in the Hempstead beds in the Isle of Wight. The 
bones of several birds have been obtained from Hordwell, and the remains of 
quadrupeds of the genera Palaeotherium (Palaeotherium minus), Anoplotherium, 
Anthracotherium, Dichodon, Dichobune, Spalacodon, and Hyaenodon. The latter 
offers, I believe, the oldest known example of a true carnivorous animal in the 
series of British fossils, although I attach very little theoretical importance 
to the fact, because herbivorous species are those most easily met with in a 
fossil state in all save cavern deposits. In another point of view, however, 
this fauna deserves notice. Its geological position is considerably lower than 
that of the Bembridge or Montmartre beds, from which it differs almost as much 
in species as it does from the still more ancient fauna of the Lower Eocene beds 
to be mentioned in the sequel. It therefore teaches us what a grand succession 
of distinct assemblages of mammalia flourished on the earth during the Eocene 
period.

Many of the marine shells of the brackish-water beds of the above series, both 
in the Isle of Wight and Hordwell Cliff, are common to the underlying Barton 
Clay: and, on the other hand, there are some fresh-water shells, such as Cyrena 
obovata, which are common to the Bembridge beds, notwithstanding the 
intervention of the St. Helen's series. The white and green marls of the Headon 
series, and some of the accompanying limestones, often resemble the Eocene 
strata of France in mineral character and colour in so striking a manner as to 
suggest the idea that the sediment was derived from the same region or produced 
contemporaneously under very similar geographical circumstances.

(FIGURE 180. Solenastraea cellulosa, Duncan. Brockenhurst.)

At Brockenhurst, near Lyndhurst, in the New Forest, marine strata have recently 
been found containing fifty-nine shells, of which many have been described by 
Mr. Edwards. These beds rest on the Lower Headon, and are considered as the 
equivalent of the middle part of the Headon series, many of the shells being 
common to the brackish-water or Middle Headon beds of Colwell and Whitecliff 
Bays, such as Cancellaria muricata, Sowerby, Fusus labiatus, Sowerby, etc. In 
these beds at Brockenhurst, corals, ably described by Dr. Duncan, have recently 
been found in abundance and perfection; see Figure 180, Solenastraea cellulosa.

Baron von Konen has pointed out that no less than forty-six out of the fifty-
nine Brockenhurst shells, or a proportion of 78 per cent, agree with species 
occurring in Dumont's Lower Tongrian formation in Belgium. (Quarterly Geological 
Journal volume 20 page 97 1864.) This being the case, we might fairly expect 
that if we had a marine equivalent of the Bembridge series or of the 
contemporaneous Paris gypsum, we should find it to contain a still greater 
number of shells common to the Tongrian beds of Belgium, but the exact 
correlation of these fresh-water groups of France, Belgium, and Britain has not 
yet been fully made out. It is possible that the Tongrian of Dumont may be newer 
than the Bembridge series, and therefore referable to the Lower Miocene. If ever 
the whole series should be complete, we must be prepared to find the marine 
equivalent of the Bembridge beds, or the uppermost Eocene, passing by 
imperceptible shades into the inferior beds of the overlying Miocene strata.

Among the fossils found in the Middle Headon are Cytherea incrassata and 
Cerithium plicatum (Figure 160 Chapter 15). These shells, especially the latter, 
are very characteristic of the Lower Miocene, and their occurrence in the Headon 
series has been cited as an objection to the line proposed to be drawn between 
Miocene and Eocene. But if we were to attach importance to such occasional 
passages, we should soon find that no lines of division could be drawn anywhere, 
for in the present state of our knowledge of the Tertiary series there will 
always be species common to beds above and below our boundary-lines.

BARTON SERIES (SANDS AND CLAYS), A.4 TABLE 16.1.)

(FIGURE 181. Chama squamosa, Eichw. Barton.)

Both in the Isle of Wight, and in Hordwell Cliff, Hants, the Headon beds, above-
mentioned, rest on white sands usually devoid of fossils, and used in the Isle 
of Wight for making glass. In one of these sands Dr. Wright found Chama 
squamosa, a Barton Clay shell, in great plenty, and certain impressions of 
marine shells have been found in sands supposed to be of the same age in 
Whitecliff Bay. These sands have been called Upper Bagshot in the maps of our 
Government Survey, but this identification of a fossiliferous series in the Isle 
of Wight with an unfossiliferous formation in the London Basin can scarcely be 
depended upon. The Barton Clay, which immediately underlies these sands, is seen 
vertical in Alum Bay, Isle of Wight, and nearly horizontal in the cliffs of the 
mainland near Lymington. This clay, together with the Bracklesham beds, 
presently to be described, has been termed Middle Bagshot by the Survey. In 
Barton Cliff, where it attains a thickness of about 300 feet, it is rich in 
marine fossils.

It was formerly confounded with the London Clay, an older Eocene deposit of very 
similar mineral character, to be mentioned below, which contains many shells in 
common, but not more than one-fourth of the whole. In other words, there are 
known at present 247 species in the London Clay and 321 in that of Barton, and 
only 70 common to the two formations. Fifty-six of these have been found in the 
intermediate Bracklesham beds, and the reappearance of the other 14 may imply a 
return of similar conditions, whether of temperature or depth or of a muddy 
argillaceous bottom, common to the two periods of the London and Barton Clays. 
According to M. Hebert, the most characteristic Barton Clay fossils correspond 
to those of the Gres de Beauchamp, or Sables Moyens, of the Paris Basin, but it 
also contains many common to the older Calcaire Grossier.

SHELLS OF THE BARTON CLAY.

(FIGURE 182. Mitra scabra, Sowerby.)

(FIGURE 183. Voluta ambigua, Sol.)

(FIGURE 184. Typhis pungens, Brand.)

(FIGURE 185. Voluta athleta, Sol. Barton and Bracklesham.)

(FIGURE 186. Terebellum fusiforme, Lam. Barton and Bracklesham.)

(FIGURE 187. Terebellum sopita, Brand.)

(FIGURE 188. Cardita sulcata, Brand. Barton.)

(FIGURE 189. Crassatella sulcata, Sowerby. Bracklesham and Barton.)

(FIGURE 190. Nummulites variolaria, Lam. Var. of Nummulites radiata, Sowerby. 
Middle Eocene, Bracklesham Bay.
a. Natural size.
b. Magnified.)

Certain foraminifera called Nummulites begin, when we study the Tertiary 
formations in a descending order, to make their first appearance in these beds. 
A small species called Nummulites variolaria, Figure 190, is found both on the 
Hampshire coast and in beds of the same age in Whitecliff Bay, in the Isle of 
Wight. Several marine shells, such as Corbula pisum (Figure 158), are common to 
the Barton beds and the Hempstead or Lower Miocene series, and a still greater 
number, as before stated, are common to the Headon series.

MIDDLE EOCENE, ENGLAND.

BRACKLESHAM BEDS AND BAGSHOT SANDS (B.1, TABLE 16.1).

(FIGURE 191. Cardita (Venericardia) planicosta, Lam.)

(FIGURE 192. Nummulites (Nummularia) laevigata. Bracklesham. Dixon's Fossils of 
Sussex, Plate 8.
a. Section of nummulite.
b. Group, with an individual showing the exterior of the shell.)

Beneath the Barton Clay we find in the north of the Isle of Wight, both in Alum 
and Whitecliff Bays, a great series of various coloured sands and clays for the 
most part unfossiliferous, and probably of estuarine origin. As some of these 
beds contain Cardita planicosta (Figure 191) they have been identified with the 
marine beds much richer in fossils seen in the coast section in Bracklesham Bay 
near Chichester in Sussex, where the strata consist chiefly of green clayey 
sands with some lignite. Among the Bracklesham fossils besides the Cardita, the 
huge Cerithium giganteum is seen, so conspicuous in the Calcaire Grossier of 
Paris, where it is sometimes two feet in length. The Nummulites laevigata (see 
Figure 192), so characteristic of the lower beds of the Calcaire Grossier in 
France, where it sometimes forms stony layers, as near Compiegne, is very common 
in these beds, together with Nummulites scabra and Nummulites variolaria. Out of 
193 species of testacea procured from the Bagshot and Bracklesham beds in 
England, 126 occur in the Calcaire Grossier in France. It was clearly, 
therefore, coeval with that part of the Parisian series more nearly than with 
any other.

(FIGURE 193. Palaeophis typhoeus, Owen; an Eocene sea-serpent. Bracklesham.
a, b. Vertebra, with long neural spine preserved.
c. Two vertebrae articulated together.)

(FIGURE 194. Defensive spine of Ostracion. Bracklesham.)

(FIGURE 195. Dental plates of Myliobates Edwardsi. Bracklesham Bay.
Dixon's Fossils of Sussex, Plate 8.)

According to tables compiled from the best authorities by Mr. Etheridge, the 
number of mollusca now known from the Bracklesham beds in Great Britain is 393, 
of which no less than 240 are peculiar to this subdivision of the British Eocene 
series, while 70 are common to the Older London Clay, and 140 to the Newer 
Barton Clay. The volutes and cowries of this formation, as well as the lunulites 
and corals, favour the idea of a warm climate having prevailed, which is borne 
out by the discovery of a serpent, Palaeophis typhoeus (see Figure 193), 
exceeding, according to Professor Owen, twenty feet in length, and allied in its 
osteology to the Boa, Python, Coluber, and Hydrus. The compressed form and 
diminutive size of certain caudal vertebrae indicate so much analogy with Hydrus 
as to induce Professor Owen to pronounce this extinct ophidian to have been 
marine. (Palaeontological Society Monograph Reptiles part 2 page 61.) Among the 
companions of the sea-snake of Bracklesham was an extinct crocodile (Gavialis 
Dixoni, Owen), and numerous fish, such as now frequent the seas of warm 
latitudes, as the Ostracion of the family Balistidae, of which a dorsal spine is 
figured (see Figure 194), and gigantic rays of the genus Myliobates (see Figure 
195).

(FIGURE 196. Carcharodon angustidens, Agassiz.)

(FIGURE 197. Otodus obliquus, Agassiz.)

(FIGURE 198. Lamna elegans, Agassiz.)

(FIGURE 199. Galeocerdo latidens, Agassiz.)

The teeth of sharks also, of the genera Carcharodon, Otodus, Lamna, Galeocerdo, 
and others, are abundant. (See Figures 196, 197, 198, 199.)

MARINE SHELLS OF BRACKLESHAM BEDS.

ALUM BAY AND BOURNEMOUTH BEDS. (LOWER BAGSHOT OF ENGLISH SURVEY), B.2, TABLE 
16.1.)

(FIGURE 200. Pleurotoma attenuata, Sowerby.)

(FIGURE 201. Voluta Selseiensis, Edwards.)

(FIGURE 202. Turritella multisulcata, Lam.)

(FIGURE 203. Lucina serrata, Sowerby. Magnified.)

(FIGURE 204. Conus deperditus, Brug.)

To that great series of sands and clays which intervene between the equivalents 
of the Bracklesham Beds and the London Clay or Lower Eocene, our Government 
Survey has given the name of the Lower Bagshot sands, for they are supposed to 
agree in age with the inferior unfossiliferous sands of the country round 
Bagshot in the London Basin. This part of the series is finely exposed in the 
vertical beds of Alum bay, in the Isle of Wight, and east and west of 
Bournemouth, on the south coast of Hampshire. In some of the close and white 
compact clays of this locality, there are not only dicotyledonous leaves, but 
numerous fronds of ferns allied to Gleichenia which are well preserved with 
their fruit.

None of the beds are of great horizontal extent, and there is much cross-
stratification in the sands, and in some places black carbonaceous seams and 
lignite. In the midst of these leaf-beds in Studland Bay, Purbeck shells of the 
genus Unio attest the fresh-water origin of the white clay.

No less than forty species of plants are mentioned by MM. de la Harpe and Gaudin 
from this formation in Hampshire, among which the Proteaceae (Dryandra, etc.) 
and the fig tribe are abundant, as well as the cinnamon and several other 
laurineae, with some papilionaceous plants. On the whole, they remind the 
botanist of the types of subtropical India and Australia. (Heer Climat et 
Vegetation du Pays Tertiaire page 172.)

Heer has mentioned several species which are common to this Alum Bay flora and 
that of Monte Bolca, near Verona, so celebrated for its fossil fish, and where 
the strata contain nummulites and other Middle Eocene fossils. He has 
particularly alluded to Aralia primigenia (of which genus a fruit has since been 
found by Mr. Mitchell at Bournemouth), Daphnogene Veronensis, and Ficus 
granadilla, as among the species common to and characteristic of the Isle of 
Wight and Italian Eocene beds; and he observes that in the flora of this period 
these forms of a temperate climate which constitute a marked feature in the 
European Miocene formations, such as the willow, poplar, birch, alder, elm, 
hornbeam, oak, fir, and pine, are wanting. The American types are also absent, 
or much more feebly represented than in the Miocene period, although fine 
specimens of the fan-palm (Sabal) have been found in these Eocene clays at 
Studland. The number of exotic forms which are common to the Eocene and Miocene 
strata of Europe, like those to be alluded to in the sequel which are common to 
the Eocene and Cretaceous fauna, demonstrate the remoteness of the times in 
which the geographical distribution of living plants originated. A great 
majority of the Eocene genera have disappeared from our temperate climates, but 
not the whole of them; and they must all have exerted some influence on the 
assemblages of species which succeeded them. Many of these last occurring in the 
Upper Miocene are indeed so closely allied to the flora now surviving as to make 
it questionable, even in the opinion of naturalists opposed to the doctrine of 
transmutation, whether they are not genealogically related the one to the other. 

LOWER EOCENE FORMATIONS, ENGLAND.

LONDON CLAY (C.1, TABLE 16.1).

This formation underlies the preceding, and sometimes attains a thickness of 500 
feet. It consists of tenacious brown and bluish-grey clay, with layers of 
concretions called septaria, which abound chiefly in the brown clay, and are 
obtained in sufficient numbers from sea-cliffs near Harwich, and from shoals off 
the coast of Essex and the Isle of Sheppey, to be used for making Roman cement. 
The total number of British fossil mollusca known at present (January, 1870) in 
this formation are 254, of which 166 are peculiar, or not found in other Eocene 
beds in this country. The principal localities of fossils in the London clay are 
Highgate Hill, near London, the Island of Sheppey at the mouth of the Thames, 
and Bognor on the Sussex coast. Out of 133 fossil shells, Mr. Prestwich found 
only 20 to be common to the Calcaire Grossier (from which 600 species have been 
obtained), while 33 are common to the "Lits Coquilliers" (see below), in which 
200 species are known in France.

In the Island of Sheppey near the mouth of the Thames, the thickness of the 
London Clay is estimated by Mr. Prestwich to be more than 500 feet, and it is in 
the uppermost 50 feet that a great number of fossil fruits were obtained, being 
chiefly found on the beach when the sea has washed away the clay of the rapidly 
wasting cliffs.

(FIGURE 205. Nipadites ellipticus, Bowerbank. Fossil fruit of palm, from 
Sheppey.)

Mr. Bowerbank, in a valuable publication on these fossil fruits and seeds, has 
described no less than thirteen fruits of palms of the recent type Nipa, now 
only found in the Molucca and Philippine Islands, and in Bengal (see Figure 
205). In the delta of the Ganges, Dr. Hooker observed the large nuts of Nipa 
fruticans floating in such numbers in the various arms of that great river, as 
to obstruct the paddle-wheels of steamboats. These plants are allied to the 
cocoanut tribe on the one side, and on the other to the Pandanus, or screw-pine. 
There are also met with three species of Anona, or custard-apple; and 
cucurbitaceous fruits (of the gourd and melon family), and fruits of various 
species of Acacia.

Besides fir-cones or fruit of true Coniferae there are cones of Proteaceae in 
abundance, and the celebrated botanist the late Robert Brown pointed out the 
affinity of these to the New Holland types Petrophila and Isopogon. Of the first 
there are about fifty, and of the second thirty described species now living in 
Australia.

(FIGURE 206. Eocene Proteaceous Fruit.
Petrophiloides Richardsoni. London Clay, Sheppey. Natural size.
a. Cone.
b. Section of cone showing the position of the seeds.)

Ettingshausen remarked in 1851 that five of the fossil species from Sheppey, 
named by Bowerbank (Fossil Fruits and Seeds of London Clay Plates 9 and 10.) 
were specimens of the same fruit (see Figure 206), in different states of 
preservation; and Mr. Carruthers, having examined the original specimens now in 
the British Museum, tells me that all these cones from Sheppey may be reduced to 
two species, which have an undoubted affinity to the two existing Australian 
genera above mentioned, although their perfect identity in structure can not be 
made out.

The contiguity of land may be inferred not only from these vegetable 
productions, but also from the teeth and bones of crocodiles and turtles, since 
these creatures, as Dean Conybeare remarked, must have resorted to some shore to 
lay their eggs. Of turtles there were numerous species referred to extinct 
genera. These are, for the most part, not equal in size to the largest living 
tropical turtles. A sea-snake, which must have been thirteen feet long, of the 
genus Palaeophis before mentioned, has also been described by Professor Owen 
from Sheppey, of a different species from that of Bracklesham, and called 
Palaeophis toliapicus. A true crocodile, also, Crocodilus toliapicus, and 
another saurian more nearly allied to the gavial, accompany the above fossils; 
also the relics of several birds and quadrupeds. One of these last belongs to 
the new genus Hyracotherium of Owen, of the hog tribe, allied to Chaeropotamus, 
another is a Lophiodon; a third a pachyderm called Coryphodon eocaenus by Owen, 
larger than any existing tapir. All these animals seem to have inhabited the 
banks of the great river which floated down the Sheppey fruits. They imply the 
existence of a mammiferous fauna antecedent to the period when nummulites 
flourished in Europe and Asia, and therefore before the Alps, Pyrenees, and 
other mountain-chains now forming the backbones of great continents, were raised 
from the deep; nay, even before a part of the constituent rocky masses now 
entering into the central ridges of these chains had been deposited in the sea.

SHELLS OF THE LONDON CLAY.

(FIGURE 207. Voluta nodosa, Sowerby. Highgate.)

(FIGURE 208. Phorus extensus, Sowerby. Highgate.)

(FIGURE 209. Rostellaria (Hippocrenes) ampla, Brander. 1/3 of natural size; also 
found in the Barton clay.)

(FIGURE 210. Nautilus centralis, Sowerby. Highgate.)

(FIGURE 211. Aturia ziczac, Bronn. Syn. Nautilus ziczac, Sowerby. London clay. 
Sheppey.)

(FIGURE 212. Belosepia sepioidea, De Blainv. London clay. Sheppey.)

(FIGURE 213. Leda amygdaloides, Sowerby. Highgate.)

(FIGURE 214. Cyptodon (Axinus) angulatum, Sowerby. London clay. Hornsey.)

(FIGURE 215. Astropecten crispatus, E. Forbes. Sheppey.)

The marine shells of the London Clay confirm the inference derivable from the 
plants and reptiles in favour of a high temperature. Thus many species of Conus 
and Voluta occur, a large Cypraea, C. oviformis, a very large Rostellaria 
(Figure 209), a species of Cancellaria, six species of Nautilus (Figure 211), 
besides other Cephalopoda of extinct genera, one of the most remarkable of which 
is the Belosepia (Figure 212). Among many characteristic bivalve shells are Leda 
amygdaloides (Figure 213) and Cryptodon angulatum (Figure 214), and among the 
Radiata a star-fish, Astropecten (Figure 215.)

These fossils are accompanied by a sword-fish (Tetrapterus priscus, Agassiz), 
about eight feet long, and a saw-fish (Pristis bisulcatus, Agassiz), about ten 
feet in length; genera now foreign to the British seas. On the whole, about 
eighty species of fish have been described by M. Agassiz from these beds of 
Sheppey, and they indicate, in his opinion, a warm climate.

In the lower part of the London clay at Kyson, a few miles east of Woodbridge, 
the remains of mammalia have been detected. Some of these have been referred by 
Professor Owen to an opossum, and others to the genus Hyracotherium. The teeth 
of this last-mentioned pachyderm were at first, in 1840, supposed to belong to a 
monkey, an opinion afterwards abandoned by Owen when more ample materials for 
comparison were obtained.

WOOLWICH AND READING SERIES (C.2, TABLE 16.1.)

This formation was formerly called the Plastic Clay, as it agrees with a similar 
clay used in pottery which occupies the same position in the French series, and 
it has been used for the like purposes in England. (Prestwich Quarterly 
Geological Journal volume 10.)

No formations can be more dissimilar, on the whole, in mineral character than 
the Eocene deposits of England and Paris; those of our own island being almost 
exclusively of mechanical origin-- accumulations of mud, sand, and pebbles; 
while in the neighbourhood of Paris we find a great succession of strata 
composed of limestones, some of them siliceous, and of crystalline gypsum and 
siliceous sandstone, and sometimes of pure flint used for millstones. Hence it 
is often impossible, as before stated, to institute an exact comparison between 
the various members of the English and French series, and to settle their 
respective ages. But in regard to the division which we have now under 
consideration, whether we study it in the basins of London, Hampshire, or Paris, 
we recognise as a general rule the same mineral character, the beds consisting 
over a large area of mottled clays and sand, with lignite, and with some strata 
of well-rolled flint pebbles, derived from the chalk, varying in size, but 
occasionally several inches in diameter. These strata may be seen in the Isle of 
Wight in contact with the chalk, or in the London basin, at Reading, Blackheath, 
and Woolwich. In some of the lowest of them, banks of oysters are observed, 
consisting of Ostrea bellovacina, so common in France in the same relative 
position. In these beds at Bromley, Dr. Buckland found a large pebble to which 
five full-grown oysters were affixed, in such a manner as to show that they had 
commenced their first growth upon it, and remained attached to it through life.

(FIGURE 216. Cyrena cuneiformis, Sowerby. Natural size. Woolwich clays.)

(FIGURE 217. Melania (Melanatria) inquinata, Des. Syn. Cerithium melanoides, 
Sowerby. Woolwich clays.)

In several places, as at Woolwich on the Thames, at Newhaven in Sussex, and 
elsewhere, a mixture of marine and fresh-water testacea distinguishes this 
member of the series. Among the latter, Cyrena cuneiformis (see Figure 216) and 
Melania inquinata (see Figure 217) are very common, as in beds of corresponding 
age in France. They clearly indicate points where rivers entered the Eocene sea. 
Usually there is a mixture of brackish, fresh-water, and marine shells, and 
sometimes, as at Woolwich, proofs of the river and the sea having successively 
prevailed on the same spot. At New Charlton, in the suburbs of Woolwich, Mr. de 
la Condamine discovered in 1849, and pointed out to me, a layer of sand 
associated with well-rounded flint pebbles in which numerous individuals of the 
Cyrena tellinella were seen standing endwise with both their valves united, the 
siphonal extremity of each shell being uppermost, as would happen if the 
mollusks had died in their natural position. I have described a bank of sandy 
mud, in the delta of the Alabama River at Mobile, on the borders of the Gulf of 
Mexico, where in 1846 I dug out at low tide specimens of living species of 
Cyrena and of a Gnathodon, which were similarly placed with their shells erect, 
or in a posture which enables the animal to protrude its siphon upward, and draw 
in or reject water at pleasure. (Second Visit to the United States volume 2 page 
104.) The water at Mobile is usually fresh, but sometimes brackish. At Woolwich 
a body of river-water must have flowed permanently into the sea where the 
Cyrenae lived, and they may have been killed suddenly by an influx of pure salt-
water, which invaded the spot when the river was low, or when a subsidence of 
land took place. Traced in one direction, or eastward towards Herne Bay, the 
Woolwich beds assume more and more of a marine character; while in an opposite, 
or south-western direction, they become, as near Chelsea and other places, more 
fresh-water, and contain Unio, Paludina, and layers of lignite, so that the land 
drained by the ancient river seems clearly to have been to the south-west of the 
present site of the metropolis.

FLUVIATILE BEDS UNDERLYING DEEP-SEA STRATA.

Before the minds of geologists had become familiar with the theory of the 
gradual sinking of land, and its conversion into sea at different periods, and 
the consequent change from shallow to deep water, the fluviatile and littoral 
character of this inferior group appeared strange and anomalous. After passing 
through hundreds of feet of London clay, proved by its fossils to have been 
deposited in deep salt-water, we arrive at beds of fluviatile origin, and 
associated with them masses of shingle, attaining at Blackheath, near London, a 
thickness of 50 feet. These shingle banks are probably of marine origin, but 
they indicate the proximity of land, and the existence of a shore where the 
flints of the chalk were rolled into sand and pebbles, and spread over a wide 
space. We have, therefore, first, as before stated, evidence of oscillations of 
level during the accumulation of the Woolwich series, then of a great 
submergence, which allowed a marine deposit 500 thick to be laid over the 
antecedent beds of fresh and brackish water origin.

THANET SANDS (C.3 TABLE 16.1).

The Woolwich or plastic clay above described may often be seen in the Hampshire 
basin in actual contact with the chalk, constituting in such places the lowest 
member of the British Eocene series. But at other points another formation of 
marine origin, characterised by a somewhat different assemblage of organic 
remains, has been shown by Mr. Prestwich to intervene between the chalk and the 
Woolwich series. For these beds he has proposed the name of "Thanet Sands," 
because they are well seen in the Isle of Thanet, in the northern part of Kent, 
and on the sea-coast between Herne Bay and the Reculvers, where they consist of 
sands with a few concretionary masses of sandstone, and contain, among other 
fossils, Pholadomya cuneata, Cyprina morrisii, Corbula longirostris, Scalaria 
Bowerbankii, etc. The greatest thickness of these beds is 90 feet.

UPPER EOCENE FORMATIONS OF FRANCE.

The tertiary formations in the neighbourhood of Paris consist of a series of 
marine and fresh-water strata, alternating with each other, and filling up a 
depression in the chalk. The area which they occupy has been called the Paris 
Basin, and is about 180 miles in its greatest length from north to south, and 
about 90 miles in breadth from east to west. MM. Cuvier and Brongniart 
attempted, in 1810, to distinguish five different groups, comprising three 
fresh-water and two marine, which were supposed to imply that the waters of the 
ocean, and of rivers and lakes, had been by turns admitted into and excluded 
from the same area. Investigations since made in the Hampshire and London basins 
have rather tended to confirm these views, at least so far as to show that since 
the commencement of the Eocene period there have been great movements of the bed 
of the sea, and of the adjoining lands, and that the superposition of deep-sea 
to shallow-water deposits (the London Clay, for example, to the Woolwich beds) 
can only be explained by referring to such movements. It appears, 
notwithstanding, from the researches of M. Constant Prevost, that some of the 
minor alternations and intermixtures of fresh-water and marine deposits, in the 
Paris basin, may be accounted for without such changes of level, by imagining 
both to have been simultaneously in progress, in the same bay of the same sea, 
or a gulf into which many rivers entered.

GYPSEOUS SERIES OF MONTMARTRE (A.1, TABLE 16.1).

To enlarge on the numerous subdivisions of the Parisian strata would lead me 
beyond my present limits; I shall therefore give some examples only of the most 
important formations. Beneath the Gres de Fontainebleau, belonging to the Lower 
Miocene period, as before stated, we find, in the neighbourhood of Paris, a 
series of white and green marls, with subordinate beds of gypsum. These are most 
largely developed in the central parts of the Paris basin, and, among other 
places, in the hill of Montmartre, where its fossils were first studied by 
Cuvier.

The gypsum quarried there for the manufacture of plaster of Paris occurs as a 
granular crystalline rock, and, together with the associated marls, contains 
land and fluviatile shells, together with the bones and skeletons of birds and 
quadrupeds. Several land-plants are also met with, among which are fine 
specimens of the fan-palm or palmetto tribe (Flabellaria). The remains also of 
fresh-water fish, and of crocodiles and other reptiles, occur in the gypsum. The 
skeletons of mammalia are usually isolated, often entire, the most delicate 
extremities being preserved; as if the carcasses, clothed with their flesh and 
skin, had been floated down soon after death, and while they were still swollen 
by the gases generated by their first decomposition. The few accompanying shells 
are of those light kinds which frequently float on the surface of rivers, 
together with wood.

In this formation the relics of about fifty species of quadrupeds, including the 
genera Palaeotherium (see Figure 174), Anoplotherium (see Figure 218), and 
others, have been found, all extinct, and nearly four-fifths of them belonging 
to the Perissodactyle or odd-toed division of the order Pachydermata, which now 
contains only four living genera, namely, rhinoceros, tapir, horse, and hyrax. 
With them a few carnivorous animals are associated, among which are the 
Hyaenodon dasyuroides, a species of dog, Canis Parisiensis, and a weasel, 
Cynodon Parisiensis. Of the Rodentia are found a squirrel; of the Cheiroptera, a 
bat; while the Marsupalia (an order now confined to America, Australia, and some 
contiguous islands) are represented by an opossum.

Of birds, about ten species have been ascertained, the skeletons of some of 
which are entire. None of them are referable to existing species. (Cuvier, Oss. 
Foss. tome 3 page 255.) The same remark, according to MM. Cuvier and Agassiz, 
applies both to the reptiles and fish. Among the last are crocodiles and 
tortoises of the genera Emys and Trionyx.

(FIGURE 218. Xiphodon gracile, or Anoplotherium gracile, Cuvier. Restored 
outline.)

The tribe of land quadrupeds most abundant in this formation is such as now 
inhabits alluvial plains and marshes, and the banks of rivers and lakes, a class 
most exposed to suffer by river inundations. Among these were several species of 
Palaeotherium, a genus before alluded to. These were associated with the 
Anoplotherium, a tribe intermediate between pachyderms and ruminants. One of the 
three divisions of this family was called by Cuvier Xiphodon. Their forms were 
slender and elegant, and one, named Xiphodon gracile (Figure 218), was about the 
size of the chamois; and Cuvier inferred from the skeleton that it was as light, 
graceful, and agile as the gazelle.

FOSSIL FOOTPRINTS.

There are three superimposed masses of gypsum in the neighbourhood of Paris, 
separated by intervening deposits of laminated marl. In the uppermost of the 
three, in the valley of Montmorency, M. Desnoyers discovered in 1859 many 
footprints of animals occurring at no less than six different levels. (Sur des 
Empreintes de Pas d'Animaux par M. J. Desnoyers. Compte rendu de l'Institut 
1859.) The gypsum to which they belong varies from thirty to fifty feet in 
thickness, and is that which has yielded to the naturalist the largest number of 
bones and skeletons of mammalia, birds, and reptiles. I visited the quarries, 
soon after the discovery was made known, with M. Desnoyers, who also showed me 
large slabs in the Museum at Paris, where, on the upper planes of 
stratification, the indented foot-marks were seen, while corresponding casts in 
relief appeared on the lower surfaces of the strata of gypsum which were 
immediately superimposed. A thin film of marl, which before it was dried and 
condensed by pressure must have represented a much thicker layer of soft mud, 
intervened between the beds of solid gypsum. On this mud the animals had 
trodden, and made impressions which had penetrated to the gypseous mass below, 
then evidently unconsolidated. Tracks of the Anoplotherium with its bisulcate 
hoof, and the trilobed footprints of Palaeotherium, were seen of different 
sizes, corresponding to those of several species of these genera which Cuvier 
had reconstructed, while in the same beds were foot-marks of carnivorous 
mammalia. The tracks also of fluviatile, lacustrine, and terrestrial tortoises 
(Emys, Trionyx, etc.) were discovered, also those of crocodiles, iguanas, 
geckos, and great batrachians, and the footprints of a huge bird, apparently a 
wader, of the size of the gastornis, to be mentioned in the sequel. There were 
likewise the impressions of the feet of other creatures, some of them clearly 
distinguishable from any of the fifty extinct types of mammalia of which the 
bones have been found in the Paris gypsum. The whole assemblage, says Desnoyers, 
indicate the shores of a lake, or several small lakes communicating with each 
other, on the borders of which many species of pachyderms wandered, and beasts 
of prey which occasionally devoured them. The tooth-marks of these last had been 
detected by palaeontologists long before on the bones and skulls of Paleotheres 
entombed in the gypsum.

IMPERFECTION OF THE RECORD.

These foot-marks have revealed to us new and unexpected proofs that the air-
breathing fauna of the Upper Eocene period in Europe far surpassed in the number 
and variety of its species the largest estimate which had previously been formed 
of it. We may now feel sure that the mammalia, reptiles, and birds which have 
left portions of their skeletons as memorials of their existence in the solid 
gypsum constituted but a part of the then living creation. Similar inferences 
may be drawn from the study of the whole succession of geological records. In 
each district the monuments of periods embracing thousands, and probably in some 
instances hundreds of thousands of years, are totally wanting. Even in the 
volumes which are extant the greater number of the pages are missing in any 
given region, and where they are found they contain but few and casual entries 
of the physical events or living beings of the times to which they relate. It 
may also be remarked that the subordinate formations met with in two 
neighbouring countries, such as France and England (the minor Tertiary groups 
above enumerated), commonly classed as equivalents and referred to corresponding 
periods, may nevertheless have been by no means strictly coincident in date. 
Though called contemporaneous, it is probable that they were often separated by 
intervals of many thousands of years. We may compare them to double stars, which 
appear single to the naked eye because seen from a vast distance in space, and 
which really belong to one and the same stellar system, though occupying places 
in space extremely remote if estimated by our ordinary standard of terrestrial 
measurements.

CALCAIRE SILICIEUX, OR TRAVERTIN INFERIEUR (A.2 AND 3 TABLE 16.1).

This compact siliceous limestone extends over a wide area. It resembles a 
precipitate from the waters of mineral springs, and is often traversed by small 
empty sinuous cavities. It is, for the most part, devoid of organic remains, but 
in some places contains fresh-water and land species, and never any marine 
fossils. The calcaire siliceux and the calcaire grossier usually occupy distinct 
parts of the Paris basin, the one attaining its fullest development in those 
places where the other is of slight thickness. They are described by some 
writers as alternating with each other towards the centre of the basin, as at 
Sergy and Osny.

The gypsum, with its associated marls before described, is in greatest force 
towards the centre of the basin, where the calcaire grossier and calcaire 
silicieux are less fully developed.

GRES DE BEAUCHAMP, OR SABLES MOYENS (A.4 TABLE 16.1).

In some parts of the Paris basin, sands and marls, called the Gres de Beauchamp, 
or Sables moyens, divide the gypseous beds from the calcaire grossier proper. 
These sands, in which a small nummulite (N. variolaria) is very abundant, 
contain more than 300 species of marine shells, many of them peculiar, but 
others common to the next division.

MIDDLE EOCENE FORMATIONS OF FRANCE.

CALCAIRE GROSSIER, UPPER AND MIDDLE (B.1 TABLE 16.1).

The upper division of this group consists in great part of beds of compact, 
fragile limestone, with some intercalated green marls. The shells in some parts 
are a mixture of Cerithium, Cyclostoma, and Corbula; in others Limnea, 
Cerithium, Paludina, etc. In the latter, the bones of reptiles and mammalia, 
Palaeotherium and Lophiodon, have been found. The middle division, or calcaire 
grossier proper, consists of a coarse limestone, often passing into sand. It 
contains the greater number of the fossil shells which characterise the Paris 
basin. No less than 400 distinct species have been procured from a single spot 
near Grignon, where they are imbedded in a calcareous sand, chiefly formed of 
comminuted shells, in which, nevertheless, individuals in a perfect state of 
preservation, both of marine, terrestrial, and fresh-water species, are mingled 
together. Some of the marine shells may have lived on the spot; but the 
Cyclostoma and Limnea, being land and fresh-water shells, must have been brought 
thither by rivers and currents, and the quantity of triturated shells implies 
considerable movement in the waters.

Nothing is more striking in this assemblage of fossil testacea than the great 
proportion of species referable to the genus Cerithium (Figures 160 and 161 
Chapter 15). There occur no less than 137 species of this genus in the Paris 
basin, and almost all of them in the calcaire grossier. Most of the living 
Cerithia inhabit the sea near the mouths of rivers, where the waters are 
brackish; so that their abundance in the marine strata now under consideration 
is in harmony with the hypothesis that the Paris basin formed a gulf into which 
several rivers flowed.

EOCENE FORAMINIFERA.

(FIGURE 219. Calcarina rarispina, Desh.
a. Natural size.
b. Magnified.)

(FIGURE 220. Spirolina stenostoma, Desh.
a. Natural size.
b. Magnified.)

(FIGURE 221. Triloculina inflata, Desh.
a. Natural size.
b. Magnified.)

In some parts of the calcaire grossier round Paris, certain beds occur of a 
stone used in building, and called by the French geologists "Miliolite 
limestone." It is almost entirely made up of millions of microscopic shells, of 
the size of minute grains of sand, which all belong to the class Foraminifera. 
Figures of some of these are given in Figures 219 to 221. As this miliolitic 
stone never occurs in the Faluns, or Upper Miocene strata of Brittany and 
Touraine, it often furnishes the geologist with a useful criterion for 
distinguishing the detached Eocene and Upper Miocene formations scattered over 
those and other adjoining provinces. The discovery of the remains of 
Palaeotherium and other mammalia in some of the upper beds of the calcaire 
grossier shows that these land animals began to exist before the deposition of 
the overlying gypseous series had commenced.

LOWER CALCAIRE GROSSIER, OR GLAUCONIE GROSSIERE (B.1 TABLE 16.1).

The lower part of the calcaire grossier, which often contains much green earth, 
is characterised at Auvers, near Pontoise, to the north of Paris, and still more 
in the environs of Compiegne, by the abundance of nummulites, consisting chiefly 
of N. laevigata, N. scabra, and N. Lamarcki, which constitute a large proportion 
of some of the stony strata, though these same foraminifera are wanting in beds 
of similar age in the immediate environs of Paris.

SOISSONNAIS SANDS, OR LITS COQUILLIERS (B.2 TABLE 16.1).

(FIGURE 222. Nerita conoidea, Lam. Syn. N. Schmidelliana, Chemnitz.)

Below the preceding formation, shelly sands are seen, of considerable thickness, 
especially at Cuisse-Lamotte, near Compiegne, and other localities in the 
Soissonnais, about fifty miles N.E. of Paris, from which about 300 species of 
shells have been obtained, many of them common to the calcaire grossier and the 
Bracklesham beds of England, and many peculiar. The Nummulites planulata is very 
abundant, and the most characteristic shell is the Nerita conoidea, Lam., a 
fossil which has a very wide geographical range; for, as M. d'Archiac remarks, 
it accompanies the nummulitic formation from Europe to India, having been found 
in Cutch, near the mouths of the Indus, associated with Nummulites scabra. No 
less than 33 shells of this group are said to be identical with shells of the 
London clay proper, yet, after visiting Cuisse-Lamotte and other localities of 
the "Sables inferieurs" of Archiac, I agree with Mr. Prestwich, that the latter 
are probably newer than the London clay, and perhaps older than the Bracklesham 
beds of England. The London clay seems to be unrepresented in the Paris basin, 
unless partially so, by these sands. (d'Archiac Bulletin tome 10 and Prestwich 
Quarterly Geological Journal 1847 page 377.)

LOWER EOCENE FORMATIONS OF FRANCE.

ARGILE PLASTIQUE (C.2 TABLE 16.1).

At the base of the tertiary system in France are extensive deposits of sands, 
with occasional beds of clay used for pottery, and called "argile plastique." 
Fossil oysters (Ostrea bellovacina) abound in some places, and in others there 
is a mixture of fluviatile shells, such as Cyrena cuneiformis (Figure 216), 
Melania inquinata (Figure 217), and others, frequently met with in beds 
occupying the same position in the London Basin. Layers of lignite also 
accompany the inferior clays and sands.

Immediately upon the chalk at the bottom of all the tertiary strata in France 
there generally is a conglomerate or breccia of rolled and angular chalk-flints, 
cemented by siliceous sand. These beds appear to be of littoral origin, and 
imply the previous emergence of the chalk, and its waste by denudation. In the 
year 1855, the tibia and femur of a large bird equalling at least the ostrich in 
size were found at Meudon, near Paris, at the base of the Plastic clay. This 
bird, to which the name of Gastornis Parisiensis has been assigned, appears, 
from the Memoirs of MM. Hebert, Lartet, and Owen, to belong to an extinct genus. 
Professor Owen refers it to the class of wading land birds rather than to an 
aquatic species. (Quarterly Geological Journal volume 12 page 204 1856.)

That a formation so much explored for economical purposes as the Argile 
plastique around Paris, and the clays and sands of corresponding age near 
London, should never have afforded any vestige of a feathered biped previously 
to the year 1855, shows what diligent search and what skill in osteological 
interpretation are required before the existence of birds of remote ages can be 
established.

SABLES DE BRACHEUX (C.3 TABLE 16.1).

The marine sands called the Sables de Bracheux (a place near Beauvais), are 
considered by M. Hebert to be older than the Lignites and Plastic clay, and to 
coincide in age with the Thanet Sands of England. At La Fere, in the Department 
of Aisne, in a deposit of this age, a fossil skull has been found of a quadruped 
called by Blainville Arctocyon primaevus, and supposed by him to be related both 
to the bear and to the Kinkajou (Cercoleptes). This creature appears to be the 
oldest known tertiary mammifer.

NUMMULITIC FORMATIONS OF EUROPE, ASIA, ETC.

Of all the rocks of the Eocene period, no formations are of such great 
geographical importance as the Upper and Middle Eocene, as above defined, 
assuming that the older tertiary formation, commonly called nummulitic, is 
correctly ascribed to this group. It appears that of more than fifty species of 
these foraminifera described by D'Archiac, one or two species only are found in 
other tertiary formations whether of older or newer date. Nummulites intermedia, 
a Middle Eocene form, ascends into the Lower Miocene, but it seems doubtful 
whether any species descends to the level of the London clay, still less to the 
Argile plastique or Woolwich beds. Separate groups of strata are often 
characterised by distinct species of nummulite; thus the beds between the lower 
Miocene and the lower Eocene may be divided into three sections, distinguished 
by three different species of nummulites, N. variolaria in the upper, N. 
laevigata in the middle, and N. planulata in the lower beds. The nummulitic 
limestone of the Swiss Alps rises to more than 10,000 feet above the level of 
the sea, and attains here and in other mountain chains a thickness of several 
thousand feet. It may be said to play a far more conspicuous part than any other 
tertiary group in the solid framework of the earth's crust, whether in Europe, 
Asia, or Africa. It occurs in Algeria and Morocco, and has been traced from 
Egypt, where it was largely quarried of old for the building of the Pyramids, 
into Asia Minor, and across Persia by Bagdad to the mouths of the Indus. It has 
been observed not only in Cutch, but in the mountain ranges which separate 
Scinde from Persia, and which form the passes leading to Caboul; and it has been 
followed still farther eastward into India, as far as eastern Bengal and the 
frontiers of China.

(FIGURE 223. Nummulites Puschi, D'Archiac. Peyrehorade, Pyrenees.
a. External surface of one of the nummulites, of which longitudinal sections are 
seen in the limestone.
b. Transverse section of same.)

Dr. T. Thompson found nummulites at an elevation of no less than 16,500 feet 
above the level of the sea, in Western Thibet. One of the species, which I 
myself found very abundant on the flanks of the Pyrenees, in a compact 
crystalline marble (Figure 223) is called by M. D'Archiac Nummulites Puschi. The 
same is also very common in rocks of the same age in the Carpathians. In many 
distant countries, in Cutch, for example, some of the same shells, such as 
Nerita conoidea (Figure 222), accompany the nummulites, as in France. The 
opinion of many observers, that the Nummulitic formation belongs partly to the 
cretaceous era, seems chiefly to have arisen from confounding an allied genus, 
Orbitoides, with the true Nummulite.

When we have once arrived at the conviction that the nummulitic formation 
occupies a middle and upper place in the Eocene series, we are struck with the 
comparatively modern date to which some of the greatest revolutions in the 
physical geography of Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa must be referred. All 
the mountain-chains, such as the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Himalayas, 
into the composition of whose central and loftiest parts the nummulitic strata 
enter bodily, could have had no existence till after the Middle Eocene period. 
During that period the sea prevailed where these chains now rise, for nummulites 
and their accompanying testacea were unquestionably inhabitants of salt water. 
Before these events, comprising the conversion of a wide area from a sea to a 
continent, England had been peopled, as I before pointed out, by various 
quadrupeds, by herbivorous pachyderms, by insectivorous bats, and by opossums.

Almost all the volcanoes which preserve any remains of their original form, or 
from the craters of which lava streams can be traced, are more modern than the 
Eocene fauna now under consideration; and besides these superficial monuments of 
the action of heat, Plutonic influences have worked vast changes in the texture 
of rocks within the same period. Some members of the nummulitic and overlying 
tertiary strata called flysch have actually been converted in the central Alps 
into crystalline rocks, and transformed into marble, quartz-rock, micha-schist, 
and gneiss. (Murchison Quarterly Journal of Geological Society volume 5 and 
Lyell volume 6 1850 Anniversary Address.)

EOCENE STRATA IN THE UNITED STATES.

In North America the Eocene formations occupy a large area bordering the 
Atlantic, which increases in breadth and importance as it is traced southward 
from Delaware and Maryland to Georgia and Alabama. They also occur in Louisiana 
and other States both east and west of the valley of the Mississippi. At 
Claiborne, in Alabama, no less than 400 species of marine shells, with many 
echinoderms and teeth of fish, characterise one member of this system. Among the 
shells, the Cardita planicosta, before mentioned (Figure 191), is in abundance; 
and this fossil and some others identical with European species, or very nearly 
allied to them, make it highly probable that the Claiborne beds agree in age 
with the central or Bracklesham group of England, and with the calcaire 
grossiere of Paris. (See paper by the Author Quarterly Journal of Geological 
Society volume 4 page 12 and Second Visit to the United States volume 2 page 
59.)

Higher in the series is a remarkable calcareous rock, formerly called "the 
nummulite limestone," from the great number of discoid bodies resembling 
nummulites which it contains, fossils now referred by A. d'Orbigny to the genus 
Orbitoides, which has been demonstrated by Dr. Carpenter to belong to the 
foraminifera. (Quarterly Journal of Geological Society volume 6 page 32.) That 
naturalist, moreover, is of opinion that the Orbitoides alluded to (O. Mantelli) 
is of the same species as one found in Cutch, in the Middle Eocene or nummulitic 
formation of India.

Above the orbitoidal limestone is a white limestone, sometimes soft and 
argillaceous, but in parts very compact and calcareous. It contains several 
peculiar corals, and a large Nautilus allied to N. ziczac; also in its upper bed 
a gigantic cetacean, called Zeuglodon by Owen. (See Memoir by R.W. Gibbes 
Journal of Academy of Natural Science Philadelphia volume 1 1847.)

The colossal bones of this cetacean are so plentiful in the interior of Clarke 
County, Alabama, as to be characteristic of the formation. The vertebral column 
of one skeleton found by Dr. Buckley at a spot visited by me, extended to the 
length of nearly seventy feet, and not far off part of another backbone nearly 
fifty feet long was dug up. I obtained evidence, during a short excursion, of so 
many localities of this fossil animal within a distance of ten miles, as to lead 
me to conclude that they must have belonged to at least forty distinct 
individuals.

(FIGURE 224. Zeuglodon cetoides, Owen. Basilosaurus, Harlan.
Molar tooth, natural size.)

(FIGURE 225. Zeuglodon cetoides, Owen. Basilosaurus, Harlan.
Vertebra, reduced.)

Professor Owen first pointed out that this huge animal was not reptilian, since 
each tooth was furnished with double roots (Figure 224), implanted in 
corresponding double sockets; and his opinion of the cetacean nature of the 
fossil was afterwards confirmed by Dr. Wyman and Dr. R.W. Gibbes. That it was an 
extinct mammal of the whale tribe has since been placed beyond all doubt by 
discovery of the entire skull of another fossil species of the same family, 
having the double occipital condyles only met with in mammals, and the 
convoluted tympanic bones which are characteristic of cetaceans.


CHAPTER XVII.

UPPER CRETACEOUS GROUP.

Lapse of Time between Cretaceous and Eocene Periods.
Table of successive Cretaceous Formations.
Maestricht Beds.
Pisolitic Limestone of France.
Chalk of Faxoe.
Geographical Extent and Origin of the White Chalk.
Chalky Matter now forming in the Bed of the Atlantic.
Marked Difference between the Cretaceous and existing Fauna.
Chalk-flints.
Pot-stones of Horstead.
Vitreous Sponges in the Chalk.
Isolated Blocks of Foreign Rocks in the White Chalk supposed to be ice-borne.
Distinctness of Mineral Character in contemporaneous Rocks of the Cretaceous 
Epoch.
Fossils of the White Chalk.
Lower White Chalk without Flints.
Chalk Marl and its Fossils.
Chloritic Series or Upper Greensand.
Coprolite Bed near Cambridge.
Fossils of the Chloritic Series.
Gault.
Connection between Upper and Lower Cretaceous Strata.
Blackdown Beds.
Flora of the Upper Cretaceous Period.
Hippurite Limestone.
Cretaceous Rocks in the United States.

We have treated in the preceding chapters of the Tertiary or Cainozoic strata, 
and have next to speak of the Secondary or Mesozoic formations. The uppermost of 
these last is commonly called the chalk or the cretaceous formation, from creta, 
the latin name for that remarkable white earthy limestone, which constitutes an 
upper member of the group in those parts of Europe where it was first studied. 
The marked discordance in the fossils of the tertiary, as compared with the 
cretaceous formations, has long induced many geologists to suspect that an 
indefinite series of ages elapsed between the respective periods of their 
origin. Measured, indeed, by such a standard, that is to say, by the amount of 
change in the Fauna and Flora of the earth effected in the interval, the time 
between the Cretaceous and Eocene may have been as great as that between the 
Eocene and Recent periods, to the history of which the last seven chapters have 
been devoted. Several deposits have been met with here and there, in the course 
of the last half century, of an age intermediate between the white chalk and the 
plastic clays and sands of the Paris and London districts, monuments which have 
the same kind of interest to a geologist which certain medieval records excite 
when we study the history of nations. For both of them throw light on ages of 
darkness, preceded and followed by others of which the annals are comparatively 
well-known to us. But these newly-discovered records do not fill up the wide 
gap, some of them being closely allied to the Eocene, and others to the 
Cretaceous type, while none appear as yet to possess so distinct and 
characteristic a fauna as may entitle them to hold an independent place in the 
great chronological series.

Among the formations alluded to, the Thanet Sands of Prestwich have been 
sufficiently described in the last chapter, and classed as Lower Eocene. To the 
same tertiary series belong the Belgian formations, called by Professor Dumont, 
Landenian. On the other hand, the Maestricht and Faxoe limestones are very 
closely connected with the chalk, to which also the Pisolitic limestone of 
France is referable.

CLASSIFICATION OF THE CRETACEOUS ROCKS.

TABLE 17.1.

UPPER CRETACEOUS OR CHALK PERIOD.

1. Maestricht Beds and Faxoe Limestone.
2. Upper White Chalk, with flints.
3. Lower White Chalk, without flints.
4. Chalk Marl.
5. Chloritic series (or Upper Greensand).
6. Gault.

LOWER CRETACEOUS OR NEOCOMIAN.

1. Marine: Upper Neocomian, see Chapter 18. Fresh-water: Wealden Beds (upper 
part).
2. Marine: Middle Neocomian, see Chapter 18. Fresh-water: Wealden Beds (upper 
part).
3. Marine: Lower Neocomian, see Chapter 18. Fresh-water: Wealden Beds (upper 
part).

The cretaceous group has generally been divided into an Upper and a Lower 
series, the Upper called familiarly THE CHALK, and the Lower THE GREENSAND; the 
one deriving its name from the predominance of white earthy limestone and marl, 
of which it consists in a great part of France and England, the other or lower 
series from the plentiful mixture of green or chloritic grains contained in some 
of the sands and cherts of which it largely consists in the same countries. But 
these mineral characters often fail, even when we attempt to follow out the same 
continuous subdivisions throughout a small portion of the north of Europe, and 
are worse than valueless when we desire to apply them to more distant regions. 
It is only by aid of the organic remains which characterise the successive 
marine subdivisions of the formation that we are able to recognise in remote 
countries, such as the south of Europe or North America, the formations which 
were there contemporaneously in progress. To the English student of geology it 
will be sufficient to begin by enumerating those groups which characterise the 
series in this country and others immediately contiguous, alluding but slightly 
to those of more distant regions. In Table 17.1 it will be seen that I have used 
the term Neocomian for that commonly called "Lower Greensand;" as this latter 
term is peculiarly objectionable, since the green grains are an exception to the 
rule in many of the members of this group even in districts where it was first 
studied and named.

MAESTRICHT BEDS.

(FIGURE 226. Belemnitella mucronata, Maestricht, Faxoe, and White Chalk.
a. Entire specimen, showing vascular impression on outer surface, and 
characteristic slit.
b. Section of same, showing place of phragmocone. (For particulars of structure 
see Chapter 18.))

On the banks of the Meuse, at Maestricht, reposing on ordinary white chalk with 
flints, we find an upper calcareous formation about 100 feet thick, the fossils 
of which are, on the whole, very peculiar, and all distinct from tertiary 
species. Some few are of species common to the inferior white chalk, among which 
may be mentioned Belemnitella mucronata (Figure 226) and Pecten quadricostatus, 
a shell regarded by many as a mere variety of Pecten quinquecostatus (see Figure 
270). Besides the Belemnite there are other genera, such as Baculites and 
Hamites, never found in strata newer than the cretaceous, but frequently met 
with in these Maestricht beds. On the other hand, Voluta, Fasciolaria, and other 
genera of univalve shells, usually met with only in tertiary strata, occur.

The upper part of the rock, about 20 feet thick, as seen in St. Peter's Mount, 
in the suburbs of Maestricht, abounds in corals and Bryozoa, often detachable 
from the matrix; and these beds are succeeded by a soft yellowish limestone 50 
feet thick, extensively quarried from time immemorial for building. The stone 
below is whiter, and contains occasional nodules of grey chert or chalcedony.

(FIGURE 227. Mosasaurus Camperi. Original more than three feet long.)

(FIGURE 228. Hemipneustes radiatus, Ag. Spatangus radiatus, Lam.
Chalk of Maestricht and white chalk.)

M. Bosquet, with whom I examined this formation (August, 1850), pointed out to 
me a layer of chalk from two to four inches thick, containing green earth and 
numerous encrinital stems, which forms the line of demarkation between the 
strata containing the fossils peculiar to Maestricht and the white chalk below. 
The latter is distinguished by regular layers of black flint in nodules, and by 
several shells, such as Terebratula carnea (see Figure 246), wholly wanting in 
beds higher than the green band. Some of the organic remains, however, for which 
St. Peter's Mount is celebrated, occur both above and below that parting layer, 
and, among others, the great marine reptile called Mosasaurus (see Figure 227), 
a saurian supposed to have been 24 feet in length, of which the entire skull and 
a great part of the skeleton have been found. Such remains are chiefly met with 
in the soft freestone, the principal member of the Maestricht beds. Among the 
fossils common to the Maestricht and white chalk may be instanced the 
echinoderm, Figure 228.

I saw proofs of the previous denudation of the white chalk exhibited in the 
lower bed of the Maestricht formation in Belgium, about 30 miles S.W. of 
Maestricht, at the village of Jendrain, where the base of the newer deposit 
consisted chiefly of a layer of well-rolled, black chalk-flint pebbles, in the 
midst of which perfect specimens of Thecidea papillata and Belemnitella 
mucronata are imbedded. To a geologist accustomed in England to regard rolled 
pebbles of chalk-flint as a common and distinctive feature of tertiary beds of 
different ages, it is a new and surprising phenomenon to behold strata made up 
of such materials, and yet to feel no doubt that they were accumulated in a sea 
in which the belemnite and other cretaceous mollusca flourished.

PISOLITIC LIMESTONE OF FRANCE.

Geologists were for many years at variance respecting the chronological 
relations of this rock, which is met with in the neighbourhood of Paris, and at 
places north, south, east, and west of that metropolis, as between Vertus and 
Laversines, Meudon and Montereau. By many able palaeontologists the species of 
fossils, more than fifty in number, were declared to be more Eocene in their 
appearance than Cretaceous. But M. Hebert found in this formation at Montereau, 
near Paris, the Pecten quadricostatus, a well-known Cretaceous species, together 
with some other fossils common to the Maestricht chalk and to the Baculite 
limestone of the Cotentin, in Normandy. He therefore, as well as M. Alcide 
d'Orbigny, who had carefully studied the fossils, came to the opinion that it 
was an upper member of the Cretaceous group. It is usually in the form of a 
coarse yellowish or whitish limestone, and the total thickness of the series of 
beds already known is about 100 feet. Its geographical range, according to M. 
Hebert, is not less than 45 leagues from east to west, and 35 from north to 
south. Within these limits it occurs in small patches only, resting 
unconformably on the white chalk.

(FIGURE 229. Portion of Baculites Faujasii.
Maestricht and Faxoe beds and white chalk.)

(FIGURE 230. Nautilus Danicus, Schl. Faxoe, Denmark.)

The Nautilus Danicus, Figure 230, and two or three other species found in this 
rock, are frequent in that of Faxoe, in Denmark, but as yet no Ammonites, 
Hamites, Scaphites, Turrilites, Baculites, or Hippurites have been met with. The 
proportion of peculiar species, many of them of tertiary aspect, is confessedly 
large; and great aqueous erosion suffered by the white chalk, before the 
pisolitic limestone was formed, affords an additional indication of the two 
deposits being widely separated in time. The pisolitic formation, therefore, may 
eventually prove to be somewhat more intermediate in date between the secondary 
and tertiary epochs than the Maestricht rock.

CHALK OF FAXOE.

In the island of Seeland, in Denmark, the newest member of the chalk series, 
seen in the sea-cliffs at Stevensklint resting on white chalk with flints, is a 
yellow limestone, a portion of which, at Faxoe, where it is used as a building 
stone, is composed of corals, even more conspicuously than is usually observed 
in recent coral reefs. It has been quarried to the depth of more than 40 feet, 
but its thickness is unknown. The imbedded shells are chiefly casts, many of 
them of univalve mollusca, which are usually very rare in the white chalk of 
Europe. Thus, there are two species of Cypraea, one of Oliva, two of Mitra, four 
of the genus Cerithium, six of Fusus, two of Trochus, one of Patella, one of 
Emarginula, etc.; on the whole, more than thirty univalves, spiral or 
patelliform. At the same time, some of the accompanying bivalve shells, 
echinoderms, and zoophytes, are specifically identical with fossils of the true 
Cretaceous series. Among the cephalopoda of Faxoe may be mentioned Baculites 
Faujasii (Figure 229), and Belemnitella mucronata (Figure 226), shells of the 
white chalk. The Nautilus Danicus (see Figure 230) is characteristic of this 
formation; and it also occurs in France in the calcaire pisolitique of Laversin 
(Department of Oise). The claws and entire skull of a small crab, Brachyurus 
rugosus (Schlott.), are scattered through the Faxoe stone, reminding us of 
similar crustaceans inclosed in the rocks of modern coral reefs. Some small 
portions of this coralline formation consist of white earthy chalk.

COMPOSITION, EXTENT AND ORIGIN OF THE WHITE CHALK.

(FIGURE 231. Diagrammatic section from Hertfordshire, in England, to Sens, in 
France.
Through London (left), Hythe, Boulogne, Valley of Bray, Paris and Sens (right).)

The highest beds of chalk in England and France consist of a pure, white, 
calcareous mass, usually too soft for a building-stone, but sometimes passing 
into a more solid state. It consists, almost purely, of carbonate of lime; the 
stratification is often obscure, except where rendered distinct by 
interstratified layers of flint, a few inches thick, occasionally in continuous 
beds, but oftener in nodules, and recurring at intervals generally from two to 
four feet distant from each other. This upper chalk is usually succeeded, in the 
descending order, by a great mass of white chalk without flints, below which 
comes the chalk marl, in which there is a slight admixture of argillaceous 
matter. The united thickness of the three divisions in the south of England 
equals, in some places, 1000 feet. The section in Figure 231 will show the 
manner in which the white chalk extends from England into France, covered by the 
tertiary strata described in former chapters, and reposing on lower cretaceous 
beds.

The area over which the white chalk preserves a nearly homogeneous aspect is so 
vast, that the earlier geologists despaired of discovering any analogous 
deposits of recent date. Pure chalk, of nearly uniform aspect and composition, 
is met with in a north-west and south-east direction, from the north of Ireland 
to the Crimea, a distance of about 1140 geographical miles, and in an opposite 
direction it extends from the south of Sweden to the south of Bordeaux, a 
distance of about 840 geographical miles. In Southern Russia, according to Sir 
R. Murchison, it is sometimes 600 feet thick, and retains the same mineral 
character as in France and England, with the same fossils, including Inoceramus 
Cuvieri, Belemnitella mucronata, and Ostrea vesicularis (Figure 251).

(Figures 232 to 236.-- Organic bodies forming the ooze of the bed of the 
Atlantic at great depths.

(FIGURE 232. Globigerina bulloides. Calcareous Rhizopod.)

(FIGURE 233. Actinocyclus. Siliceous Diatomaceae. )

(FIGURE 234. Pinnularia. Siliceous Diatomaceae.)

(FIGURE 235. Eunotia bidens. Siliceous Diatomaceae.)

(FIGURE 236. Spicula of sponge. Siliceous sponge.))

Great light has recently been thrown upon the origin of the unconsolidated white 
chalk by the deep soundings made in the North Atlantic, previous to laying down, 
in 1858, the electric telegraph between Ireland and Newfoundland. At depths 
sometimes exceeding two miles, the mud forming the floor of the ocean was found, 
by Professor Huxley, to be almost entirely composed (more than nineteen-
twentieths of the whole) of minute Rhizopods, or foraminiferous shells of the 
genus Globigerina, especially the species Globigerina bulloides (see Figure 
232.) the organic bodies next in quantity were the siliceous shells called 
Polycystineae, and next to them the siliceous skeletons of plants called 
Diatomaceae (Figures 233, 234, 235), and occasionally some siliceous spiculae of 
sponges (Figure 236) were intermixed. These were connected by a mass of living 
gelatinous matter to which he has given the name of Bathybius, and which 
contains abundance of very minute bodies termed Coccoliths and Coccospheres, 
which have also been detected fossil in chalk.

Sir Leopold MacClintock and Dr. Wallich have ascertained that 95 per cent of the 
mud of a large part of the North Atlantic consists of Globigerina shells. But 
Captain Bullock, R.N., lately brought up from the enormous depth of 16,860 feet 
a white, viscid, chalky mud, wholly devoid of Globigerinae. This mud was 
perfectly homogeneous in composition, and contained no organic remains visible 
to the naked eye. Mr. Etheridge, however, has ascertained by microscopical 
examination that it is made up of Coccoliths, Discoliths, and other minute 
fossils like those of the Chalk classed by Huxley as Bathybius, when this term 
is used in its widest sense. This mud, more than three miles deep, was dredged 
up in latitude 20 degrees 19' N., longitude 4 degrees 36' E., or about midway 
between Madeira and the Cape of Good Hope.

The recent deep-sea dredgings in the Atlantic conducted by Dr. Wyville Thomson, 
Dr. Carpenter, Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys, and others, have shown that on the same white 
mud there sometimes flourish Mollusca, Crustacea, and Echinoderms, besides 
abundance of siliceous sponges, forming, on the whole, a marine fauna bearing a 
striking resemblance in its general character to that of the ancient chalk.

POPULAR ERROR AS TO THE GEOLOGICAL CONTINUITY OF THE CRETACEOUS PERIOD.

We must be careful, however, not to overrate the points of resemblance which the 
deep-sea investigations have placed in a strong light. They have been supposed 
by some naturalists to warrant a conclusion expressed in these words: "We are 
still living in the Cretaceous epoch;" a doctrine which has led to much popular 
delusion as to the bearing of the new facts on geological reasoning and 
classification. The reader should be reminded that in geology we have been in 
the habit of founding our great chronological divisions, not on foraminifera and 
sponges, nor even on echinoderms and corals, but on the remains of the most 
highly organised beings available to us, such as the mollusca; these being met 
with, as explained in Chapter 9, in stratified rocks of almost every age. In 
dealing with the mollusca, it is those of the highest or most specialised 
organisation, which afford us the best characters in proportion as their 
vertical range is the most limited. Thus the Cephalopoda are the most valuable, 
as having a more restricted range in time than the Gasteropoda; and these, 
again, are more characteristic of the particular stratigraphical subdivisions 
than are the Lamellibranchiate Bivalves, while these last, again, are more 
serviceable in classification than the Brachiopoda, a still lower class of 
shell-fish, which are the most enduring of all.

When told that the new dredgings prove that "we are still living in the Chalk 
Period," we naturally ask whether some cuttle-fish has been found with a 
Belemnite forming part of its internal framework; or have Ammonites, Baculites, 
Hamites, Turrilites, with four or five other Cephalopodous genera characteristic 
of the chalk and unknown as tertiary, been met with in the abysses of the ocean? 
Or, in the absence of these long-extinct forms, has a single spiral univalve, or 
species of Cretaceous Gasteropod, been found living? Or, to descend still lower 
in the scale, has some characteristic Cretaceous genus of Lamellibranchiate 
Bivalve, such as the Inoceramus, or Hippurite, foreign to the Tertiary seas, 
been proved to have survived down to our time? Or, of the numerous genera of 
lamellibranchiates common to the Cretaceous and Recent seas, has one species 
been found living? The answer to all these questions is-- not one has been 
found. Even of the humblest shell-fish, the Brachiopods, no new species common 
to the Cretaceous and recent seas has yet been met with. It has been very 
generally admitted by conchologists that out of a hundred species of this tribe 
occurring fossil in the Upper Chalk-- one, and one only, Terebratulina striata, 
is still living, being thought to be identical with Terebratula caput-serpentis. 
Although this identity is still questioned by some naturalists of authority, it 
would certainly not surprise us if another lamp-shell of equal antiquity should 
be met with in the deep sea.

Had it been declared that we are living in the Eocene epoch, the idea would not 
be so extravagant, for the great reptiles of the Upper Chalk, the Mosasaurus, 
Pliosaurus, and Pterodactyle, and many others, as well as so many genera of 
chambered univalves, had already disappeared from the earth, and the marine 
fauna had made a greater approach to our own by nearly the entire difference 
which separates it from the fauna of the Cretaceous seas. The Eocene nummulitic 
limestone of Egypt is a rock mainly composed, like the more ancient white chalk, 
of globigerine mud; and if the reader will refer to what we have said of the 
extent to which the nummulitic marine strata, formed originally at the bottom of 
the sea, now enter into the framework of mountain chains of the principal 
continents, he will at once perceive that the present Atlantic, Pacific, and 
Indian Oceans are geographical terms, which must be wholly without meaning when 
applied to the Eocene, and still more to the Cretaceous Period; so that to talk 
of the chalk having been uninterruptedly forming in the Atlantic from the 
Cretaceous Period to our own, is as inadmissible in a geographical as in a 
geological sense.

CHALK-FLINTS.

The origin of the layers of flint, whether in the form of nodules, or continuous 
sheets, or in veins or cracks not parallel to the stratification, has always 
been more difficult to explain than that of the white chalk. But here, again, 
the late deep-sea soundings have suggested a possible source of such mineral 
matter. During the cruise of the "Bulldog," already alluded to, it was 
ascertained that while the calcareous Globigerinae had almost exclusive 
possession of certain tracts of the sea-bottom, they were wholly wanting in 
others, as between Greenland and Labrador. According to Dr. Wallich, they may 
flourish in those spaces where they derive nutriment from organic and other 
matter, brought from the south by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, and they 
may be absent where the effects of that great current are not felt. Now, in 
several of the spaces where the calcareous Rhizopods are wanting, certain 
microscopic plants, called Diatomaceae, above-mentioned (Figures 233-235), the 
solid parts of which are siliceous, monopolise the ground at a depth of nearly 
400 fathoms, or 2400 feet.

The large quantities of silex in solution required for the formation of these 
plants may probably arise from the disintegration of feldspathic rocks, which 
are universally distributed. As more than half of their bulk is formed of 
siliceous earth, they may afford an endless supply of silica to all the great 
rivers which flow into the ocean. We may imagine that, after a lapse of many 
years or centuries, changes took place in the direction of the marine currents, 
favouring at one time a supply in the same area of siliceous, and at another of 
calcareous matter in excess, giving rise in the one case to a preponderance of 
Globigerinae, and in the other of Diatomaceae. These last, and certain sponges, 
may by their decomposition have furnished the silex, which, separating from the 
chalky mud, collected round organic bodies, or formed nodules, or filled 
shrinkage cracks.

POT-STONES.

(FIGURE 237. View of a chalk-pit at Horstead, near Norwich, showing the position 
of the pot-stones. From a drawing by Mrs. Gunn.)

A more difficult enigma is presented by the occurrence of certain huge flints, 
or pot-stones, as they are called in Norfolk, occurring singly, or arranged in 
nearly continuous columns at right angles to the ordinary and horizontal layers 
of small flints. I visited in the year 1825 an extensive range of quarries then 
open on the river Bure, near Horstead, about six miles from Norwich, which 
afforded a continuous section, a quarter of a mile in length, of white chalk, 
exposed to the depth of about twenty-six feet, and covered by a bed of gravel. 
The pot-stones, many of them pear-shaped, were usually about three feet in 
height and one foot in their transverse diameter, placed in vertical rows, like 
pillars, at irregular distances from each other, but usually from twenty to 
thirty feet apart, though sometimes nearer together, as in Figure 237. These 
rows did not terminate downward in any instance which I could examine, nor 
upward, except at the point where they were cut off abruptly by the bed of 
gravel. On breaking open the pot-stones, I found an internal cylindrical nucleus 
of pure chalk, much harder than the ordinary surrounding chalk, and not 
crumbling to pieces like it, when exposed to the winter's frost. At the distance 
of half a mile, the vertical piles of pot-stones were much farther apart from 
each other. Dr. Buckland has described very similar phenomena as characterising 
the white chalk on the north coast of Antrim, in Ireland. (Geological 
Transactions 1st Series volume 4 page 413.)

VITREOUS SPONGES OF THE CHALK.

These pear-shaped masses of flint often resemble in shape and size the large 
sponges called Neptune's Cups (Spongia patera, Hardw.), which grow in the seas 
of Sumatra; and if we could suppose a series of such gigantic sponges to be 
separated from each other, like trees in a forest, and the individuals of each 
successive generation to grow on the exact spot where the parent sponge died and 
was enveloped in calcareous mud, so that they should become piled one above the 
other in a vertical column, their growth keeping pace with the accumulation of 
the enveloping calcareous mud, a counterpart of the phenomena of the Horstead 
pot-stones might be obtained.

(FIGURE 238. Ventriculites radiatus, Mantell. Syn. Ocellaria radiata. D'Orbigny. 
White chalk.)

Professor Wyville Thomson, describing the modern soundings in 1869 off the north 
coast of Scotland, speaks of the ooze or chalk mud brought from a depth of about 
3000 feet, and states that at one haul they obtained forty specimens of vitreous 
sponges buried in the mud. He suggests that the Ventriculites of the chalk were 
nearly allied to these sponges, and that when the silica of their spicules was 
removed, and was dissolved out of the calcareous matrix, it set into flint.

BOULDERS AND GROUPS OF PEBBLES IN CHALK.

The occurrence here and there, in the white chalk of the south of England, of 
isolated pebbles of quartz and green schist has justly excited much wonder. It 
was at first supposed that they had been dropped from the roots of some floating 
tree, by which means stones are carried to some of the small coral islands of 
the Pacific. But the discovery in 1857 of a group of stones in the white chalk 
near Croydon, the largest of which was syenite and weighed about forty pounds, 
accompanied by pebbles and fine sand like that of a beach, has been shown by Mr. 
Godwin Austen to be inexplicable except by the agency of floating ice. If we 
consider that icebergs now reach 40 degrees north latitude in the Atlantic, and 
several degrees nearer the equator in the southern hemisphere, we can the more 
easily believe that even during the Cretaceous epoch, assuming that the climate 
was milder, fragments of coast ice may have floated occasionally as far as the 
south of England.

DISTINCTNESS OF MINERAL CHARACTER IN CONTEMPORANEOUS ROCKS OF THE CRETACEOUS 
PERIOD.

But we must not imagine that because pebbles are so rare in the white chalk of 
England and France there are no proofs of sand, shingle, and clay having been 
accumulated contemporaneously even in European seas. The siliceous sandstone 
called "upper quader" by the Germans overlies white argillaceous chalk or 
"planer-kalk," a deposit resembling in composition and organic remains the chalk 
marl of the English series. This sandstone contains as many fossil shells common 
to our white chalk as could be expected in a sea-bottom formed of such different 
materials. It sometimes attains a thickness of 600 feet, and, by its jointed 
structure and vertical precipices, plays a conspicuous part in the picturesque 
scenery of Saxon Switzerland, near Dresden. It demonstrates that in the 
Cretaceous sea, as in our own, distinct mineral deposits were simultaneously in 
progress. The quartzose sandstone alluded to, derived from the detritus of the 
neighbouring granite, is absolutely devoid of carbonate of lime, yet it was 
formed at the distance only of four hundred miles from a sea-bottom now 
constituting part of France, where the purely calcareous white chalk was 
forming. In the North American continent, on the other hand, where the Upper 
Cretaceous formations are so widely developed, true white chalk, in the ordinary 
sense of that term, does not exist.

FOSSILS OF THE WHITE CHALK.

(FIGURE 239. Ananchytes ovatus, Leske. White chalk, upper and lower.
a. Side view.
b. Base of the shell, on which both the oral and anal apertures are placed; the 
anal being more round, and at the smaller end.)

(FIGURE 240. Micraster cor-angumum, Leske. White chalk.)

(FIGURE 241. Galerites albogalerus, Lam. White chalk.)

(FIGURE 242. Marsupites Milleri. Mant. White chalk.)

Among the fossils of the white chalk, echinoderms are very numerous; and some of 
the genera, like Ananchytes (see Figure 239), are exclusively cretaceous. Among 
the Crinoidea, the Marsupites (Figure 242) is a characteristic genus. Among the 
mollusca, the cephalopoda are represented by Ammonites, Baculites (Figure 229), 
and Belemnites (Figure 226). Although there are eight or more species of 
Ammonites and six of them peculiar to it, this genus is much less fully 
represented than in each of the other subdivisions of the Upper Cretaceous 
group.

(FIGURE 243. Terebratulina striata, Wahlenb. Upper white chalk.)

(FIGURE 244. Rhynchonella octoplicata, Sowerby. (Var. of R. plicatilis). Upper 
white chalk.

(FIGURE 245. Magas pumila, Sowerby. Upper white chalk.)

(FIGURE 246. Terebratula carnea, Sowerby. Upper white chalk.)

(FIGURE 247. Terebratula biplicata, Brocch. Upper cretaceous.)

(FIGURE 248. Crania Parisiensis, Duf. Inferior or attached valve. Upper white 
chalk.)

(FIGURE 249. Pecten Beaveri, Sowerby. Reduced to one-third diameter. Lower white 
chalk and chalk marl. Maidstone.)

(FIGURE 250. Lima spinosa, Sowerby. Syn. Spondylus spinosus. Upper white chalk.)

(FIGURE 251. Ostrea vesicularis. Syn. Gryphaea convexa. Upper chalk and upper 
greensand.)

Among the brachiopoda in the white chalk, the Terebratulae are very abundant 
(see Figures 243-247). With these are associated some forms of oyster (see 
Figure 251), and other bivalves (Figures 249, 250).

(FIGURE 252. Inoceramus Lamarckii. Syn. Catillus Lamarckii. White chalk (Dixon's 
Geology Sussex Table 28 Figure 29).)

Among the bivalve mollusca, no form marks the Cretaceous era in Europe, America, 
and India in a more striking manner than the extinct genus Inoceramus (Catillus 
of Lam.; see Figure 252), the shells of which are distinguished by a fibrous 
texture, and are often met with in fragments, having probably been extremely 
friable.

(Figures 253 to 256. Radiolites Mortoni. Mantell. Houghton, Sussex. White chalk. 
Diameter one-seventh natural size. On the side where the shell is thinnest, 
there is one external furrow and corresponding internal ridge, a, b, Figures 
253, 254; but they are usually less prominent than in these figures. The upper 
or opercular valve is wanting.

(FIGURE 253. Two individuals deprived of their upper valves, adhering together.)

(FIGURE 254. Same seen from above.)

(FIGURE 255. Transverse section of part of the wall of the shell, magnified to 
show the structure.)

(FIGURE 256. Vertical section of the same.))

Of the singular family called Rudistes by Lamarck, hereafter to be mentioned as 
extremely characteristic of the chalk of southern Europe, a single 
representative only (Figure 253) has been discovered in the white chalk of 
England.

(FIGURE 257. Eschara disticha. White chalk.
a. Natural size.
b. Portion magnified.)

(FIGURE 258. Escharina oceani.
a. Natural size.
b. Part of the same magnified.
White chalk.)

(FIGURE 259. A branching sponge in a flint, from the white chalk. From the 
collection of Mr. Bowerbank.)

The general absence of univalve mollusca in the white chalk is very marked. Of 
bryozoa there is an abundance, such as Eschara and Escharina (Figures 257, 258). 
These and other organic bodies, especially sponges, such as Ventriculites 
(Figure 238), are dispersed indifferently through the soft chalk and hard flint, 
and some of the flinty nodules owe their irregular forms to inclosed sponges, 
such as Figure 259, a, where the hollows in the exterior are caused by the 
branches of a sponge (Figure 259, b), seen on breaking open the flint.

(FIGURE 260. Palatal tooth of Ptychodus decurrens. Lower white chalk. 
Maidstone.)

(FIGURE 261. Cestracion Phillippi; recent. Port Jackson. Buckland, Bridgewater 
Treatise Plate 27 d.))

The remains of fishes of the Upper Cretaceous formations consist chiefly of 
teeth belonging to the shark family. Some of the genera are common to the 
Tertiary formations, and some are distinct. To the latter belongs the genus 
Ptychodus (Figure 260), which is allied to the living Port Jackson shark, 
Cestracion Phillippi, the anterior teeth of which (see Figure 261, a) are sharp 
and cutting, while the posterior or palatal teeth (b) are flat (Figure 260). But 
we meet with no bones of land-animals, nor any terrestrial or fluviatile shells, 
nor any plants, except sea-weeds, and here and there a piece of drift-wood. All 
the appearances concur in leading us to conclude that the white chalk was the 
product of an open sea of considerable depth.

The existence of turtles and oviparous saurians, and of a Pterodactyl or winged 
lizard, found in the white chalk of Maidstone, implies, no doubt, some 
neighbouring land; but a few small islets in mid-ocean, like Ascension, formerly 
so much frequented by migratory droves of turtle, might perhaps have afforded 
the required retreat where these creatures laid their eggs in the sand, or from 
which the flying species may have been blown out to sea. Of the vegetation of 
such islands we have scarcely any indication, but it consisted partly of 
cycadaceous plants; for a fragment of one of these was found by Captain Ibbetson 
in the Chalk Marl of the Isle of Wight, and is referred by A. Brongniart to 
Clathraria Lyellii, Mantell, a species common to the antecedent Wealden period. 
The fossil plants, however, of beds corresponding in age to the white chalk at 
Aix-la-Chapelle, presently to be described, like the sandy beds of Saxony, 
before alluded to, afford such evidence of land as to prove how vague must be 
any efforts of ours to restore the geography of that period.

The Pterodactyl of the Kentish chalk, above alluded to, was of gigantic 
dimensions, measuring 16 feet 6 inches from tip to tip of its outstretched 
wings. Some of its elongated bones were at first mistaken by able anatomists for 
those of birds; of which class no osseous remains have as yet been derived from 
the white chalk, although they have been found (as will be seen) in the 
Chloritic sand.

(FIGURE 262. Coprolites of fish, from the chalk.)

The collector of fossils from the white chalk was formerly puzzled by meeting 
with certain bodies which they call larch-cones, which were afterwards 
recognised by Dr. Buckland to be the excrement of fish (see Figure 262). They 
are composed in great part of phosphate of lime.

LOWER WHITE CHALK.

(FIGURE 263. Baculites anceps, Lam. Lower chalk.)

The Lower White Chalk, which is several hundred feet thick, without flints, has 
yielded 25 species of Ammonites, of which half are peculiar to it. The genera 
Baculite, Hamite, Scaphite, Turrilite, Nautilus, Belemnite, and Belemnitella, 
are also represented.

CHALK MARL. 

(FIGURE 264. Ammonites Rhotomagensis. Chalk marl. Back and side view.)

(FIGURE 265. Turrilites costatus, Lam. Lower chalk and chalk marl.
a. Section, showing the foliated border of the sutures of the chambers.)

(FIGURE 266. Scaphites aequalis. Chloritic marl and sand, Dorsetshire.)

The lower chalk without flints passes gradually downward, in the south of 
England, into an argillaceous limestone, "the chalk marl," already alluded to. 
It contains 32 species of Ammonites, seven of which are peculiar to it, while 
eleven pass up into the overlying lower white chalk. A. Rhotomagensis is 
characteristic of this formation. Among the British cephalopods of other genera 
may be mentioned Scaphites aequalis (Figure 266) and Turrilites costatus (Figure 
265).

CHLORITIC SERIES (OR UPPER GREENSAND).

According to the old nomenclature, this subdivision of the chalk was called 
Upper Greensand, in order to distinguish it from those members of the Neocomian 
or Lower Cretaceous series below the Gault to which the name of Greensand had 
been applied. Besides the reasons before given for abandoning this nomenclature, 
it is objectionable in this instance as leading the uninitiated to suppose that 
the divisions thus named Upper and Lower Greensand are of co-ordinate value, 
instead of which the chloritic sand is quite a subordinate member of the Upper 
Cretaceous group, and the term Greensand has very commonly been used for the 
whole of the Lower Cretaceous rocks, which are almost comparable in importance 
to the entire Upper Cretaceous series. The higher portion of the Chloritic 
series in some districts has been called chloritic marl, from its consisting of 
a chalky marl with chloritic grains. In parts of Surrey, where calcareous matter 
is largely intermixed with sand, it forms a stone called malm-rock or firestone. 
In the cliffs of the southern coast of the Isle of Wight it contains bands of 
calcareous limestone with nodules of chert.

COPROLITE BED. 

The so-called coprolite bed, found near Farnham, in Surrey, and near Cambridge, 
contains nodules of phosphate of lime in such abundance as to be largely worked 
for the manufacture of artificial manure. It belongs to the upper part of the 
Chloritic series, and is doubtless chiefly of animal origin, and may perhaps be 
partly coprolitic, derived from the excrement of fish and reptiles. The late Mr. 
Barrett discovered in it, near Cambridge, in 1858, the remains of a bird, which 
was rather larger than the common pigeon, and probably of the order Natatores, 
and which, like most of the Gull tribe, had well-developed wings. Portions of 
the metacarpus, metatarsus, tibia, and femur have been detected, and the 
determinations of Mr. Barrett have been confirmed by Professor Owen.

This phosphatic bed in the suburbs of Cambridge must have been formed partly by 
the denudation of pre-existing rocks, mostly of Cretaceous age. The fossil 
shells and bones of animals washed out of these denuded strata, now forming a 
layer only a few feet thick, have yielded a rich harvest to the collector. A 
large Rudist of the genus Radiolite, no less than two feet in height, may be 
seen in the Cambridge Museum, obtained from this bed. The number of reptilian 
remains, all apparently of Cretaceous age, is truly surprising; more than ten 
species of Pterodactyl, five or six of Ichthyosaurus, one of Pliosaurus, one of 
Dinosaurus, eight of Chelonians, besides other forms, having been recognised.

The chloritic sand is regarded by many geologists as a littoral deposit of the 
Chalk Ocean, and therefore contemporaneous with part of the chalk marl, and 
even, perhaps, with some part of the white chalk. For, as the land went on 
sinking, and the cretaceous sea widened its area, white mud and chloritic sand 
were always forming somewhere, but the line of sea-shore was perpetually 
shifting its position. Hence, though both sand and mud originated 
simultaneously, the one near the land, the other far from it, the sands in every 
locality where a shore became submerged might constitute the underlying deposit.

(FIGURE 267. Ostrea columba. Syn. Gryphaea columba. Chloritic sand.)

(FIGURE 268. Ostrea carinata. Chalk marl and chloritic sand. Neocomian.)

(FIGURE 269. Terebrirostra lyra, Sowerby. Chloritic sand.)

(FIGURE 270. Pecten 5-costatus. White chalk and chloritic sand. Neocomian.)

(FIGURE 271. Plagiostoma Hoperi, Sowerby. Syn. Lima Hoperi. White chalk and 
chloritic sand.)

Among the characteristic mollusca of the chloritic sand may be mentioned 
Terebrirostra lyra (Figure 269), Plagiostoma Hoperi (Figure 271), Pecten 
quinque-costatus (Figure 270), and Ostrea columba (Figure 267).

The Cephalopoda are abundant, among which 40 species of Ammonites are now known, 
10 being peculiar to this subdivision, and the rest common to the beds 
immediately above or below.

GAULT.

(FIGURE 272. Ancyloceras spinigerum, d'Orb. Syn. Hamites spiniger, Sowerby. Near 
Folkestone. Gault.)

The lowest member of the Upper Cretaceous group, usually about 100 feet thick in 
the S.E. of England, is provincially termed Gault. It consists of a dark blue 
marl, sometimes intermixed with green sand. Many peculiar forms of cephalopoda, 
such as the Hamite (Figure 272), and Scaphite, with other fossils, characterise 
this formation, which, small as is its thickness, can be traced by its organic 
remains to distant parts of Europe, as, for example, to the Alps.

Twenty-one species of British Ammonites are recorded as found in the Gault, of 
which only eight are peculiar to it, ten being common to the overlying Chloritic 
series.

CONNECTION BETWEEN UPPER AND LOWER CRETACEOUS STRATA.-- BLACKDOWN BEDS.

The break between the Upper and Lower Cretaceous formations will be appreciated 
when it is stated that, although the Neocomian contains 31 species of Ammonite, 
and the Gault, as we have seen, 21, there are only three of those common to both 
divisions. Nevertheless, we may expect the discovery in England, and still more 
when we extend our survey to the Continent, of beds of passage intermediate 
between the Upper and Lower Cretaceous. Even now the Blackdown beds in 
Devonshire, which rest immediately on Triassic strata, and which evidently 
belong to some part of the Cretaceous series, have been referred by some 
geologists to the Upper group, by others to the Lower or Neocomian. They 
resemble the Folkestone beds of the latter series in mineral character, and 59 
out of 156 of their fossil mollusca are common to them; but they have also 16 
species common to the Gault, and 20 to the overlying Chloritic series; and what 
is very important, out of seven Ammonites six are found also in the Gault and 
Chloritic series, only one being peculiar to the Blackdown beds.

Professor Ramsay has remarked that there is a stratigraphical break; for in 
Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, at those few points where there are exposures of 
junctions of the Gault and Neocomian, the surface of the latter has been much 
eroded or denuded, while to the westward of the great chalk escarpment the 
unconformability of the two groups is equally striking. At Blackdown this 
unconformability is still more marked, for though distant only 100 miles from 
Kent and Surrey, no formation intervenes between these beds and the Trias; all 
intermediate groups, such as the Lower Neocomian and Oolite, having either not 
been deposited or destroyed by denudation.

FLORA OF THE UPPER CRETACEOUS PERIOD.

As the Upper Cretaceous rocks of Europe are, for the most part, of purely marine 
origin, and formed in deep water usually far from the nearest shore, land-plants 
of this period, as we might naturally have anticipated, are very rarely met 
with. In the neighbourhood of Aix-la-Chapelle, however, an important exception 
occurs, for there certain white sands and laminated clays, 400 feet in 
thickness, contain the remains of terrestrial plants in a beautiful state of 
preservation. These beds are the equivalents of the white chalk and chalk marl 
of England, or Senonien of d'Orbigny, although the white siliceous sands of the 
lower beds, and the green grains in the upper part of the formation, cause it to 
differ in mineral character from our white chalk.

Beds of fine clay, with fossil plants, and with seams of lignite, and even 
perfect coal, are intercalated. Floating wood, containing perforating shells, 
such as Pholas and Gastrochoena, occur. There are likewise a few beds of a 
yellowish-brown limestone, with marine shells, which enable us to prove that the 
lowest and highest plant-beds belong to one group. Among these shells are Pecten 
quadricostatus, and several others which are common to the upper and lower part 
of the series, and Trigonia limbata, d'Orbigny, a shell of the white chalk. On 
the whole, the organic remains and the geological position of the strata prove 
distinctly that in the neighbourhood of Aix-la-Chapelle a gulf of the ancient 
Cretaceous sea was bounded by land composed of Devonian rocks. These rocks 
consisted of quartzose and schistose beds, the first of which supplied white 
sand and the other argillaceous mud to a river which entered the sea at this 
point, carrying down in its turbid waters much drift-wood and the leaves of 
plants. Occasionally, when the force of the river abated, marine shells of the 
genera Trigonia, Turritella, Pecten, etc., established themselves in the same 
area, and plants allied to Zostera and Fucus grew on the bottom.

The fossil plants of this member of the upper chalk at Aix have been diligently 
collected and studied by Dr. Debey, and as they afford the only example yet 
known of a terrestrial flora older than the Eocene, in which the great divisions 
of the vegetable kingdom are represented in nearly the same proportions as in 
our own times, they deserve particular attention. Dr. Debey estimates the number 
of species as amounting to more than two hundred, of which sixty-seven are 
cryptogamous, chiefly ferns, twenty species of which can be well determined, 
most of them being in fructification. The scars on the bark of one or two are 
supposed to indicate tree-ferns. Of thirteen genera three are still existing, 
namely, Gleichenia, now inhabiting the Cape of Good Hope, and New Holland; 
Lygodium, now spread extensively through tropical regions, but having some 
species which live in Japan and North America; and Asplenium, a cosmopolite 
form. Among the phaenogamous plants, the Conifers are abundant, the most common 
belonging to a genus called Cycadopteris by Debey, and hardly separable from 
Sequoia (or Wellingtonia), of which both the cones and branches are preserved. 
When I visited Aix, I found the silicified wood of this plant very plentifully 
dispersed through the white sands in the pits near that city. In one silicified 
trunk 200 rings of annual growth could be counted. Species of Araucaria like 
those of Australia are also found. Cycads are extremely rare, and of 
Monocotyledons there are but few. No palms have been recognised with certainty, 
but the genus Pandanus, or screw pine, has been distinctly made out. The number 
of the Dicotyledonous Angiosperms is the most striking feature in so ancient a 
flora.

(In this and subsequent remarks on fossil plants I shall often use Dr. Lindley's 
terms, as most familiar in this country; but as those of M. A. Brongniart are 
much cited, it may be useful to geologists to give a table explaining the 
corresponding names of groups so much spoken of in palaeontology.

COLUMN 1. BRONGNIART.

COLUMN 2. LINDLEY.

COLUMN 3. EXAMPLES.

CRYPTOGAMIC.

1. Cryptogamous amphigens, or cellular cryptogamic: Thallogens: Lichens, sea-
weeds, fungi.

2. Cryptogamous acrogens: Acrogens: Mosses, equisetums, ferns, lycopodiums-- 
Lepidodendra.

PHAENEROGAMIC.

3. Dicotyledonous gymnosperms: Gymnogens: Conifers and Cycads.

4. Dicotyledonous Angiosperms: Exogens: Compositae, leguminosae, umbelliferae, 
cruciferae, heaths, etc. All native European trees except conifers.

5. Monocotyledons: Endogens. Palms, lilies, aloes, rushes, grasses, etc.)

Among them we find the familiar forms of the Oak, Fig, and Walnut (Quercus, 
Ficus, and Juglans), of the last both the nuts and leaves; also several genera 
of the Myrtaceae. But the predominant order is the Proteaceae, of which there 
are between sixty and seventy supposed species, many of extinct genera, but some 
referred to the following living forms-- Dryandra, Grevillea, Hakea, Banksia, 
Persoonia-- all now belonging to Australia, and Leucospermum, species of which 
form small bushes at the Cape.

The epidermis of the leaves of many of these Aix plants, especially of the 
Proteaceae, is so perfectly preserved in an envelope of fine clay, that under 
the microscope the stomata, or polygonal cellules, can be detected, and their 
peculiar arrangement is identical with that known to characterise some living 
Proteaceae (Grevillea, for example). Although this peculiarity of the structure 
of stomata is also found in plants of widely distant orders, it is, on the 
whole, but rarely met with, and being thus observed to characterise a foliage 
previously suspected to be proteaceous, it adds to the probability that the 
botanical evidence had been correctly interpreted.

An occasional admixture at Aix-la-Chapelle of Fucoids and Zosterites attests, 
like the shells, the presence of salt-water. Of insects, Dr. Debey has obtained 
about ten species of the families Curculionidae and Carabidae.

The resemblance of the flora of Aix-la-Chapelle to the tertiary and living 
floras in the proportional number of dicotyledonous angiosperms as compared to 
the gymnogens, is a subject of no small theoretical interest, because we can now 
affirm that these Aix plants flourished before the rich reptilian fauna of the 
secondary rocks had ceased to exist. The Ichthyosaurus, Pterodactyl, and 
Mosasaurus were of coeval date with the oak, the walnut, and the fig. 
Speculations have often been hazarded respecting a connection between the rarity 
of Exogens in the older rocks and a peculiar state of the atmosphere. A denser 
air, it was suggested, had in earlier times been alike adverse to the well-being 
of the higher order of flowering plants, and of the quick-breathing animals, 
such as mammalia and birds, while it was favourable to a cryptogamic and 
gymnospermous flora, and to a predominance of reptile life. But we now learn 
that there is no incompatibility in the co-existence of a vegetation like that 
of the present globe, and some of the most remarkable forms of the extinct 
reptiles of the age of gymnosperms.

If the passage seem at present to be somewhat sudden from the flora of the Lower 
or Neocomian to that of the Upper Cretaceous period, the abruptness of the 
change will probably disappear when we are better acquainted with the fossil 
vegetation of the uppermost beds of the Neocomian and that of the lowest strata 
of the Gault or true Cretaceous series.

HIPPURITE LIMESTONE.-- DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE CHALK OF THE NORTH AND SOUTH OF 
EUROPE.

(FIGURE 273. Map of part of S.W. France, from the Loire river to the Pyrenees.)

By the aid of the three tests, superposition, mineral character, and fossils, 
the geologist has been enabled to refer to the same Cretaceous period certain 
rocks in the north and south of Europe, which differ greatly both in their 
fossil contents and in their mineral composition and structure.

If we attempt to trace the cretaceous deposits from England and France to the 
countries bordering the Mediterranean, we perceive, in the first place, that in 
the neighbourhood of London and Paris they form one great continuous mass, the 
Straits of Dover being a trifling interruption, a mere valley with chalk cliffs 
on both sides. We then observe that the main body of the chalk which surrounds 
Paris stretches from Tours to near Poitiers (see Figure 273, in which the shaded 
part represents chalk).

Between Poitiers and La Rochelle, the space marked A on the map separates two 
regions of chalk. This space is occupied by the Oolite and certain other 
formations older than the Chalk and Neocomian, and has been supposed by M. E. de 
Beaumont to have formed an island in the Cretaceous sea. South of this space we 
again meet with rocks which we at once recognise to be cretaceous, partly from 
the chalky matrix and partly from the fossils being very similar to those of the 
white chalk of the north: especially certain species of the genera Spatangus, 
Ananchytes, Cidarites, Nucula, Ostrea, Gryphaea (Exogyra), Pecten, Plagiostoma 
(Lima), Trigonia, Catillus (Inoceramus), and Terebratula. (d'Archiac, Sur la 
form. Cretacee du S.-O. de la France Mem. de la Soc. Geol. de France tome 2.) 
But Ammonites, as M. d'Archiac observes, of which so many species are met with 
in the chalk of the north of France, are scarcely ever found in the southern 
region; while the genera Hamite, Turrilite, and Scaphite, and perhaps Belemnite, 
are entirely wanting.

(FIGURE 274. Radiolites radiosa, d'Orbigny. White chalk of France.
b. Upper valve of same.)

(FIGURE 275. Radiolites foliaceus, d'Orbigny. Syn. Sphaerulites agarici-formis, 
Blainv. White chalk of France.)

(FIGURE 276. Hippurites organisans, Desmoulins. Upper chalk:-- chalk marl of 
Pyrenees? (d'Orbigny's Palaeontologie francaise plate 533.)
a. Young individual; when full grown they occur in groups adhering laterally to 
each other.
b. Upper side of the upper valve, showing a reticulated structure in those 
parts, b, where the external coating is worn off.
c. Upper end or opening of the lower and cylindrical valve.
d. Cast of the interior of the lower conical valve.)

On the other hand, certain forms are common in the south which are rare or 
wholly unknown in the north of France. Among these may be mentioned many 
Hippurites, Sphaerulites, and other members of that great family of mollusca 
called Rudistes by Lamarck, to which nothing analogous has been discovered in 
the living creation, but which is quite characteristic of rocks of the 
Cretaceous era in the south of France, Spain, Sicily, Greece, and other 
countries bordering the Mediterranean. The species called Hippurites organisans 
(Figure 276) is more abundant than any other in the south of Europe; and the 
geologist should make himself well acquainted with the cast of the interior, d, 
which is often the only part preserved in many compact marbles of the Upper 
Cretaceous period. The flutings on the interior of the Hippurite, which are 
represented on the cast by smooth, rounded longitudinal ribs, and in some 
individuals attain a great size and length, are wholly unlike the markings on 
the exterior of the shell.

CRETACEOUS ROCKS IN THE UNITED STATES.

If we pass to the American continent, we find in the State of New Jersey a 
series of sandy and argillaceous beds wholly unlike in mineral character to our 
Upper Cretaceous system; which we can, nevertheless, recognise as referable, 
palaeontologically, to the same division.

That they were about the same age generally as the European chalk and Neocomian, 
was the conclusion to which Dr. Morton and Mr. Conrad came after their 
investigation of the fossils in 1834. The strata consist chiefly of green sand 
and green marl, with an overlying coralline limestone of a pale yellow colour, 
and the fossils, on the whole, agree most nearly with those of the Upper 
European series, from the Maestricht beds to the Gault inclusive. I collected 
sixty shells from the New Jersey deposits in 1841, five of which were identical 
with European species-- Ostrea larva, O. vesicularis, Gryphaea costata, Pecten 
quinque-costatus, Belemnitella mucronata. As some of these have the greatest 
vertical range in Europe, they might be expected more than any others to recur 
in distant parts of the globe. Even where the species were different, the 
generic forms, such as the Baculite and certain sections of Ammonites, as also 
the Inoceramus (see above, Figure 252) and other bivalves, have a decidedly 
cretaceous aspect. Fifteen out of the sixty shells above alluded to were 
regarded by Professor Forbes as good geographical representatives of well-known 
cretaceous fossils of Europe. The correspondence, therefore, is not small, when 
we reflect that the part of the United States where these strata occur is 
between 3000 and 4000 miles distant from the chalk of Central and Northern 
Europe, and that there is a difference of ten degrees in the latitude of the 
places compared on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Fish of the genera Lamna, 
Galeus, and Carcharodon are common to New Jersey and the European cretaceous 
rocks. So also is the genus Mosasaurus among reptiles.

It appears from the labours of Dr. Newberry and others, that the Cretaceous 
strata of the United States east and west of the Appalachians are characterised 
by a flora decidedly analogous to that of Aix-la-Chapelle above-mentioned, and 
therefore having considerable resemblance to the vegetation of the Tertiary and 
Recent Periods.


CHAPTER XVIII.

LOWER CRETACEOUS OR NEOCOMIAN FORMATION.

Classification of marine and fresh-water Strata.
Upper Neocomian.
Folkestone and Hythe Beds.
Atherfield Clay.
Similarity of Conditions causing Reappearance of Species after short Intervals.
Upper Speeton Clay.
Middle Neocomian.
Tealby Series.
Middle Speeton Clay.
Lower Neocomian.
Lower Speeton Clay.
Wealden Formation.
Fresh-water Character of the Wealden.
Weald Clay.
Hastings Sands.
Punfield Beds of Purbeck, Dorsetshire.
Fossil Shells and Fish of the Wealden.
Area of the Wealden.
Flora of the Wealden.

We now come to the Lower Cretaceous Formation which was formerly called Lower 
Greensand, and for which it will be useful for reasons before explained (Chapter 
17) to use the term "Neocomian."

TABLE 18.1. LOWER CRETACEOUS OR NEOCOMIAN GROUP.

COLUMN 1: MARINE.
COLUMN 2: FRESH-WATER.

1. Upper Neocomian-- Greensand of Folkestone, Sandgate, and Hythe, Atherfield 
clay, upper part of Speeton clay: Part of Wealden beds of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, 
Hants, and Dorset.

2. Middle Neocomian-- Punfield Marine bed, Tealby beds, middle part of Speeton 
clay: Part of Wealden beds of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hants, and Dorset.

3. Lower Neocomian-- Lower part of Speeton clay: Part of Wealden beds of Kent, 
Surrey, Sussex, Hants, and Dorset.

In Western France, the Alps, the Carpathians, Northern Italy, and the Apennines, 
an extensive series of rocks has been described by Continental geologists under 
the name of Tithonian. These beds, which are without any marine equivalent in 
this country, appear completely to bridge over the interval between the 
Neocomian and the Oolites. They may, perhaps, as suggested by Mr. Judd, be of 
the same age as part of the Wealden series.

UPPER NEOCOMIAN.

FOLKSTONE AND HYTHE BEDS.

(FIGURE 277. Nautilus plicatus, Sowerby, in Fitton's Monog.)

(FIGURE 278. Ancyloceras gigas, d'Orbigny.)

(FIGURE 279. Gervillia anceps, Desh. Upper Neocomian, Surrey.)

(FIGURE 280. Trigonia caudata, Agassiz. Upper Neocomian.)

(FIGURE 281. Terebratula sella, Sowerby. Upper Neocomian, Hythe.)

(FIGURE 282. Diceras Lonsdalii. Upper Neocomian, Wilts.
a. The bivalve shell.
b. Cast of one of the valves enlarged.)

The sands which crop out beneath the Gault in Wiltshire, Surrey, and Sussex are 
sometimes in the uppermost part pure white, at others of a yellow and 
ferruginous colour, and some of the beds contain much green matter. At 
Folkestone they contain layers of calcareous matter and chert, and at Hythe, in 
the neighbourhood, as also at Maidstone and other parts of Kent, the limestone 
called Kentish Rag is intercalated. This somewhat clayey and calcareous stone 
forms strata two feet thick, alternating with quartzose sand. The total 
thickness of these Folkestone and Hythe beds is less than 300 feet, and they are 
seen to rest immediately on a grey clay, to which we shall presently allude as 
the Atherfield clay. Among the fossils of the Folkestone and Hythe beds we may 
mention Nautilus plicatus (Figure 277), Ancyloceras (Scaphites) gigas (Figure 
278), which has been aptly described as an Ammonite more or less uncoiled; 
Trigonia caudata (Figure 280), Gervillia anceps (Figure 279), a bivalve genus 
allied to Avicula, and Terebratula sella (Figure 281). In ferruginous beds of 
the same age in Wiltshire is found a remarkable shell called Diceras Lonsdalii 
(Figure 282), which abounds in the Upper and Middle Neocomian of Southern 
Europe. This genus is closely allied to Chama, and the cast of the interior has 
been compared to the horns of a goat.

ATHERFIELD CLAY.

We mentioned before that the Folkstone and Hythe series rest on a grey clay. 
This clay is only of slight thickness in Kent and Surrey, but acquires great 
dimensions at Atherfield, in the Isle of Wight. The difference, indeed, in 
mineral character and thickness of the Upper Neocomian formation near 
Folkestone, and the corresponding beds in the south of the Isle of Wight, about 
100 miles distant, is truly remarkable. In the latter place we find no limestone 
answering to the Kentish Rag, and the entire thickness from the bottom of the 
Atherfield clay to the top of the Neocomian, instead of being less than 300 feet 
as in Kent, is given by the late Professor E. Forbes as 843 feet, which he 
divides into sixty-three strata, forming three groups. The uppermost of these 
consists of ferruginous sands, the second of sands and clay, and the third or 
lowest of a brown clay, abounding in fossils.

Pebbles of quartzose sandstone, jasper, and flinty slate, together with grains 
of chlorite and mica, and, as Mr. Godwin-Austen has shown, fragments and water-
worn fossils of the oolitic rocks, speak plainly of the nature of the pre-
existing formations, by the wearing down of which the Neocomian beds were 
formed. The land, consisting of such rocks, was doubtless submerged before the 
origin of the white chalk, a deposit which was formed in a more open sea, and in 
clearer waters.

(FIGURE 283. Perna Mulleti, Desh. One-eighth natural size.
a. Exterior.
b. Part of hinge-line of upper or right valve.)

Among the shells of the Atherfield clay the biggest and most abundant shell is 
the large Perna Mulleti, of which a reduced figure is given in Figure 283.

SIMILARITY OF CONDITIONS CAUSING REAPPEARANCE OF SPECIES.

Some species of mollusca and other fossils range through the whole series, while 
others are confined to particular subdivisions, and Forbes laid down a law which 
has since been found of very general application in regard to estimating the 
chronological relations of consecutive strata. Whenever similar conditions, he 
says, are repeated, the same species reappear, provided too great a lapse of 
time has not intervened; whereas if the length of the interval has been 
geologically great, the same genera will reappear represented by distinct 
species. Changes of depth, or of the mineral nature of the sea-bottom, the 
presence or absence of lime or of peroxide of iron, the occurrence of a muddy, 
or a sandy, or a gravelly bottom, are marked by the banishment of certain 
species and the predominance of others. But these differences of conditions 
being mineral, chemical, and local in their nature, have no necessary connection 
with the extinction, throughout a large area, of certain animals or plants. When 
the forms proper to loose sand or soft clay, or to perfectly clear water, or to 
a sea of moderate or great depth, recur with all the same species, we may infer 
that the interval of time has been, geologically speaking, small, however dense 
the mass of matter accumulated. But if, the genera remaining the same, the 
species are changed, we have entered upon a new period; and no similarity of 
climate, or of geographical and local conditions, can then recall the old 
species which a long series of destructive causes in the animate and inanimate 
world has gradually annihilated.

SPEETON CLAY, UPPER DIVISION.

(FIGURE 284. Ammonites Deshayesii, Leym. Upper Neocomian.)

On the coast, beneath the white chalk of Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire, an 
argillaceous formation crops out, called the Speeton clay, several hundred feet 
in thickness, the palaeontological relations of which have been ably worked out 
by Mr. John W. Judd, and he has shown that it is separable into three divisions, 
the uppermost of which, 150 feet thick, and containing 87 species of mollusca, 
decidedly belongs to the Atherfield clay and associated strata of Hythe and 
Folkestone, already described. (Judd, Speeton clay, Quarterly Geological Journal 
volume 24 1868 page 218.) It is characterised by the Perna Mulleti (Figure 283) 
and Terebratula sella (Figure 281), and by Ammonites Deshayesii (Figure 284), a 
well-known Hythe fossil. Fine skeletons of reptiles of the genera Pliosaurus and 
Teleosaurus have been obtained from this clay. At the base of this upper 
division of the Speeton clay there occurs a layer of large Septaria, formerly 
worked for the manufacture of cement. This bed is crowded with fossils, 
especially Ammonites, one species of which, three feet in diameter, was observed 
by Mr. Judd.

MIDDLE NEOCOMIAN.

TEALBY SERIES.

(FIGURE 285. Pecten cinctus, Sowerby. (P. crassitesta, Rom.) Middle Neocomian, 
England; Middle and Lower Neocomian, Germany. One-fifth natural size.)

(FIGURE 286. Ancyloceras (Crioceras) Duvallei, Leveille. Middle and Lower 
Neocomian. One-fifth natural size.)

At Tealby, a village in the Lincolnshire Wolds, there crop out beneath the white 
chalk some non-fossiliferous ferruginous sands about twenty-feet thick, beneath 
which are beds of clay and limestone, about fifty feet thick, with an 
interesting suite of fossils, among which are Pecten cinctus (Figure 285), from 
9 to 12 inches in diameter, Ancyloceras Duvallei (Figure 286), and some forty 
other shells, many of them common to the Middle Speeton clay, about to be 
mentioned. Mr. Judd remarks that as Ammonites clypei-formis and Terebratula 
hippopus characterise the Middle Neocomian of the Continent, it is to this stage 
that the Tealby series containing the same fossils may be assigned. (Judd 
Quarterly Geological Journal 1867 volume 23 page 249.)

The middle division of the Speeton clay, occurring at Speeton below the cement-
bed, before alluded to, is 150 feet thick, and contains about 39 species of 
mollusca, half of which are common to the overlying clay. Among the peculiar 
shells, Pecten cinctus (Figure 285) and Ancyloceras (Crioceras) Duvallei (Figure 
286) occur.

LOWER NEOCOMIAN.

(FIGURE 287. Ammonites Noricus, Schloth. Lower Neocomian, Speeton.)

In the lower division of the Speeton clay, 200 feet thick, 46 species of 
mollusca have been found, and three divisions, each characterised by its 
peculiar ammonite, have been noticed by Mr. Judd. The central zone is marked by 
Ammonites Noricus (see Figure 287). On the Continent these beds are well-known 
by their corresponding fossils, the Hils clay and conglomerate of the north of 
Germany agreeing with the Middle and Lower Speeton, the latter of which, with 
the same mineral characters and fossils as in Yorkshire, is also found in the 
little island of Heligoland. Yellow limestone, which I have myself seen near 
Neuchatel, in Switzerland, represents the Lower Neocomian at Speeton.

WEALDEN FORMATION.

Beneath the Atherfield clay or Upper Neocomian of the S.E. of England, a fresh-
water formation is found, called the Wealden, which, although it occupies a 
small horizontal area in Europe, as compared to the White Chalk and the marine 
Neocomian beds, is nevertheless of great geological interest, since the imbedded 
remains give us some insight into the nature of the terrestrial fauna and flora 
of the Lower Cretaceous epoch. The name of Wealden was given to this group 
because it was first studied in parts of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, called the 
Weald; and we are indebted to Dr. Mantell for having shown, in 1822, in his 
"Geology of Sussex," that the whole group was of fluviatile origin. In proof of 
this he called attention to the entire absence of Ammonites, Belemnites, 
Brachiopoda, Echinodermata, Corals, and other marine fossils, so characteristic 
of the Cretaceous rocks above, and of the Oolitic strata below, and to the 
presence in the Weald of Paludinae, Melaniae, Cyrenae, and various fluviatile 
shells, as well as the bones of terrestrial reptiles and the trunks and leaves 
of land-plants.

(FIGURE 288. Section from (left) W.S.W. through Brixton bay, Isle of Wight, 
Solent and South Downs to E.N.E. (right).
1. Tertiary.
2. Chalk and Gault.
3. Upper Neocomian (or Lower Greensand).
4. Wealden (Weald Clay and Hastings Sands).)

The evidence of so unexpected a fact as that of a dense mass of purely fresh-
water origin underlying a deep-sea deposit (a phenomenon with which we have 
since become familiar) was received, at first, with no small doubt and 
incredulity. But the relative position of the beds is unequivocal; the Weald 
Clay being distinctly seen to pass beneath the Atherfield Clay in various parts 
of Surrey, Kent, and Sussex, and to reappear in the Isle of Wight at the base of 
the Cretaceous series, being, no doubt, continuous far beneath the surface, as 
indicated by the dotted lines in Figure 288. They are also found occupying the 
same relative position below the chalk in the peninsula of Purbeck, Dorsetshire, 
where, as we shall see in the sequel, they repose on strata referable to the 
Upper Oolite.

WEALD CLAY.

The Upper division, or Weald Clay, is, in great part, of fresh-water origin, but 
in its highest portion contains beds of oysters and other marine shells which 
indicate fluvio-marine conditions. The uppermost beds are not only conformable, 
as Dr. Fitton observes, to the inferior strata of the overlying Neocomian, but 
of similar mineral composition. To explain this, we may suppose that, as the 
delta of a great river was tranquilly subsiding, so as to allow the sea to 
encroach upon the space previously occupied by fresh-water, the river still 
continued to carry down the same sediment into the sea. In confirmation of this 
view it may be stated that the remains of the Iguanodon Mantelli, a gigantic 
terrestrial reptile, very characteristic of the Wealden, has been discovered 
near Maidstone, in the overlying Kentish Rag, or marine limestone of the Upper 
Neocomian. Hence we may infer that some of the saurians which inhabited the 
country of the great river continued to live when part of the district had 
become submerged beneath the sea. Thus, in our own times, we may suppose the 
bones of large alligators to be frequently entombed in recent fresh-water strata 
in the delta of the Ganges. But if part of that delta should sink down so as to 
be covered by the sea, marine formations might begin to accumulate in the same 
space where fresh-water beds had previously been formed; and yet the Ganges 
might still pour down its turbid waters in the same direction, and carry seaward 
the carcasses of the same species of alligator, in which case their bones might 
be included in marine as well as in subjacent fresh-water strata.

(FIGURES 289 AND 290. Tooth of Iguanodon Mantelli.

(FIGURE 289. a, and b.)

(FIGURE 290. A. Partially worn tooth of young individual of the same.
b. Crown of tooth in adult worn down. (Mantell.)))

The Iguanodon, first discovered by Dr. Mantell, was an herbivorous reptile, of 
which the teeth, though bearing a great analogy, in their general form and 
crenated edges (see Figure 289 a and b), to the modern Iguanas which now 
frequent the tropical woods of America and the West Indies, exhibit many 
important differences. It appears that they have often been worn by the process 
of mastication; whereas the existing herbivorous reptiles clip and gnaw off the 
vegetable productions on which they feed, but do not chew them. Their teeth 
frequently present an appearance of having been chipped off, but never, like the 
fossil teeth of the Iguanodon, have a flat ground surface (see Figure 290, b) 
resembling the grinders of herbivorous mammalia. Dr. Mantell computes that the 
teeth and bones of this species which passed under his examination during twenty 
years must have belonged to no less than seventy-one distinct individuals, 
varying in age and magnitude from the reptile just burst from the egg, to one of 
which the femur measured twenty-four inches in circumference. Yet, 
notwithstanding that the teeth were more numerous than any other bones, it is 
remarkable that it was not until the relics of all these individuals had been 
found, that a solitary example of part of a jaw-bone was obtained. Soon 
afterwards remains both of the upper and lower jaw were met with in the Hastings 
beds in Tilgate Forest, near Cuckfield. In the same sands at Hastings, Mr. 
Beckles found large tridactyle impressions which it is conjectured were made by 
the hind feet of this animal, on which it is ascertained that there were only 
three well-developed toes.

(FIGURE 291. Cypris spinigera, Fitton.)

(FIGURE 292. Weald clay with Cyprides.)

Occasionally bands of limestone, called Sussex Marble, occur in the Weald Clay, 
almost entirely composed of a species of Paludina, closely resembling the common 
P. vivipara of English rivers. Shells of the Cypris, a genus of Crustaceans 
mentioned in Chapter 3 as abounding in lakes and ponds, are also plentifully 
scattered through the clays of the Wealden, sometimes producing, like plates of 
mica, a thin lamination (see Figure 292).

HASTINGS SANDS.

This lower division of the Wealden consists of sand, sandstone, calciferous 
grit, clay, and shale; the argillaceous strata, notwithstanding the name, 
predominating somewhat over the arenaceous, as will be seen by reference to the 
following table, drawn up by Messrs. Drew and Foster, of the Geological Survey 
of Great Britain:

TABLE 18.1. SUBORDINATE FORMATIONS IN THE HASTINGS SAND.

COLUMN 1: NAME OF SUBORDINATE FORMATION.
COLUMN 2: MINERAL COMPOSITION OF THE STRATA.
COLUMN 3: THICKNESS IN FEET.

Tunbridge Wells Sand: Sandstone and loam: 150.

Wadhurst Clay: Blue and brown shale and clay, with a little calc-grit: 100.

Ashdown Sand: Hard sand, with some beds of calc-grit: 160.

Ashburnham Beds: Mottled white and red clay, with some sandstone: 330.

The picturesque scenery of the "High Rocks" and other places in the 
neighbourhood of Tunbridge Wells is caused by the steep natural cliffs, to which 
a hard bed of white sand, occurring in the upper part of the Tunbridge Wells 
Sand, mentioned in the above table, gives rise. This bed of "rock-sand" varies 
in thickness from 25 to 48 feet. Large masses of it, which were by no means hard 
or capable of making a good building-stone, form, nevertheless, projecting rocks 
with perpendicular faces, and resist the degrading action of the river because, 
says Mr. Drew, they present a solid mass without planes of division. The 
calcareous sandstone and grit of Tilgate Forest, near Cuckfield, in which the 
remains of the Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus were first found by Dr. Mantell, 
constitute an upper member of the Tunbridge Wells Sand, while the "sand-rock" of 
the Hastings cliffs, about 100 feet thick, is one of the lower members of the 
same. The reptiles, which are very abundant in this division, consist partly of 
saurians, referred by Owen and Mantell to eight genera, among which, besides 
those already enumerated, we find the Megalosaurus and Plesiosaurus. The 
Pterodactyl also, a flying reptile, is met with in the same strata, and many 
remains of Chelonians of the genera Trionyx and Emys, now confined to tropical 
regions.

(FIGURE 293. Lepidotus Mantelli, Agassiz. Wealden.
a. Palate and teeth.
b. Side view of teeth.
c. Scale.)

The fishes of the Wealden are chiefly referable to the Ganoid and Placoid 
orders. Among them the teeth and scales of Lepidotus are most widely diffused 
(see Figure 293). These ganoids were allied to the Lepidosteus, or Gar-pike, of 
the American rivers. The whole body was covered with large rhomboidal scales, 
very thick, and having the exposed part coated with enamel. Most of the species 
of this genus are supposed to have been either river-fish, or inhabitants of the 
sea at the mouth of estuaries.

(FIGURE 294. Unio Valdensis, Mant. Isle of Wight and Dorsetshire; in the lower 
beds of the Hastings Sands. a, b.)

(FIGURE 295. Underside of slab of sandstone about one yard in diameter. 
Stammerham, Sussex.)

At different heights in the Hastings Sands, we find again and again slabs of 
sandstone with a strong ripple-mark, and between these slabs beds of clay many 
yards thick. In some places, as at Stammerham, Horsham, near there, are 
indications of this clay having been exposed so as to dry and crack before the 
next layer was thrown down upon it. The open cracks in the clay have served as 
moulds, of which casts have been taken in relief, and which are, therefore, seen 
on the lower surface of the sandstone (see Figure 295).

(FIGURE 296. Sphenopteris gracilis, Fitton. From the Hastings Sands near 
Tunbridge Wells.
a. A portion of the same magnified.)

Near the same place a reddish sandstone occurs in which are innumerable traces 
of a fossil vegetable, apparently Sphenopteris, the stems and branches of which 
are disposed as if the plants were standing erect on the spot where they 
originally grew, the sand having been gently deposited upon and around them; and 
similar appearances have been remarked in other places in this formation. 
(Mantell Geology of S.E. of England page 244.) In the same division also of the 
Wealden, at Cuckfield, is a bed of gravel or conglomerate, consisting of water-
worn pebbles of quartz and jasper, with rolled bones of reptiles. These must 
have been drifted by a current, probably in water of no great depth.

From such facts we may infer that, notwithstanding the great thickness of this 
division of the Wealden, the whole of it was a deposit in water of a moderate 
depth, and often extremely shallow. This idea may seem startling at first, yet 
such would be the natural consequence of a gradual and continuous sinking of the 
ground in an estuary or bay, into which a great river discharged its turbid 
waters. By each foot of subsidence, the fundamental rock would be depressed one 
foot farther from the surface; but the bay would not be deepened, if newly-
deposited mud and sand should raise the bottom one foot. On the contrary, such 
new strata of sand and mud might be frequently laid dry at low water, or 
overgrown for a season by a vegetation proper to marshes.

PUNFIELD BEDS, BRACKISH AND MARINE.

(FIGURE 297. Vicarya Lujani, De Verneuil (Foss. de Utrillas.) Wealden, Punfield.
a. Nearly perfect shell.
b. Vertical section of smaller specimen, showing continuous ridges as in 
Nerinaea.)

The shells of the Wealden beds belong to the genera Melanopsis, Melania, 
Paludina, Cyrena, Cyclas, Unio (see Figure 294), and others, which inhabit 
rivers or lakes; but one band has been found at Punfield, in Dorsetshire, 
indicating a brackish state of the water, where the genera Corbula, Mytilus, and 
Ostrea occur; and in some places this bed becomes purely marine, containing some 
well-known Neocomian fossils, among which Ammonites Deshayesii (Figure 284) may 
be mentioned. Others are peculiar as British, but very characteristic of the 
Upper and Middle Neocomian of Spain, and among these the Vicarya Lujani (Figure 
297), a shell allied to Nerinea, is conspicuous.

By reference to Table 18.1 it will be seen that the Wealden beds are given as 
the fresh-water equivalents of the Marine Neocomian. The highest part of them in 
England may, for reasons just given, be regarded as Upper Neocomian, while some 
of the inferior portions may correspond in age to the Middle and Lower divisions 
of that group. In favour of this latter view, M. Marcou mentions that a fish 
called Asteracanthus granulosus, occurring in the Tilgate beds, is 
characteristic of the lowest beds of the Neocomian of the Jura, and it is well 
known that Corbula alata, common in the Ashburnham beds, is found also at the 
base of the Neocomian of the Continent.

AREA OF THE WEALDEN.

In regard to the geographical extent of the Wealden, it can not be accurately 
laid down, because so much of it is concealed beneath the newer marine 
formations. It has been traced about 320 English miles from west to east, from 
the coast of Dorsetshire to near Boulogne, in France; and nearly 200 miles from 
north-west to south-east, from Surrey and Hampshire to Vassy, in France. If the 
formation be continuous throughout this space, which is very doubtful, it does 
not follow that the whole was contemporaneous; because, in all likelihood, the 
physical geography of the region underwent frequent changes throughout the whole 
period, and the estuary may have altered its form, and even shifted its place. 
Dr. Dunker, of Cassel, and H. von Meyer, in an excellent monograph on the 
Wealdens of Hanover and Westphalia, have shown that they correspond so closely, 
not only in their fossils, but also in their mineral characters, with the 
English series, that we can scarcely hesitate to refer the whole to one great 
delta. Even then, the magnitude of the deposit may not exceed that of many 
modern rivers. Thus, the delta of the Quorra or Niger, in Africa, stretches into 
the interior for more than 170 miles, and occupies, it is supposed, a space of 
more than 300 miles along the coast, thus forming a surface of more than 25,000 
square miles, or equal to about one-half of England. (Fitton Geology of Hastings 
page 58, who cites Lander's Travels.) Besides, we know not, in such cases, how 
far the fluviatile sediment and organic remains of the river and the land may be 
carried out from the coast, and spread over the bed of the sea. I have shown, 
when treating of the Mississippi, that a more ancient delta, including species 
of shells such as now inhabit Louisiana, has been upraised, and made to occupy a 
wide geographical area, while a newer delta is forming; and the possibility of 
such movements and their effects must not be lost sight of when we speculate on 
the origin of the Wealden. (See Chapter 6 and Second Visit to the United States 
volume 2 chapter 34.)

It may be asked where the continent was placed, from the ruins of which the 
Wealden strata were derived, and by the drainage of which a great river was fed. 
If the Wealden was gradually going downward 1000 feet or more perpendicularly, a 
large body of fresh-water would not continue to be poured into the sea at the 
same point. The adjoining land, if it participated in the movement, could not 
escape being submerged. But we may suppose such land to have been stationary, or 
even undergoing contemporaneous slow upheaval. There may have been an ascending 
movement in one region, and a descending one in a contiguous parallel zone of 
country. But even if that were the case, it is clear that finally an extensive 
depression took place in that part of Europe where the deep sea of the 
Cretaceous period was afterwards brought in.

THICKNESS OF THE WEALDEN.

In the Weald area itself, between the North and South Downs, fresh-water beds to 
the thickness of 1600 feet are known, the base not being reached. Probably the 
thickness of the whole Wealden series, as seen in Swanage Bay, can not be 
estimated as less than 2000 feet.

WEALDEN FLORA.

The flora of the Wealden is characterised by a great abundance of Coniferae, 
Cycadeae, anD Ferns, and by the absence of leaves and fruits of Dicotyledonous 
Angiosperms. The discovery in 1855, in the Hastings beds of the Isle of Wight, 
of Gyrogonites, or spore-vessels of the Chara, was the first example of that 
genus of plants, so common in the tertiary strata, being found in a Secondary or 
Mesozoic rock.


CHAPTER XIX.

JURASSIC GROUP.-- PURBECK BEDS AND OOLITE.

The Purbeck Beds a Member of the Jurassic Group.
Subdivisions of that Group.
Physical Geography of the Oolite in England and France.
Upper Oolite.
Purbeck Beds.
New Genera of fossil Mammalia in the Middle Purbeck of Dorsetshire.
Dirt-bed or ancient Soil.
Fossils of the Purbeck Beds.
Portland Stone and Fossils.
Kimmeridge Clay.
Lithographic Stone of Solenhofen.
Archaeopteryx.
Middle Oolite.
Coral Rag.
Nerinaea Limestone.
Oxford Clay, Ammonites and Belemnites.
Kelloway Rock.
Lower, or Bath, Oolite.
Great Plants of the Oolite.
Oolite and Bradford Clay.
Stonesfield Slate.
Fossil Mammalia.
Fuller's Earth.
Inferior Oolite and Fossils.
Northamptonshire Slates.
Yorkshire Oolitic Coal-field.
Brora Coal.
Palaeontological Relations of the several Subdivisions of the Oolitic group.

CLASSIFICATION OF THE OOLITE.

Immediately below the Hastings Sands we find in Dorsetshire another remarkable 
fresh-water formation, called THE PURBECK, because it was first studied in the 
sea-cliffs of the peninsula of Purbeck in that county. These beds are for the 
most part of fresh-water origin, but the organic remains of some few 
intercalated beds are marine, and show that the Purbeck series has a closer 
affinity to the Oolitic group, of which it may be considered as the newest or 
uppermost member.

In England generally, and in the greater part of Europe, both the Wealden and 
Purbeck beds are wanting, and the marine cretaceous group is followed 
immediately, in the descending order, by another series called the Jurassic. In 
this term, the formations commonly designated as "the Oolite and Lias" are 
included, both being found in the Jura Mountains. The Oolite was so named 
because in the countries where it was first examined the limestones belonging to 
it had an Oolitic structure (see Chapter 3). These rocks occupy in England a 
zone nearly thirty miles in average breadth, which extends across the island, 
from Yorkshire in the north-east, to Dorsetshire in the south-west. Their 
mineral characters are not uniform throughout this region; but the following are 
the names of the principal subdivisions observed in the central and south-
eastern parts of England.

TABLE 19.1. OOLITE.

UPPER OOLITE:
a. Purbeck beds.
b. Portland stone and sand.
c. Kimmeridge clay.

MIDDLE OOLITE:
d. Coral rag.
e. Oxford clay, and Kelloway rock.

LOWER OOLITE:
f. Cornbrash and Forest marble.
g. Great Oolite and Stonesfield slate.
h. Fuller's earth.
i. Inferior Oolite.

The Upper Oolitic system of the Table 19.1 has usually the Kimmeridge clay for 
its base; the Middle Oolitic system, the Oxford clay. The Lower system reposes 
on the Lias, an argillo-calcareous formation, which some include in the Lower 
Oolite, but which will be treated of separately in the next chapter. Many of 
these subdivisions are distinguished by peculiar organic remains; and, though 
varying in thickness, may be traced in certain directions for great distances, 
especially if we compare the part of England to which the above-mentioned type 
refers with the north-east of France and the Jura Mountains adjoining. In that 
country, distant above 400 geographical miles, the analogy to the accepted 
English type, notwithstanding the thinness or occasional absence of the clays, 
is more perfect than in Yorkshire or Normandy.

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY.

The alternation, on a grand scale, of distinct formations of clay and limestone 
has caused the oolitic and liassic series to give rise to some marked features 
in the physical outline of parts of England and France. Wide valleys can usually 
be traced throughout the long bands of country where the argillaceous strata 
crop out; and between these valleys the limestones are observed, forming ranges 
of hills or more elevated grounds. These ranges terminate abruptly on the side 
on which the several clays rise up from beneath the calcareous strata.

(FIGURE 298. Section through Lias (left), Lower Oolite, Oxford Clay, Middle 
Oolite, Kim. Clay. Upper Oolite. Gault, Chalk and London Clay (right).)

Figure 298 will give the reader an idea of the configuration of the surface now 
alluded to, such as may be seen in passing from London to Cheltenham, or in 
other parallel lines, from east to west, in the southern part of England. It has 
been necessary, however, in this drawing, greatly to exaggerate the inclination 
of the beds, and the height of the several formations, as compared to their 
horizontal extent. It will be remarked, that the lines of steep slope, or 
escarpment, face towards the west in the great calcareous eminences formed by 
the chalk and the Upper, Middle, and Lower Oolites; and at the base of which we 
have respectively the Gault, Kimmeridge clay, Oxford clay, and Lias. This last 
forms, generally, a broad vale at the foot of the escarpment of inferior Oolite, 
but where it acquires considerable thickness, and contains solid beds of 
marlstone, it occupies the lower part of the escarpment.

The external outline of the country which the geologist observes in travelling 
eastward from Paris to Metz, is precisely analogous, and is caused by a similar 
succession of rocks intervening between the tertiary strata and the Lias; with 
this difference, however, that the escarpments of Chalk, Upper, Middle, and 
Lower Oolites face towards the east instead of the west. It is evident, 
therefore, that the denuding causes (see Chapter 6) have acted similarly over an 
area several hundred miles in diameter, removing the softer clays more 
extensively than the limestones, and causing these last to form steep slopes or 
escarpments wherever the harder calcareous rock was based upon a more yielding 
and destructible formation.

UPPER OOLITE.

PURBECK BEDS.

These strata, which we class as the uppermost member of the Oolite, are of 
limited geographical extent in Europe, as already stated, but they acquire 
importance when we consider the succession of three distinct sets of fossil 
remains which they contain. Such repeated changes in organic life must have 
reference to the history of a vast lapse of ages. The Purbeck beds are finely 
exposed to view in Durdlestone Bay, near Swanage, Dorsetshire, and at Lulworth 
Cove and the neighbouring bays between Weymouth and Swanage. At Meup's Bay, in 
particular, Professor E. Forbes examined minutely, in 1850, the organic remains 
of this group, displayed in a continuous sea-cliff section, and it appears from 
his researches that the Upper, Middle, and Lower Purbecks are each marked by 
peculiar species of organic remains, these again being different, so far as a 
comparison has yet been instituted, from the fossils of the overlying Hastings 
Sands and Weald Clay.

UPPER PURBECK.

(FIGURE 299. Cyprides from the Upper Purbeck.
a. Cypris gibbosa, E. Forbes.
b. Cypris tuberculata, E. Forbes.
c. Cypris leguminella, E. Forbes.)

The highest of the three divisions is purely fresh-water, the strata, about 
fifty feet in thickness, containing shells of the genera Paludina, Physa, 
Limnaea, Planorbis, Valvata, Cyclas, and Unio, with Cyprides and fish. All the 
species seem peculiar, and among these the Cyprides are very abundant and 
characteristic (see Figure 299, a, b, c.)

The stone called "Purbeck Marble," formerly much used in ornamental architecture 
in the old English cathedrals of the southern counties, is exclusively procured 
from this division.

MIDDLE PURBECK.

Next in succession is the Middle Purbeck, about thirty feet thick, the uppermost 
part of which consists of fresh-water limestone, with cyprides, turtles, and 
fish, of different species from those in the preceding strata. Below the 
limestone are brackish-water beds full of Cyrena, and traversed by bands 
abounding in Corbula and Melania. These are based on a purely marine deposit, 
with Pecten, Modiola, Avicula, and Thracia. Below this, again, come limestones 
and shales, partly of brackish and partly of fresh-water origin, in which many 
fish, especially species of Lepidotus and Microdon radiatus, are found, and a 
crocodilian reptile named Macrorhynchus. Among the mollusks, a remarkable ribbed 
Melania, of the section Chilina, occurs.

(FIGURE 300. Ostrea distorta, Sowerby. Cinder-bed. Middle Purbeck.)

(FIGURE 301. Hemicidaris Purbeckensis, E. Forbes. Middle Purbeck.)

(FIGURE 302. Cyprides from the Middle Purbecks.
a. Cypris striato-punctata, E. Forbes.
b. Cypris fasciculata, E. Forbes.
c. Cypris granulata, Sowerby.)

(FIGURE 303. Physa Bristovii, E. Forbes. Middle Purbeck.)

Immediately below is a great and conspicuous stratum, twelve feet thick, formed 
of a vast accumulation of shells of Ostrea distorta (Figure 300), long familiar 
to geologists under the local name of "Cinder-bed." In the uppermost part of 
this bed Professor Forbes discovered the first echinoderm (Figure 301) as yet 
known in the Purbeck series, a species of Hemicidaris, a genus characteristic of 
the Oolitic period, and scarcely, if at all, distinguishable from a previously 
known Oolitic fossil. It was accompanied by a species of Perna. Below the 
Cinder-bed fresh-water strata are again seen, filled in many places with species 
of Cypris (Figure 302, a, b, c), and with Valvata, Paludina, Planorbis, Limnaea, 
Physa (Figure 303), and Cyclas, all different from any occurring higher in the 
series. It will be seen that Cypris fasciculata (Figure 302, b) has tubercles at 
the end only of each valve, a character by which it can be immediately 
recognised. In fact, these minute crustaceans, almost as frequent in some of the 
shales as plates of mica in a micaceous sandstone, enable geologists at once to 
identify the Middle Purbeck in places far from the Dorsetshire cliffs, as, for 
example, in the Vale of Wardour in Wiltshire. Thick beds of chert occur in the 
Middle Purbeck filled with mollusca and cyprides of the genera already 
enumerated, in a beautiful state of preservation, often converted into 
chalcedony. Among these Professor Forbes met with gyrogonites (the spore-vessels 
of Chara), plants never until 1851 discovered in rocks older than the Eocene. 
About twenty feet below the "Cinder-bed" is a stratum two or three inches thick, 
in which fossil mammalia presently to be mentioned occur, and beneath this a 
thin band of greenish shales, with marine shells and impressions of leaves like 
those of a large Zostera, forming the base of the Middle Purbeck.

FOSSIL MAMMALIA OF THE MIDDLE PURBECK.

In 1852, after alluding to the discovery of numerous insects and air-breathing 
mollusca in the Purbeck strata, I remarked that, although no mammalia had then 
been found, "it was too soon to infer their non-existence on mere negative 
evidence."  (Elements of Geology 4th edition.) Only two years after this remark 
was in print, Mr. W.R. Brodie found in the Middle Purbeck, about twenty feet 
below the "Cinder-bed" above alluded to, in Durdlestone Bay, portions of several 
small jaws with teeth, which Professor Owen recognised as belonging to a small 
mammifer of the insectivorous class, more closely allied in its dentition to the 
Amphitherium (or Thylacotherium) than to any existing type.

Four years later (in 1856) the remains of several other species of warm-blooded 
quadrupeds were exhumed by Mr. S.H. Beckles, F.R.S., from the same thin bed of 
marl near the base of the Middle Purbeck. In this marly stratum many reptiles, 
several insects, and some fresh-water shells of the genera Paludina, Planorbis, 
and Cyclas, were found.

Mr. Beckles had determined thoroughly to explore the thin layer of calcareous 
mud from which in the suburbs of Swanage the bones of the Spalacotherium had 
already been obtained, and in three weeks he brought to light from an area forty 
feet long and ten wide, and from a layer the average thickness of which was only 
five inches, portions of the skeletons of six new species of mammalia, as 
interpreted by Dr. Falconer, who first examined them. Before these interesting 
inquiries were brought to a close, the joint labours of Professor Owen and Dr. 
Falconer had made it clear that twelve or more species of mammalia characterised 
this portion of the Middle Purbeck, most of them insectivorous or predaceous, 
varying in size from that of a mole to that of the common polecat, Mustela 
putorius. While the majority had the character of insectivorous marsupials, Dr. 
Falconer selected one as differing widely from the rest, and pointed out that in 
certain characters it was allied to the living Kangaroo-rat, or Hypsiprymnus, 
ten species of which now inhabit the prairies and scrub-jungle of Australia, 
feeding on plants, and gnawing scratched-up roots. A striking peculiarity of 
their dentition, one in which they differ from all other quadrupeds, consists in 
their having a single large pre-molar, the enamel of which is furrowed with 
vertical grooves, usually seven in number.

(FIGURE 304. Pre-molar of the recent Australian Hypsiprymnus Gaimardi, showing 7 
grooves, at right angles to the length of the jaw, magnified 3 1/2 diameters.)

(FIGURE 305. Third and largest pre-molar (lower jaw) of Plagiaulax Becklesii, 
magnified 5 1/2 diameters, showing 7 diagonal grooves.)

(FIGURE 306. Plagiaulex Becklesii, Falconer. Middle Purbeck. Right ramus of 
lower jaw, magnified two diameters.
a. Incisor.
b, c. Line of vertical fracture behind the pre-molars.
pm. Three pre-molars, the third and last (much larger than the other two taken 
together) being divided by a crack.
m. Sockets of two missing molars.)

The largest pre-molar (see Figure 305) in the fossil genus exhibits in like 
manner seven parallel grooves, producing by their termination a similar serrated 
edge in the crown; but their direction is diagonal-- a distinction, says Dr. 
Falconer, which is "trivial, not typical." As these oblique furrows form so 
marked a character of the majority of the teeth, Dr. Falconer gave to the fossil 
the generic name of Plagiaulax. The shape and relative size of the incisor, a, 
Figure 306, exhibit a no less striking similarity to Hypsiprymnus. Nevertheless, 
the more sudden upward curve of this incisor, as well as other characters of the 
jaw, indicate a great deviation in the form of Plagiaulax from that of the 
living kangaroo-rats.

There are two fossil specimens of lower jaws of this genus evidently referable 
to two distinct species extremely unequal in size and otherwise distinguishable. 
The Plagiaulax Becklesii (Figure 306) was about as big as the English squirrel 
or the flying phalanger of Australia (Petaurus Australis, Waterhouse). The 
smaller fossil, having only half the linear dimensions of the other, was 
probably only one-twelfth of its bulk. It is of peculiar geological interest, 
because, as shown by Dr. Falconer, its two back molars bear a decided 
resemblance to those of the Triassic Microlestes (Figure 389 Chapter 19), the 
most ancient of known mammalia, of which an account will be given in Chapter 21.

Up to 1857 all the mammalian remains discovered in secondary rocks had consisted 
solely of single branches of the lower jaw, but in that year Mr. Beckles 
obtained the upper portion of a skull, and on the same slab the lower jaw of 
another quadruped with eight molars, a large canine, and a broad and thick 
incisor. It has been named Triconodon from its bicuspid teeth, and is supposed 
to have been a small insectivorous marsupial, about the size of a hedgehog. 
Other jaws have since been found indicating a larger species of the same genus.

Professor Owen has proposed the name of Galestes for the largest of the mammalia 
discovered in 1858 in Purbeck, equalling the polecat (Mustela putorius) in size. 
It is supposed to have been predaceous and marsupial.

Between forty and fifty pieces or sides of lower jaws with teeth have been found 
in oolitic strata in Purbeck; only five upper maxillaries, together with one 
portion of a separate cranium, occur at Stonesfield, and it is remarkable that 
with these there were no examples in Purbeck of an entire skeleton, nor of any 
considerable number of bones in juxtaposition. In several portions of the matrix 
there were detached bones, often much decomposed, and fragments of others 
apparently mammalian; but if all of them were restored, they would scarcely 
suffice to complete the five skeletons to which the five upper maxillaries above 
alluded to belonged. As the average number of pieces in each mammalian skeleton 
is about 250, there must be many thousands of missing bones; and when we 
endeavour to account for their absence, we are almost tempted to indulge in 
speculations like those once suggested to me by Dr. Buckland, when he tried to 
solve the enigma in reference to Stonesfield; "The corpses," he said, "of 
drowned animals, when they float in a river, distended by gases during 
putrefaction, have often their lower jaw hanging loose, and sometimes it has 
dropped off. The rest of the body may then be drifted elsewhere, and sometimes 
may be swallowed entire by a predaceous reptile or fish, such as an ichthyosaur 
or a shark."

As all the above-mentioned Purbeck marsupials, belonging to eight or nine genera 
and to about fourteen species, insectivorous, predaceous, and herbivorous, have 
been obtained from an area less than 500 square yards in extent, and from a 
single stratum no more than a few inches thick, we may safely conclude that the 
whole lived together in the same region, and in all likelihood they constituted 
a mere fraction of the mammalia which inhabited the lands drained by one river 
and its tributaries. They afford the first positive proof as yet obtained of the 
co-existence of a varied fauna of the highest class of vertebrata with that 
ample development of reptile life which marks all the periods from the Trias to 
the Lower Cretaceous inclusive, and with a gymnospermous flora, or that state of 
the vegetable kingdom when cycads and conifers predominated over all kinds of 
plants, except the ferns, so far, at least, as our present imperfect knowledge 
of fossil botany entitles us to speak.

TABLE 19.2. NUMBER AND DISTRIBUTION OF ALL THE KNOWN SPECIES OF FOSSIL MAMMALIA 
FROM STRATA OLDER THAN THE PARIS GYPSUM, OR THAN THE BEMBRIDGE SERIES OF THE 
ISLE OF WIGHT.

TERTIARY:

Headon Series and beds between the Paris Gypsum and the Gres de Beauchamp: 14: 
10 English, 4 French.

Barton Clay and Sables de Beauchamp: 0.

Bagshot Beds, Calcaire Grossier, and Upper Soissonnais of Cuisse-Lamotte: 20: 16 
French, 1 English, 3 United States (I allude to several Zeuglodons found in 
Alabama, and referred by some zoologists to three species.)

London Clay, including the Kyson Sand: 7 English.

Plastic Clay and Lignite: 9: 7 French, 2 English.

Sables de Bracheux: 1 French.

Thanet Sands and Lower Landenian of Belgium: 0.

SECONDARY:

Maestricht Chalk: 0.

White Chalk: 0.

Chalk Marl: 0.

Chloritic Series (Upper Greensand): 0.

Gault: 0.

Neocomian (Lower Greensand): 0.

Wealden: 0.

Upper Purbeck Oolite : 0.

Middle Purbeck Oolite : 14 Swanage.

Lower Purbeck Oolite: 0.

Portland Oolite: 0.

Kimmeridge Clay: 0.

Coral Rag: 0.

Oxford Clay: 0.

Great Oolite: 4 Stonesfield.

Inferior Oolite: 0.

Lias: 0.

Upper Trias: 4 Wurtemberg, Somersetshire. N. Carolina.

Middle Trias: 0.

Lower Trias: 0.

PRIMARY.

Permian: 0.

Carboniferous : 0.

Devonian: 0.

Silurian: 0.

Cambrian: 0.

Laruentian: 0.

Table 19.2 will enable the reader to see at a glance how conspicuous a part, 
numerically considered, the mammalian species of the Middle Purbeck now play 
when compared with those of other formations more ancient than the Paris gypsum, 
and, at the same time, it will help him to appreciate the enormous hiatus in the 
history of fossil mammalia which at present occurs between the Eocene and 
Purbeck periods, and between the latter and the Stonesfield Oolite, and between 
this again and the Trias.

The Sables de Bracheux, enumerated in the Tertiary division of the table, 
supposed by Mr. Prestwich to be somewhat newer than the Thanet Sands, and by M. 
Hebert to be of about that age, have yielded at La Fere the Arctocyon 
(Palaeocyon) primaevus, the oldest known tertiary mammal.

It is worthy of notice, that in the Hastings Sands there are certain layers of 
clay and sandstone in which numerous footprints of quadrupeds have been found by 
Mr. Beckles, and traced by him in the same set of rocks through Sussex and the 
Isle of Wight. They appear to belong to three or four species of reptiles, and 
no one of them to any warm-blooded quadruped. They ought, therefore, to serve as 
a warning to us, when we fail in like manner to detect mammalian footprints in 
older rocks (such as the New Red Sandstone), to refrain from inferring that 
quadrupeds, other than reptilian, did not exist or pre-exist.

But the most instructive lesson read to us by the Purbeck strata consists in 
this: They are all, with the exception of a few intercalated brackish and marine 
layers, of fresh-water origin; they are 160 feet in thickness, have been well 
searched by skillful collectors, and by the late Edward Forbes in particular, 
who studied them for months consecutively. They have been numbered, and the 
contents of each stratum recorded separately, by the officers of the Geological 
Survey of Great Britain. They have been divided into three distinct groups by 
Forbes, each characterised by the same genera of pulmoniferous mollusca and 
cyprides, these genera being represented in each group by different species; 
they have yielded insects of many orders, and the fruits of several plants; and 
lastly, they contain "dirt-beds," or old terrestrial surfaces and vegetable 
soils at different levels, in some of which erect trunks and stumps of cycads 
and conifers, with their roots still attached to them, are preserved. Yet when 
the geologist inquires if any land-animals of a higher grade than reptiles lived 
during any one of these three periods, the rocks are all silent, save one thin 
layer a few inches in thickness; and this single page of the earth's history has 
suddenly revealed to us in a few weeks the memorials of so many species of 
fossil mammalia, that they already outnumber those of many a subdivision of the 
tertiary series, and far surpass those of all the other secondary rocks put 
together!

LOWER PURBECK.

(FIGURE 307. Cyprides from the Lower Purbeck.
a. Cypris Purbeckensis, Forbes.
b. Same magnified.
c. Cypris punctata, Forbes.
d, e. Two views magnified of the same.)

Beneath the thin marine band mentioned above as the base of the Middle Purbeck, 
some purely fresh-water marls occur, containing species of Cypris (Figure 307 a, 
c), Valvata, and Limnaea, different from those of the Middle Purbeck. This is 
the beginning of the inferior division, which is about 80 feet thick. Below the 
marls are seen, at Meup's Bay, more than thirty feet of brackish-water strata, 
abounding in a species of Serpula, allied to, if not identical with, Serpula 
coacervites, found in beds of the same age in Hanover. There are also shells of 
the genus Rissoa (of the subgenus Hydrobia), and a little Cardium of the 
subgenus Protocardium, in these marine beds, together with Cypris. Some of the 
cypris-bearing shales are strangely contorted and broken up, at the west end of 
the Isle of Purbeck. The great dirt-bed or vegetable soil containing the roots 
and stools of Cycadeae, which I shall presently describe, underlies these marls, 
and rests upon the lowest fresh-water limestone, a rock about eight feet thick, 
containing Cyclas, Valvata, and Limnaea, of the same species as those of the 
uppermost part of the Lower Purbeck, or above the dirt-bed. The fresh-water 
limestone in its turn rests upon the top beds of the Portland stone, which, 
although it contains purely marine remains, often consists of a rock 
undistinguishable in mineral character from the Lowest Purbeck limestone.

DIRT-BED OR ANCIENT SURFACE-SOIL.

(FIGURE 308. Mantellia nidiformis, Brongniart. The upper part shows the woody 
stem, the lower part the bases of the leaves.)

The most remarkable of all the varied succession of beds enumerated in the above 
list is that called by the quarrymen "the dirt," or "black dirt," which was 
evidently an ancient vegetable soil. It is from 12 to 18 inches thick, is of a 
dark brown or black colour, and contains a large proportion of earthy lignite. 
Through it are dispersed rounded and sub-angular fragments of stone, from 3 to 9 
inches in diameter, in such numbers that it almost deserves the name of gravel. 
I also saw in 1866, in Portland, a smaller dirt-bed six feet below the principal 
one, six inches thick, consisting of brown earth with upright Cycads of the same 
species, Mantellia nidiformis, as those found in the upper bed, but no 
Coniferae. The weight of the incumbent strata squeezing down the compressible 
dirt-bed has caused the Cycads to assume that form which has led the quarrymen 
to call them "petrified birds' nests," which suggested to Brongniart the 
specific name of nidiformis. I am indebted to Mr. Carruthers for Figure 308 of 
one of these Purbeck specimens, in which the original cylindrical figure has 
been less distorted than usual by pressure.

Many silicified trunks of coniferous trees, and the remains of plants allied to 
Zamia and Cycas, are buried in this dirt-bed, and must have become fossil on the 
spots where they grew. The stumps of the trees stand erect for a height of from 
one to three feet, and even in one instance to six feet, with their roots 
attached to the soil at about the same distances from one another as the trees 
in a modern forest. The carbonaceous matter is most abundant immediately around 
the stumps, and round the remains of fossil Cycadeae.

(FIGURE 309. Section in Isle of Portland, Dorset. (Buckland and De la 
Beche.)showing layers (from top to bottom): Fresh-water calcareous slate: Dirt-
bed and ancient forest: Lowest fresh-water beds of the Lower Purbeck: and 
Portland stone, marine.)

Besides the upright stumps above mentioned, the dirt-bed contains the stems of 
silicified trees laid prostrate. These are partly sunk into the black earth, and 
partly enveloped by a calcareous slate which covers the dirt-bed. The fragments 
of the prostrate trees are rarely more than three or four feet in length; but by 
joining many of them together, trunks have been restored, having a length from 
the root to the branches of from 20 to 23 feet, the stems being undivided for 17 
or 20 feet, and then forked. The diameter of these near the root is about one 
foot; but I measured one myself, in 1866, which was 3 1/2 feet in diameter, said 
by the quarrymen to be unusually large. Root-shaped cavities were observed by 
Professor Henslow to descend from the bottom of the dirt-bed into the subjacent 
fresh-water stone, which, though now solid, must have been in a soft and 
penetrable state when the trees grew. The thin layers of calcareous slate 
(Figure 309) were evidently deposited tranquilly, and would have been horizontal 
but for the protrusion of the stumps of the trees, around the top of each of 
which they form hemispherical concretions.

(FIGURE 310. Section of cliff east of Lulworth Cove. (Buckland and De la Beche.) 
showing layers (from top to bottom): Fresh-water calcareous slate: Dirt-bed, 
with stools of trees: Fresh-water: Portland stone, marine.)

The dirt-bed is by no means confined to the island of Portland, where it has 
been most carefully studied, but is seen in the same relative position in the 
cliffs east of Lulworth Cove, in Dorsetshire, where, as the strata have been 
disturbed, and are now inclined at an angle of 45 degrees, the stumps of the 
trees are also inclined at the same angle in an opposite direction-- a beautiful 
illustration of a change in the position of beds originally horizontal (see 
Figure 310).

From the facts above described we may infer, first, that those beds of the Upper 
Oolite, called "the Portland," which are full of marine shells, were overspread 
with fluviatile mud, which became dry land, and covered by a forest, throughout 
a portion of the space now occupied by the south of England, the climate being 
such as to permit the growth of the Zamia and Cycas. Secondly. This land at 
length sank down and was submerged with its forests beneath a body of fresh-
water, from which sediment was thrown down enveloping fluviatile shells. 
Thirdly. The regular and uniform preservation of this thin bed of black earth 
over a distance of many miles, shows that the change from dry land to the state 
of a fresh-water lake or estuary, was not accompanied by any violent denudation, 
or rush of water, since the loose black earth, together with the trees which lay 
prostrate on its surface, must inevitably have been swept away had any such 
violent catastrophe taken place.

The forest of the dirt-bed, as before hinted, was not everywhere the first 
vegetation which grew in this region. Besides the lower bed containing upright 
Cycadeae, before mentioned, another has sometimes been found above it, which 
implies oscillations in the level of the same ground, and its alternate 
occupation by land and water more than once.

SUBDIVISIONS OF THE PURBECK.

It will be observed that the division of the Purbecks into upper, middle, and 
lower, was made by Professor Forbes strictly on the principle of the entire 
distinctness of the species of organic remains which they include. The lines of 
demarkation are not lines of disturbance, nor indicated by any striking physical 
characters or mineral changes. The features which attract the eye in the 
Purbecks, such as the dirt-beds, the dislocated strata at Lulworth, and the 
Cinder-bed, do not indicate any breaks in the distribution of organised beings. 
"The causes which led to a complete change of life three times during the 
deposition of the fresh-water and brackish strata must," says this naturalist, 
"be sought for, not simply in either a rapid or a sudden change of their area 
into land or sea, but in the great lapse of time which intervened between the 
epochs of deposition at certain periods during their formation."

Each dirt-bed may, no doubt, be the memorial of many thousand years or 
centuries, because we find that two or three feet of vegetable soil is the only 
monument which many a tropical forest has left of its existence ever since the 
ground on which it now stands was first covered with its shade. Yet, even if we 
imagine the fossil soils of the Lower Purbeck to represent as many ages, we need 
not be surprised to find that they do not constitute lines of separation between 
strata characterised by different zoological types. The preservation of a layer 
of vegetable soil, when in the act of being submerged, must be regarded as a 
rare exception to a general rule. It is of so perishable a nature, that it must 
usually be carried away by the denuding waves or currents of the sea, or by a 
river; and many Purbeck dirt-beds were probably formed in succession and 
annihilated, besides those few which now remain.

The plants of the Purbeck beds, so far as our knowledge extends at present, 
consist chiefly of Ferns, Coniferae, and Cycadeae (Figure 308), without any 
angiosperms; the whole more allied to the Oolitic than to the Cretaceous 
vegetation. The same affinity is indicated by the vertebrate and invertebrate 
animals. Mr. Brodie has found the remains of beetles and several insects of the 
homopterous and trichopterous orders, some of which now live on plants, while 
others are of such forms as hover over the surface of our present rivers.

PORTLAND OOLITE AND SAND (b, TABLE 19.1).

(FIGURE 311. Cerithium Portlandicum (=Terebra) Sowerby.
a. Cast of shell known as "Portland screw."
b. The shell itself. )

(FIGURE 312. Isastraea oblonga, M. Edw. and  J. Haime. As seen on a polished 
slab of chert from the Portland Sand, Tisbury.)

(FIGURE 313. Trigonia gibbosa. 1/2 natural size. Portland Stone, Tisbury.
a. The hinge.)

(FIGURE 314. Cardium dissimile. 1/4 natural size. Portland Stone.)

(FIGURE 315. Ostrea expansa. Portland Sand.)

The Portland Oolite has already been mentioned as forming in Dorsetshire the 
foundation on which the fresh-water limestone of the Lower Purbeck reposes (see 
above). It supplies the well-known building-stone of which St. Paul's and so 
many of the principal edifices of London are constructed. About fifty species of 
mollusca occur in this formation, among which are some ammonites of large size. 
The cast of a spiral univalve called by the quarrymen the "Portland screw" (a, 
Figure 311), is common; the shell of the same (b) being rarely met with. Also 
Trigonia gibbosa (Figure 313) and Cardium dissimile (Figure 314). This upper 
member rests on a dense bed of sand, called the Portland Sand, containing 
similar marine fossils, below which is the Kimmeridge Clay. In England these 
Upper Oolite formations are almost wholly confined to the southern counties. But 
some fragments of them occur beneath the Neocomian or Speeton Clay on the coast 
of Yorkshire, containing many more fossils common to the Portlandian of the 
Continent than does the same formation in Dorsetshire. Corals are rare in this 
formation, although one species is found plentifully at Tisbury, Wiltshire, in 
the Portland Sand, converted into flint and chert, the original calcareous 
matter being replaced by silex (Figure 312).

KIMMERIDGE CLAY.

The Kimmeridge Clay consists, in great part, of a bituminous shale, sometimes 
forming an impure coal, several hundred feet in thickness. In some places in 
Wiltshire it much resembles peat; and the bituminous matter may have been, in 
part at least, derived from the decomposition of vegetables. But as impressions 
of plants are rare in these shales, which contain ammonites, oysters, and other 
marine shells, with skeletons of fish and saurians, the bitumen may perhaps be 
of animal origin. Some of the saurians (Pliosaurus) in Dorsetshire are among the 
most gigantic of their kind.

(FIGURE 316. Cardium striatulum. Kimmeridge Clay, Hartwell.)

(FIGURE 317. Ostrea deltoidea. Kimmeridge Clay, 1/4 natural size.)

(FIGURE 318. Gryphaea (Exogyra) virgula. Kimmeridge Clay.)

(FIGURE 319. Trigonellites latus, Park, Kimmeridge Clay.)

Among the fossils, amounting to nearly 100 species, may be mentioned Cardium 
striatulum (Figure 316) and Ostrea deltoidea (Figure 317), the latter found in 
the Kimmeridge Clay throughout England and the north of France, and also in 
Scotland, near Brora. The Gryphaea virgula (Figure 318), also met with in the 
Kimmeridge Clay near Oxford, is so abundant in the Upper Oolite of parts of 
France as to have caused the deposit to be termed "marnes a gryphees virgules." 
Near Clermont, in Argonne, a few leagues from St. Menehould, where these 
indurated marls crop out from beneath the Gault, I have seen them, on 
decomposing, leave the surface of every ploughed field literally strewed over 
with this fossil oyster. The Trigonellites latus (Aptychus of some 
authors)(Figure 319) is also widely dispersed through this clay. The real nature 
of the shell, of which there are many species in oolitic rocks, is still a 
matter of conjecture. Some are of opinion that the two plates have been the 
gizzard of a cephalopod; others, that it may have formed a bivalve operculum of 
the same.

SOLENHOFEN STONE.

(FIGURE 320. Skeleton of Pterodactylus crassirostris. Oolite of Pappenheim, near 
Solenhofen.
a. This bone, consisting of four joints, is part of the fifth or outermost digit 
elongated, as in bats, for the support of a wing.)

The celebrated lithographic stone of Solenhofen in Bavaria, appears to be of 
intermediate age between the Kimmeridge clay and the Coral Rag, presently to be 
described. It affords a remarkable example of the variety of fossils which may 
be preserved under favourable circumstances, and what delicate impressions of 
the tender parts of certain animals and plants may be retained where the 
sediment is of extreme fineness. Although the number of testacea in this slate 
is small, and the plants few, and those all marine, count Munster had determined 
no less than 237 species of fossils when I saw his collection in 1833; and among 
them no less than seven SPECIES of flying reptiles or pterodactyls (see Figure 
320), six saurians, three tortoises, sixty species of fish, forty-six of 
crustacea, and twenty-six of insects. These insects, among which is a libellula, 
or dragon-fly, must have been blown out to sea, probably from the same land to 
which the pterodactyls, and other contemporaneous air-breathers, resorted.

(FIGURE 321. Tail and feather of Archaeopteryx, from Solenhofen, and tail of 
living bird for comparison.
A. Caudal vertebrae of Archaeopteryx macrura, Owen; with impression of tail-
feathers; one-fifth natural size.
B. Two caudal vertebrae of same; natural size.
C. Single feather, found in 1861 at Solenhofen, by Von Meyer, and called 
Archaeopteryx lithographica; natural size.
D. Tail of recent vulture (Gyps Bengalensis) showing attachment of tail-feathers 
in living birds; one-quarter natural size.
E. Profile of caudal vertebrae of same; one-third natural size.
e, e. Direction of tail-feathers when seen in profile.
f. Ploughshare bone or broad terminal joint (seen also in f, D.))

In the same slate of Solenhofen a fine example was met with in 1862 of the 
skeleton of a bird almost entire, and retaining even its feathers so perfect 
that the vanes as well as the shaft are preserved. The head was at first 
supposed to be wanting, but Mr. Evans detected on the slab what seems to be the 
impression of the cranium and beak, much resembling in size and shape that of 
the jay or woodcock. This valuable specimen is now in the British Museum, and 
has been called by Professor Owen Archaeopteryx macrura. Although anatomists 
agree that it is a true bird, yet they also find that in the length of the bones 
of the tail, and some other minor points of its anatomy, it approaches more 
nearly to reptiles than any known living bird. In the living representatives of 
the class Aves, the tail-feathers are attached to a coccygian bone, consisting 
of several vertebrae united together, whereas in the Archaeopteryx the tail is 
composed of twenty vertebrae, each of which supports a pair of quill-feathers. 
The first five only of the vertebrae, as seen in A, have transverse processes, 
the fifteen remaining ones become gradually longer and more tapering. The 
feathers diverge outward from them at an angle of 45 degrees.

Professor Huxley in his late memoirs on the order of reptiles called 
Dinosaurians, which are largely represented in all the formations, from the 
Neocomian to the Trias inclusive, has shown that they present in their structure 
many remarkable affinities to birds. But a reptile about two feet long, called 
Compsognathus, lately found in the Stonesfield slate, makes a much greater 
approximation to the class Aves than any Dinosaur, and therefore forms a closer 
link between the classes Aves and Reptilia than does the Archaeopteryx.

It appears doubtful whether any species of British fossil, whether of the 
vertebrate or invertebrate class, is common to the Oolite and Chalk. But there 
is no similar break or discordance as we proceed downward, and pass from one to 
another of the several leading members of the Jurassic group, the Upper, Middle, 
and Lower Oolite, and the Lias, there being often a considerable proportion of 
the mollusca, sometimes as much as a fourth, common to such divisions as the 
Upper and Middle Oolite.

MIDDLE OOLITE.

CORAL RAG.

(FIGURE 322. Thecosmilia annularis, Milne Edwards and J. Haime. Coral Rag, 
Steeple Ashton.)

(FIGURE 323. Thamnastraea. Coral Rag. Steeple Ashton.)

(FIGURE 324. Ostrea gregaria, Coral Rag, Steeple Ashton.)

One of the limestones of the Middle Oolite has been called the "Coral Rag," 
because it consists, in part, of continuous beds of petrified corals, most of 
them retaining the position in which they grew at the bottom of the sea. In 
their forms they more frequently resemble the reef-building polyparia of the 
Pacific than do the corals of any other member of the Oolite. They belong 
chiefly to the genera Thecosmilia (Figure 322), Protoseris, and Thamnastraea, 
and sometimes form masses of coral fifteen feet thick. In Figure 323 of a 
Thamnastraea from this formation, it will be seen that the cup-shaped cavities 
are deepest on the right-hand side, and that they grow more and more shallow, 
until those on the left side are nearly filled up. The last-mentioned stars are 
supposed to represent a perfected condition, and the others an immature state. 
These coralline strata extend through the calcareous hills of the north-west of 
Berkshire, and north of Wilts, and again recur in Yorkshire, near Scarborough. 
The Ostrea gregarea (Figure 324) is very characteristic of the formation in 
England and on the Continent. 

(FIGURE 325. Nerinaea Goodhallii, Fitton. Coral Rag, Weymouth. 1/4 natural 
size.)

One of the limestones of the Jura, referred to the age of the English Coral Rag, 
has been called "Nerinaean limestone" (Calcaire a Nerinees) by M. Thirria; 
Nerinaea being an extinct genus of univalve shells (Figure 325) much resembling 
the Cerithium in external form. Figure 325 shows the curious and continuous 
ridges on the columnella and whorls.

OXFORD CLAY.

(FIGURE 326. Belemnites hastatus. Oxford Clay.)

(FIGURE 327. Ammonites Jason, Reinecke. (Syn. A. Elizabethae, Pratt. Oxford 
Clay, Christian Malford, Wiltshire.)

(FIGURE 328. Belemnites Puzosianus, d'Orbigny. B. Owenii, Pierce. Oxford Clay, 
Christian Malford, Wiltshire.
a. Section of the shell projecting from the phragmacone.
b-c. External covering to the ink-bag and phragmacone.
c, d. Osselet, or that portion commonly called the belemnite.
e. Conical chambered body called the phragmacone.
f. Position of ink-bag beneath the shelly covering.)

The coralline limestone, or "Coral Rag," above described, and the accompanying 
sandy beds, called "calcareous grits," of the Middle Oolite, rest on a thick bed 
of clay, called the "Oxford Clay," sometimes not less than 600 feet thick. In 
this there are no corals, but great abundance of cephalopoda, of the genera 
Ammonite and Belemnite (Figures 326 and 327). In some of the finely laminated 
clays ammonites are very perfect, although somewhat compressed, and are 
frequently found with the lateral lobe extended on each side of the opening of 
the mouth into a horn-like projection (Figure 327). These were discovered in the 
cuttings of the Great Western Railway, near Chippenham, in 1841, and have been 
described by Mr. Pratt (Annals of Natural History November 1841).

Similar elongated processes have been also observed to extend from the shells of 
some Belemnites discovered by Dr. Mantell in the same clay (see Figure 328), 
who, by the aid of this and other specimens, has been able to throw much light 
on the structure of singular extinct forms of cuttle-fish. (See Philosophical 
Transactions 1850 page 363; also Huxley Memoirs of Geological Survey 1864; 
Phillips Palaeontological Society.)

KELLOWAY ROCK.

The arenaceous limestone which passes under this name is generally grouped as a 
member of the Oxford clay, in which it forms, in the south-west of England, 
lenticular masses, 8 or 10 feet thick, containing at Kelloway, in Wiltshire, 
numerous casts of ammonites and other shells. But in Yorkshire this calcareo-
arenaceous formation thickens to about 30 feet, and constitutes the lower part 
of the Middle Oolite, extending inland from Scarborough in a southerly 
direction. The number of mollusca which it contains is, according to Mr. 
Etheridge, 143, of which only 34, or 23 1/2 per cent, are common to the Oxford 
clay proper. Of the 52 Cephalopoda, 15 (namely 13 species of ammonite, the 
Ancyloceras Calloviense and one Belemnite) are common to the Oxford Clay, giving 
a proportion of nearly 30 per cent.

LOWER OOLITE.

CORNBRASH AND FOREST MARBLE.

The upper division of this series, which is more extensive than the preceding or 
Middle Oolite, is called in England the Cornbrash, as being a brashy, easily 
broken rock, good for corn land. It consists of clays and calcareous sandstones, 
which pass downward into the Forest Marble, an argillaceous limestone, abounding 
in marine fossils. In some places, as at Bradford, this limestone is replaced by 
a mass of clay. The sandstones of the Forest Marble of Wiltshire are often 
ripple-marked and filled with fragments of broken shells and pieces of drift-
wood, having evidently been formed on a coast. Rippled slabs of fissile oolite 
are used for roofing, and have been traced over a broad band of country from 
Bradford in Wilts, to Tetbury in Gloucestershire. These calcareous tile-stones 
are separated from each other by thin seams of clay, which have been deposited 
upon them, and have taken their form, preserving the undulating ridges and 
furrows of the sand in such complete integrity, that the impressions of small 
footsteps, apparently of crustaceans, which walked over the soft wet sands, are 
still visible. In the same stone the claws of crabs, fragments of echini, and 
other signs of a neighbouring beach, are observed. (P. Scrope Proceedings of the 
Geological Society March 1831.)

GREAT (OR BATH) OOLITE.

(FIGURE 329. Eunomia radiata, Lamouroux. (Calamophyllia, Milne Edwards.)
a. Section transverse to the tubes.
b. Vertical section, showing the radiation of the tubes.
c. Portion of interior of tubes magnified, showing striated surface.)

Although the name of Coral Rag has been appropriated, as we have seen, to a 
member of the Middle Oolite before described, some portions of the Lower Oolite 
are equally entitled in many places to be called coralline limestones. Thus the 
Great Oolite near Bath contains various corals, among which the Eunomia radiata 
(Figure 329) is very conspicuous, single individuals forming masses several feet 
in diameter; and having probably required, like the large existing brain-coral 
(Meandrina) of the tropics, many centuries before their growth was completed.

(FIGURE 330. Apiocrinites rotundus, or Pear Encrinite; Miller. Fossil at 
Bradford, Wilts.
a. Stem of Apiocrinites, and one of the articulations, natural size.
b. Section at Bradford of Great Oolite and overlying clay, containing the fossil 
encrinites. (See text.)
c. Three perfect individuals of Apiocrinites, represented as they grew on the 
surface of the Great Oolite.
d. Body of the Apiocrinites rotundus. Half natural size.)

(FIGURE 331. Apiocrinus.
a. Single plate of body of Apiocrinus, overgrown with serpulae and bryozoa. 
Natural size. Bradford Clay.
b. Portion of the same magnified, showing the bryozoan Diastopora diluviana 
covering one of the serpulae.)

Different species of crinoids, or stone-lilies, are also common in the same 
rocks with corals; and, like them, must have enjoyed a firm bottom, where their 
base of attachment remained undisturbed for years (c, Figure 330). Such fossils, 
therefore, are almost confined to the limestones; but an exception occurs at 
Bradford, near Bath, where they are enveloped in clay sometimes 60 feet thick. 
In this case, however, it appears that the solid upper surface of the "Great 
Oolite" had supported, for a time, a thick submarine forest of these beautiful 
zoophytes, until the clear and still water was invaded by a current charged with 
mud, which threw down the stone-lilies, and broke most of their stems short off 
near the point of attachment. The stumps still remain in their original 
position; but the numerous articulations, once composing the stem, arms, and 
body of the encrinite, were scattered at random through the argillaceous deposit 
in which some now lie prostrate. These appearances are represented in the 
section b, Figure 330, where the darker strata represent the Bradford clay, 
which is however a formation of such local development that in many places it 
can not easily be separated from the clays of the overlying "forest-marble" and 
underlying "fuller's earth." The upper surface of the calcareous stone below is 
completely incrusted over with a continuous pavement, formed by the stony roots 
or attachments of the Crinoidea; and besides this evidence of the length of time 
they had lived on the spot, we find great numbers of single joints, or circular 
plates of the stem and body of the encrinite, covered over with serpulae. Now 
these serpulae could only have begun to grow after the death of some of the 
stone-lilies, parts of whose skeletons had been strewed over the floor of the 
ocean before the irruption of argillaceous mud. In some instances we find that, 
after the parasitic serpulae were full grown, they had become incrusted over 
with a bryozoan, called Diastopora diluviana (see b, Figure 331); and many 
generations of these molluscoids had succeeded each other in the pure water 
before they became fossil.

We may, therefore, perceive distinctly that, as the pines and cycadeous plants 
of the ancient "dirt-bed," or fossil forest, of the Lower Purbeck were killed by 
submergence under fresh water, and soon buried beneath muddy sediment, so an 
invasion of argillaceous matter put a sudden stop to the growth of the Bradford 
Encrinites, and led to their preservation in marine strata.

Such differences in the fossils as distinguish the calcareous and argillaceous 
deposits from each other, would be described by naturalists as arising out of a 
difference in the STATIONS of species; but besides these, there are variations 
in the fossils of the higher, middle, and lower part of the oolitic series, 
which must be ascribed to that great law of change in organic life by which 
distinct assemblages of species have been adapted, at successive geological 
periods, to the varying conditions of the habitable surface. In a single 
district it is difficult to decide how far the limitation of species to certain 
minor formations has been due to the local influence of STATIONS, or how far it 
has been caused by time or the law of variation above alluded to. But we 
recognise the reality of the last-mentioned influence, when we contrast the 
whole oolitic series of England with that of parts of the Jura, Alps, and other 
distant regions, where, although there is scarcely any lithological resemblance, 
yet some of the same fossils remain peculiar in each country to the Upper, 
Middle, and Lower Oolite formations respectively. Mr. Thurmann has shown how 
remarkably this fact holds true in the Bernese Jura, although the argillaceous 
divisions, so conspicuous in England, are feebly represented there, and some 
entirely wanting.

(FIGURE 332. Terebratula digona, Sowerby. Natural size. Bradford Clay.)

(FIGURE 333. Purpuroidea nodulata. One-fourth natural size. Great Oolite, 
Minchinhampton.)

(FIGURE 334. Cylindrites acutus. Sowb. Syn. Actaeon acutus. Great Oolite, 
Minchinhampton.)

(FIGURE 335. Patella rugosa, Sowerby. Great Oolite.)

(FIGURE 336. Nerita costulata, Desh. Great Oolite.)

(FIGURE 337. Rimula (Emarginula) clathrata, Sowerby. Great Oolite.)

The calcareous portion of the Great Oolite consists of several shelly 
limestones, one of which, called the Bath Oolite, is much celebrated as a 
building-stone. In parts of Gloucestershire, especially near Minchinhampton, the 
Great Oolite, says Mr. Lycett, "must have been deposited in a shallow sea, where 
strong currents prevailed, for there are frequent changes in the mineral 
character of the deposit, and some beds exhibit false stratification. In others, 
heaps of broken shells are mingled with pebbles of rocks foreign to the 
neighbourhood, and with fragments of abraded madrepores, dicotyledonous wood, 
and crabs' claws. The shelly strata, also, have occasionally suffered 
denudation, and the removed portions have been replaced by clay." In such 
shallow-water beds shells of the genera Patella, Nerita, Rimula, Cylindrites are 
common (see Figures 334 to 337); while cephalopods are rare, and instead of 
ammonites and belemnites, numerous genera of carnivorous trachelipods appear. 
Out of 224 species of univalves obtained from the Minchinhampton beds, Mr. 
Lycett found no less than 50 to be carnivorous. They belong principally to the 
genera Buccinum, Pleurotoma, Rostellaria, Murex, Purpuroidea (Figure 333), and 
Fusus, and exhibit a proportion of zoophagous species not very different from 
that which obtains in seas of the Recent period. These zoological results are 
curious and unexpected, since it was imagined that we might look in vain for the 
carnivorous trachelipods in rocks of such high antiquity as the Great Oolite, 
and it was a received doctrine that they did not begin to appear in considerable 
numbers till the Eocene period, when those two great families of cephalopoda, 
the ammonites and belemnites, and a great number of other representatives of the 
same class of chambered shells, had become extinct.

STONESFIELD SLATE: MAMMALIA.

(FIGURE 338. Elytron of Buprestis? Stonesfield.)

The slate of Stonesfield has been shown by Mr. Lonsdale to lie at the base of 
the Great Oolite. (Proceedings of the Geological Society volume 1 page 414.) It 
is a slightly oolitic shelly limestone, forming large lenticular masses imbedded 
in sand only six feet thick, but very rich in organic remains. It contains some 
pebbles of a rock very similar to itself, and which may be portions of the 
deposit, broken up on a shore at low water or during storms, and redeposited. 
The remains of belemnites, trigoniae, and other marine shells, with fragments of 
wood, are common, and impressions of ferns, cycadeae, and other plants. Several 
insects, also, and, among the rest, the elytra or wing-covers of beetles, are 
perfectly preserved (see Figure 338), some of them approaching nearly to the 
genus Buprestis. The remains, also, of many genera of reptiles, such as 
Plesiosaur, Crocodile, and Pterodactyl, have been discovered in the same 
limestone.

But the remarkable fossils for which the Stonesfield slate is most celebrated 
are those referred to the mammiferous class. The student should be reminded that 
in all the rocks described in the preceding chapters as older than the Eocene, 
no bones of any land-quadruped, or of any cetacean, had been discovered until 
the Spalacotherium of the Purbeck beds came to light in 1854. Yet we have seen 
that terrestrial plants were not wanting in the Upper Cretaceous formation (see 
Chapter 17), and that in the Wealden there was evidence of fresh-water sediment 
on a large scale, containing various plants, and even ancient vegetable soils. 
We had also in the same Wealden many land-reptiles and winged insects, which 
render the absence of terrestrial quadrupeds the more striking. The want, 
however, of any bones of whales, seals, dolphins, and other aquatic mammalia, 
whether in the chalk or in the upper or middle oolite, is certainly still more 
remarkable.

These observations are made to prepare the reader to appreciate more justly the 
interest felt by every geologist in the discovery in the Stonesfield slate of no 
less than ten specimens of lower jaws of mammiferous quadrupeds, belonging to 
four different species and to three distinct genera, for which the names of 
Amphitherium, Phascolotherium, and Stereognathus have been adopted.

(FIGURE 339. Tupaia tana. Right ramus of lower jaw. Natural size. A recent 
insectivorous placental mammal, from Sumatra.)

(Figures 340 and 341. Part of lower jaw of Tupaia tana. Twice natural size.

(FIGURE 340. End view seen from behind, showing the very slight inflection of 
the angle at c.)

(FIGURE 341. Side view of same.))

(Figures 342 and 343. Part of lower jaw of Didelphys Azarae; recent, Brazil. 
Natural size.

(FIGURE 342. End view seen from behind, showing the inflection of the angle of 
the jaw, c, d.)

(FIGURE 343. Side view of same.))

(FIGURE 344. Amphitherium Prevostii, Cuvier sp. Stonesfield Slate. Syn. 
Thylacotherium Prevostii, Valenc.
a. Coronoid process.
b. Condyle.
c. Angle of jaw.
d. Double-fanged molars.)

(FIGURE 345. Amphitheriumm Broderipii, Owen. Natural size. Stonesfield Slate.)

It is now generally admitted that these or really the remains of mammalia 
(although it was at first suggested that they might be reptiles), and the only 
question open to controversy is limited to this point, whether the fossil 
mammalia found in the Lower Oolite of Oxfordshire ought to be referred to the 
marsupial quadrupeds, or to the ordinary placental series. Cuvier had long ago 
pointed out a peculiarity in the form of the angular process (c, Figures 342 and 
343) of the lower jaw, as a character of the genus Didelphys; and Professor Owen 
has since confirmed the doctrine of its generality in the entire marsupial 
series. In all these pouched quadrupeds this process is turned inward, as at c, 
d, Figure 342, in the Brazilian opossum, whereas in the placental series, as at 
c, Figures 340 and 341, there is an almost entire absence of such inflection. 
The Tupaia Tana of Sumatra has been selected by Mr. Waterhouse for this 
illustration, because the jaws of that small insectivorous quadruped bear a 
great resemblance to those of the Stonesfield Amphitherium. By clearing away the 
matrix from the specimen of Amphitherium Prevostii here represented (Figure 
344), Professor Owen ascertained that the angular process (c) bent inward in a 
slighter degree than in any of the known marsupialia; in short, the inflection 
does not exceed that of the mole or hedgehog. This fact made him doubt whether 
the Amphitherium might not be an insectivorous placental, although it offered 
some points of approximation in its osteology to the marsupials, especially to 
the Myrmecobius, a small insectivorous quadruped of Australia, which has nine 
molars on each side of the lower jaw, besides a canine and three incisors. (A 
figure of this recent Myrmecobius will be found in my Principles of Geology 
chapter 9.) Another species of Amphitherium has been found at Stonesfield 
(Figure 345), which differs from the former (Figure 344) principally in being 
larger.

(FIGURE 346. Phascolotherium Bucklandi, Broderip, sp.
a. Natural size.
b. Molar of same, magnified.)

The second mammiferous genus discovered in the same slates was named originally 
by Mr. Broderip Didelphys Bucklandi (see Figure 346), and has since been called 
Phascolotherium by Owen. It manifests a much stronger likeness to the marsupials 
in the general form of the jaw, and in the extent and position of its inflected 
angle, while the agreement with the living genus Didelphys in the number of the 
pre-molar and molar teeth is complete. (Owen's British Fossil Mammals page 62.)

In 1854 the remains of another mammifer, small in size, but larger than any of 
those previously known, was brought to light. The generic name of Stereognathus 
was given to it, and, as is usually the case in these old rocks (see above), it 
consisted of part of a lower jaw, in which were implanted three double-fanged 
teeth, differing in structure from those of all other known recent or extinct 
mammals.

PLANTS OF THE OOLITE.

(FIGURE 347. Portion of a fossil fruit of Podocarya Bucklandi, Ung., magnified. 
(Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise Plate 63.) Inferior Oolite, Charmouth, Dorset.)

(FIGURE 348. Cone of fossil Araucaria sphaerocarpa, Carruthers. Inferior Oolite. 
Bruton, Somersetshire. One-third diameter of original. In the collection of the 
British Museum.)

The Araucarian pines, which are now abundant in Australia and its islands, 
together with marsupial quadrupeds, are found in like manner to have accompanied 
the marsupials in Europe during the Oolitic period (see Figure 348). In the same 
rock endogens of the most perfect structure are met with, as, for example, 
fruits allied to the Pandanus, such as the Kaidacarpum ooliticum of Carruthers 
in the Great Oolite, and the Podocarya of Buckland (see Figure 347) in the 
Inferior Oolite.

FULLER'S EARTH.

(FIGURE 349. Ostrea acuminata. Fuller's Earth.)

Between the Great and Inferior Oolite near Bath, an argillaceous deposit, called 
"the fuller's earth," occurs; but it is wanting in the north of England. It 
abounds in the small oyster represented in Figure 349. The number of mollusca 
known in this deposit is about seventy; namely, fifty Lamellibranchiate 
Bivalves, ten Brachiopods, three Gasteropods, and seven or eight Cephalopods.

INFERIOR OOLITE.

This formation consists of a calcareous freestone, usually of small thickness, 
but attaining in some places, as in the typical area of Cheltenham and the 
Western Cotswolds, a thickness of 250 feet. It sometimes rests upon yellow 
sands, formerly classed as the sands of the Inferior Oolite, but now regarded as 
a member of the Upper Lias. These sands repose upon the Upper Lias clays in the 
south and west of England. The Collyweston slate, formerly classed with the 
Great Oolite, and supposed to represent in Northamptonshire the Stonesfield 
slate, is now found to belong to the Inferior Oolite, both by community of 
species and position in the series. The Collyweston beds, on the whole, assume a 
much more marine character than the Stonesfield slate. Nevertheless, one of the 
fossil plants Aroides Stutterdi, Carruthers, remarkable, like the Pandanaceous 
species before mentioned (Figure 347) as a representative of the 
monocotyledonous class, is common to the Stonesfield beds in Oxfordshire.

(FIGURE 350. Hemitelites Brownii, Goepp. Syn. Phlebopteris contigua, Lind. and 
Hutt. Lower carbonaceous strata, Inferior Oolite shales. Gristhorpe, Yorkshire.)

The Inferior Oolite of Yorkshire consists largely of shales and sandstones, 
which assume much the aspect of a true coal-field, thin seams of coal having 
actually been worked in them for more than a century. A rich harvest of fossil 
ferns has been obtained from them, as at Gristhorpe, near Scarborough (Figure 
350). They contain also Cycadeae, of which family a magnificent specimen has 
been described by Mr. Williamson under the name Zamia gigas, and a fossil called 
Equisetum Columnare (see Figure 397), which maintains an upright position in 
sandstone strata over a wide area. Shells of Estheria and Unio, collected by Mr. 
Bean from these Yorkshire coal-bearing beds, point to the estuary or fluviatile 
origin of the deposit.

At Brora, in Sutherlandshire, a coal formation, probably coeval with the above, 
or at least belonging to some of the lower divisions of the Oolitic period, has 
been mined extensively for a century or more. It affords the thickest stratum of 
pure vegetable matter hitherto detected in any secondary rock in England. One 
seam of coal of good quality has been worked three and a half feet thick, and 
there are several feet more of pyritous coal resting upon it.

(FIGURE 351. Terebratula fimbria, Sowerby. Inferior Oolite marl. Cotswold 
Hills.)

(FIGURE 352. Rhynchonella spinosa, Schloth. Inferior Oolite.)

(FIGURE 353. Pholadomya fidicula, Sowerby. One-third natural size. Inferior 
Oolite.)

(FIGURE 354. Pleurotomaria granulata, Sowerby. Ferruginous Oolite, Normandy. 
Inferior Oolite, England.)

(FIGURE 355. Pleurotomaria ornata, Sowerby Sp. Inferior Oolite.)

(FIGURE 356. Collyrites (Dysaster) ringens, Agassiz. Inferior Oolite, 
Somersetshire.)

(FIGURE 357. Ammonites Humphresianus, Sowerby. Inferior Oolite.)

(FIGURE 358. Ammonites Braikenridgii, Sowerby. Oolite, Scarborough. Inferior 
Oolite, Dundry; Calvados; etc.)

(FIGURE 359. Ostrea Marshii. One-half natural size. Middle and Lower Oolite.)

Among the characteristic shells of the Inferior Oolite, I may instance 
Terebratula fimbria (Figure 351), Rhynchonella spinosa (Figure 352), and 
Pholadomya fidicula (Figure 353). The extinct genus Pleurotomaria is also a form 
very common in this division as well as in the Oolitic system generally. It 
resembles the Trochus in form, but is marked by a deep cleft (a, Figures 354, 
355) on one side of the mouth. The Collyrites (Dysaster) ringens (Figure 356) is 
an Echinoderm common to the Inferior Oolite of England and France, as are the 
two Ammonites (Figures 357, 358).

PALAEONTOLOGICAL RELATIONS OF THE OOLITIC STRATA.

Observations have already been made on the distinctness of the organic remains 
of the Oolitic and Cretaceous strata, and the proportion of species common to 
the different members of the Oolite. Between the Lower Oolite and the Lias there 
is a somewhat greater break, for out of 256 mollusca of the Upper Lias, thirty-
seven species only pass up into the Inferior Oolite.

In illustration of shells having a great vertical range, it may be stated that 
in England some few species pass up from the Lower to the Upper Oolite, as, for 
example, Rhynchonella obsoleta, Lithodomus inclusus, Pholadomya ovalis, and 
Trigonia costata.

(FIGURE 360. Ammonites macrocephalus, Schloth. One-third natural size. Great 
Oolite and Oxford Clay.)

Of all the Jurassic Ammonites of Great Britain, A. macrocephalus (Figure 360), 
which is common to the Great Oolite and Oxford Clay, has the widest range.

We have every reason to conclude that the gaps which occur, both between the 
larger and smaller sections of the English Oolites, imply intervals of time, 
elsewhere represented by fossiliferous strata, although no deposit may have 
taken place in the British area. This conclusion is warranted by the partial 
extent of many of the minor and some of the larger divisions even in England.


CHAPTER XX.

JURASSIC GROUP-- CONTINUED.-- LIAS.

Mineral Character of Lias.
Numerous successive Zones in the Lias, marked by distinct Fossils, without 
Unconformity in the Stratification, or Change in the Mineral Character of the 
Deposits.
Gryphite Limestone.
Shells of the Lias.
Fish of the Lias.
Reptiles of the Lias.
Ichthyosaur and Plesiosaur.
Marine Reptile of the Galapagos Islands.
Sudden Destruction and Burial of Fossil Animals in Lias.
Fluvio-marine Beds in Gloucestershire, and Insect Limestone.
Fossil Plants.
The origin of the Oolite and Lias, and of alternating Calcareous and 
Argillaceous Formations.

LIAS.

The English provincial name of Lias has been very generally adopted for a 
formation of argillaceous limestone, marl, and clay, which forms the base of the 
Oolite, and is classed by many geologists as part of that group. The peculiar 
aspect which is most characteristic of the Lias in England, France, and Germany, 
is an alternation of thin beds of blue or grey limestone, having a surface which 
becomes light-brown when weathered, these beds being separated by dark-coloured, 
narrow argillaceous partings, so that the quarries of this rock, at a distance, 
assume a striped and ribbon-like appearance.

The Lias has been divided in England into three groups, the Upper, Middle, and 
Lower. The Upper Lias consists first of sands, which were formerly regarded as 
the base of the Oolite, but which, according to Dr. Wright, are by their fossils 
more properly referable to the Lias; secondly, of clay shale and thin beds of 
limestone. The Middle Lias, or marl-stone series, has been divided into three 
zones; and the Lower Lias, according to the labours of Quenstedt, Oppel, 
Strickland, Wright, and others, into seven zones, each marked by its own group 
of fossils. This Lower Lias averages from 600 to 900 feet in thickness.

From Devon and Dorsetshire to Yorkshire all these divisions, observes Professor 
Ramsay, are constant; and from top to bottom we can not assert that anywhere 
there is actual unconformity between any two subdivisions, whether of the larger 
or smaller kind.

In the whole of the English Lias there are at present known about 937 species of 
mollusca, and of these 267 are Cephalopods, of which class more than two-thirds 
are Ammonites, the Nautilus and Belemnite also abounding. The whole series has 
been divided by zones characterised by particular Ammonites; for while other 
families of shells pass from one division to another in numbers varying from 
about 20 to 50 per cent, these cephalopods are almost always limited to single 
zones, as Quenstedt and Oppel have shown for Germany, and Dr. Wright and others 
for England.

As no actual unconformity is known from the top of the Upper to the bottom of 
the Lower Lias, and as there is a marked uniformity in the mineral character of 
almost all the strata, it is somewhat difficult to account even for such partial 
breaks as have been alluded to in the succession of species, if we reject the 
hypothesis that the old species were in each case destroyed at the close of the 
deposition of the rocks containing them, and replaced by the creation of new 
forms when the succeeding formation began. I agree with Professor Ramsay in not 
accepting this hypothesis. No doubt some of the old species occasionally died 
out, and left no representatives in Europe or elsewhere; others were locally 
exterminated in the struggle for life by species which invaded their ancient 
domain, or by varieties better fitted for a new state of things. Pauses also of 
vast duration may have occurred in the deposition of strata, allowing time for 
the modification of organic life throughout the globe, slowly brought about by 
variation accompanied by extinction of the original forms.

FOSSILS OF THE LIAS.

(FIGURE 361. Plagiostoma (Lima) giganteum, Sowerby. Inferior Oolite and Lias.)

(FIGURE 362. Gryphaea incurva, Sowerby. (G. arcuata, Lam.) Lias.)

(FIGURE 363. Avicula inaequivalvis, Sowerby. Lower Lias.)

(FIGURE 364. Avicula cygnipes, Phil. Lower Lias, Gloucestershire and Yorkshire.
a. Lower valve.
b. Upper valve.)

(FIGURE 365. Hippopodium ponderosum, Sowerby. 1/4 diameter. Lias, Cheltenham)

(FIGURE 366. Spiriferina (Spirifera) Walcotti, Sowerby. Lower Lias.)

(FIGURE 367. Leptaena Moorei, Davidson. Upper Lias, Ilminster.)

The name of Gryphite limestone has sometimes been applied to the Lias, in 
consequence of the great number of shells which it contains of a species of 
oyster, or Gryphaea (Figure 362). A large heavy shell called Hippopodium (Figure 
365), allied to Cypricardia, is also characteristic of the upper part of the 
Lower Lias. In this formation occur also the Aviculas, Figures 363 and 364. The 
Lias formation is also remarkable for being the newest of the secondary rocks in 
which brachiopoda of the genera Spirifer and Leptaena (Figures 366, 367) occur, 
although the former is slightly modified in structure so as to constitute the 
subgenus Spiriferina, Davidson, and the Leptaena has dwindled to a shell smaller 
in size than a pea. No less than eight or nine species of Spiriferina are 
enumerated by Mr. Davidson as belonging to the Lias. Palliobranchiate mollusca 
predominate greatly in strata older than the Trias; but, so far as we yet know, 
they did not survive the Liassic epoch.

(FIGURE 368. Ammonites Bucklandi, Sowerby. Ammonites bisulcatus, Brug. One-
eighth diameter of original.
a. Side view.
b. Front view, showing mouth and bisulcated keel. Characteristic of the lower 
part of the Lias of England and the Continent.)

(FIGURE 369. Ammonites planorbis, Sowerby. One-half diameter of original. From 
the base of the Lower Lias of England and the Continent.)

(FIGURE 370. Nautilus truncatus, Sowerby. Lias.)

(FIGURE 371. Ammonites bifrons, Brug. Ammonites Walcotti, Sowerby. Upper Lias 
shales.)

(FIGURE 372. Ammonites margaritatus, Montf. Syn. Ammonites Stokesi, Sowerby. 
Middle Lias.)

Allusion has already been made to numerous zones in the Lias having each their 
peculiar Ammonites. Two of these occur near the base of the Lower Lias, having a 
united thickness, varying from 40 to 80 feet. The upper of these is 
characterised by Ammonites Bucklandi, and the lower by Ammonites planorbis (see 
Figures 368, 369). (Quarterly Journal volume 16 page 376.) Sometimes, however, 
there is a third intermediate zone, that of Ammonites angulatus, which is the 
equivalent of the zone called the infra-lias on the Continent, the species of 
which are for the most part common to the superior group marked by Ammonites 
Bucklandi.

(FIGURE 373. Extracrinus (Pentacrinus) Briareus. Miller. 1/2 natural size. 
(Body, arms, and part of stem.) Lower Lias, Lyme Regis.)

(FIGURE 374. Palaeocoma (Ophioderma) tenuibrachiata. E. Forbes. Middle Lias, 
Seatown, Dorset.)

Among the Crinoids or Stone-lilies of the Lias, the Pentacrinites are 
conspicuous. (See Figure 373.) Of Palaeocoma (Ophioderma) Egertoni (Figure 374), 
referable to the Ophiuridae of Muller, perfect specimens have been met with in 
the Middle Lias beds of Dorset and Yorkshire.

The Extracrinus Briareus (removed by Major Austin from Pentacrinus on account of 
generic differences) occurs in tangled masses, forming thin beds of considerable 
extent, in the Lower Lias of Dorset, Gloucestershire, and Yorkshire. The remains 
are often highly charged with pyrites. This Crinoid, with its innumerable 
tentacular arms, appears to have been frequently attached to the driftwood of 
the liassic sea, in the same manner as Barnacles float about on wood at the 
present day. There is another species of Extracrinus and several of Pentacrinus 
in the Lias; and the latter genus is found in nearly all the formations from the 
Lias to the London Clay inclusive. It is represented in the present seas by the 
delicate and rare Pentacrinus caput-medusae of the Antilles, which, with 
Comatula, is one of the few surviving members of the ancient family of the 
Crinoids, represented by so many extinct genera in the older formations.

FISHES OF THE LIAS.

(FIGURE 375. Scales of Lepidotus gigas. Agass.
a. Two of the scales detached.)

(FIGURE 376. Aechmodus Leachii and Dapedius monilifer.
a. Aechmodus. Restored outline.
b. Scales of Aechmodus Leachii.
c. Scales of Dapedius monilifer.)

(FIGURE 377. Acrodus nobilis, Agassiz (tooth); commonly called "fossil leech." 
Lias, Lyme Regis, and Germany.)

The fossil fish, of which there are no less than 117 species known as British, 
resemble generically those of the Oolite, but differ, according to M. Agassiz, 
from those of the Cretaceous period. Among them is a species of Lepidotus (L. 
gigas, Agassiz), Figure 375, which is found in the Lias of England, France, and 
Germany. (Agassiz Poissons Fossiles volume 2 tab. 28, 29.) This genus was before 
mentioned (Chapter 18) as occurring in the Wealden, and is supposed to have 
frequented both rivers and sea-coasts. Another genus of Ganoids (or fish with 
hard, shining, and enamelled scales), called Aechmodus (Figure 376), is almost 
exclusively Liassic. The teeth of a species of Acrodus, also, are very abundant 
in the Lias (Figure 377).

(FIGURE 378. Hybodus reticulatus, Agassiz. Lias, Lyme Regis.
a. Part of fin, commonly called Ichthyodorulite.
b. Tooth.)

(FIGURE 379. Chimaera monstrosa. (Agassiz Poissons Fossiles volume 3 tab. C 
Figure 1.)
a. Spine forming anterior part of the dorsal fin.)

SBut the remains of fish which have excited more attention than any others are 
those large bony spines called ichthyodorulites (a, Figure 378), which were once 
supposed by some naturalists to be jaws, and by others weapons, resembling those 
of the living Balistes and Silurus; but which M. Agassiz has shown to be neither 
the one nor the other. The spines, in the genera last mentioned, articulate with 
the backbone, whereas there are no signs of any such articulation in the 
ichthyodorulites. These last appear to have been bony spines which formed the 
anterior part of the dorsal fin, like that of the living genera Cestracion and 
Chimaera (see a, Figure 379). In both of these genera, the posterior concave 
face is armed with small spines, as in that of the fossil Hybodus (Figure 378), 
a placoid fish of the shark family found fossil at Lyme Regis. Such spines are 
simply imbedded in the flesh, and attached to strong muscles. "They serve," says 
Dr. Buckland, "as in the Chimaera (Figure 379), to raise and depress the fin, 
their action resembling that of a movable mast, raising and lowering backward 
the sail of a barge." (Bridgewater Treatise page 290.)

REPTILES OF THE LIAS.

(FIGURE 380. Skeleton of Ichthyosaurus communis, restored by Conybeare and 
Cuvier.
a. Costal vertebrae.)

(FIGURE 381. Skeleton of Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, restored by Reverend W.D. 
Conybeare.
a. Cervical vertebra.)

It is not, however, the fossil fish which form the most striking feature in the 
organic remains of the Lias; but the Enaliosaurian reptiles, which are 
extraordinary for their number, size, and structure. Among the most singular of 
these are several species of Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus (Figures 380, 381). 
The genus Ichthyosaurus, or fish-lizard, is not confined to this formation, but 
has been found in strata as high as the White Chalk of England, and as low as 
the Trias of Germany, a formation which immediately succeeds the Lias in the 
descending order. It is evident from their fish-like vertebrae, their paddles, 
resembling those of a porpoise or whale, the length of their tail, and other 
parts of their structure, that the Ichthyosaurs were aquatic. Their jaws and 
teeth show that they were carnivorous; and the half-digested remains of fishes 
and reptiles, found within their skeletons, indicate the precise nature of their 
food.

Mr. Conybeare was enabled, in 1824, after examining many skeletons nearly 
perfect, to give an ideal restoration of the osteology of this genus, and of 
that of the Plesiosaurus (Geological Society Transactions Second Series volume 1 
page 49.). (See Figures 380, 381.) The latter animal had an extremely long neck 
and small head, with teeth like those of the crocodile, and paddles analogous to 
those of the Ichthyosaurus, but larger. It is supposed to have lived in shallow 
seas and estuaries, and to have breathed air like the Ichthyosaur and our modern 
cetacea. (Conybeare and De la Beche, Geological Transactions First Series volume 
5 page 559; and Buckland Bridgewater Treatise page 203.) Some of the reptiles 
above mentioned were of formidable dimensions. One specimen of Ichthyosaurus 
platydon, from the Lias at Lyme, now in the British Museum, must have belonged 
to an animal more than 24 feet in length; and there are species of Plesiosaurus 
which measure from 18 to 20 feet in length. The form of the Ichthyosaurus may 
have fitted it to cut through the waves like the porpoise; as it was furnished 
besides its paddles with a tail-fin so constructed as to be a powerful organ of 
motion; but it is supposed that the Plesiosaurus, at least the long-necked 
species (Figure 381), was better suited to fish in shallow creeks and bays 
defended from heavy breakers.

It is now very generally agreed that these extinct saurians must have inhabited 
the sea; and it was urged that as there are now chelonians, like the tortoise, 
living in fresh water, and others, as the turtle, frequenting the ocean, so 
there may have been formerly some saurians proper to salt, others to fresh 
water. The common crocodile of the Ganges is well-known to frequent equally that 
river and the brackish and salt water near its mouth; and crocodiles are said in 
like manner to be abundant both in the rivers of the Isla de Pinos (Isle of 
Pines), south of Cuba, and in the open sea round the coast. In 1835 a curious 
lizard (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) was discovered by Mr. Darwin in the Galapagos 
Islands. (See Darwin Naturalist's Voyage page 385 Murray.) It was found to be 
exclusively marine, swimming easily by means of its flattened tail, and 
subsisting chiefly on seaweed. One of them was sunk from the ship by a heavy 
weight, and on being drawn up after an hour was quite unharmed.

The families of Dinosauria, crocodiles, and Pterosauria or winged reptiles, are 
also represented in the Lias.

SUDDEN DESTRUCTION OF SAURIANS.

It has been remarked, and truly, that many of the fish and saurians, found 
fossil in the Lias, must have met with sudden death and immediate burial; and 
that the destructive operation, whatever may have been its nature, was often 
repeated.

"Sometimes," says Dr. Buckland, "scarcely a single bone or scale has been 
removed from the place it occupied during life; which could not have happened 
had the uncovered bodies of these saurians been left, even for a few hours, 
exposed to putrefaction, and to the attacks of fishes and other smaller animals 
at the bottom of the sea." (Bridgewater Treatise page 115.) Not only are the 
skeletons of the Ichthyosaurs entire, but sometimes the contents of their 
stomachs still remain between their ribs, as before remarked, so that we can 
discover the particular species of fish on which they lived, and the form of 
their excrements. Not unfrequently there are layers of these coprolites, at 
different depths in the Lias, at a distance from any entire skeletons of the 
marine lizards from which they were derived; "as if," says Sir H. De la Beche, 
"the muddy bottom of the sea received small sudden accessions of matter from 
time to time, covering up the coprolites and other exuviae which had accumulated 
during the intervals." (Geological Researches page 334.) It is further stated 
that, at Lyme Regis, those surfaces only of the coprolites which lay uppermost 
at the bottom of the sea have suffered partial decay, from the action of water 
before they were covered and protected by the muddy sediment that has afterwards 
permanently enveloped them.

Numerous specimens of the Calamary or pen-and-ink fish, (Geoteuthis bollensis) 
have also been met with in the Lias at Lyme, with the ink-bags still distended, 
containing the ink in a dried state, chiefly composed of carbon, and but 
slightly impregnated with carbonate of lime. These Cephalopoda, therefore, must, 
like the saurians, have been soon buried in sediment; for, if long exposed after 
death, the membrane containing the ink would have decayed. (Buckland Bridgewater 
Treatise page 307.)

As we know that river-fish are sometimes stifled, even in their own element, by 
muddy water during floods, it can not be doubted that the periodical discharge 
of large bodies of turbid fresh water in the sea may be still more fatal to 
marine tribes. In the "Principles of Geology" I have shown that large quantities 
of mud and drowned animals have been swept down into the sea by rivers during 
earthquakes, as in Java in 1699; and that indescribable multitudes of dead 
fishes have been seen floating on the sea after a discharge of noxious vapours 
during similar convulsions. But in the intervals between such catastrophes, 
strata may have accumulated slowly in the sea of the Lias, some being formed 
chiefly of one description of shell, such as ammonites, others of gryphites.

FRESH-WATER DEPOSITS.-- INSECT BEDS.

(FIGURE 382. Wing of a neuropterous insect, from the Lower Lias, 
Gloucestershire. (Reverend P.B. Brodie.))

From the above remarks the reader will infer that the Lias is for the most part 
a marine deposit. Some members, however, of the series have an estuarine 
character, and must have been formed within the influence of rivers. At the base 
of the Upper and Lower Lias respectively, insect-beds appear to be almost 
everywhere present throughout the Midland and South-western districts of 
England. These beds are crowded with the remains of insects, small fish, and 
crustaceans, with occasional marine shells. One band in Gloucestershire, rarely 
exceeding a foot in thickness, has been named the "insect limestone." It passes 
upward, says the Reverend P.B. Brodie, into a shale containing Cypris and 
Estheria, and is full of the wing-cases of several genera of Coleoptera, with 
some nearly entire beetles, of which the eyes are preserved. (A History of 
Fossil Insects etc 1846 London.) The nervures of the wings of neuropterous 
insects (Figure 382) are beautifully perfect in this bed. Ferns, with Cycads and 
leaves of monocotyledonous plants, and some apparently brackish and fresh-water 
shells, accompany the insects in several places, while in others marine shells 
predominate, the fossils varying apparently as we examine the bed nearer or 
farther from the ancient land, or the source whence the fresh water was derived. 
After studying 300 specimens of these insects from the Lias, Mr. Westwood 
declares that they comprise both wood-eating and herb-devouring beetles, of the 
Linnean genera Elater, Carabus, etc., besides grasshoppers (Gryllus), and 
detached wings of dragon-flies and may-flies, or insects referable to the 
Linnean genera Libellula, Ephemera, Hemerobius, and Panorpa, in all belonging to 
no less than twenty-four families. The size of the species is usually small, and 
such as taken alone would imply a temperate climate; but many of the associated 
organic remains of other classes must lead to a different conclusion.

FOSSIL PLANTS.

Among the vegetable remains of the Lias, several species of Zamia have been 
found at Lyme Regis, and the remains of coniferous plants at Whitby. M. Ad. 
Brongniart enumerates forty-seven liassic acrogens, most of them ferns; and 
fifty gymnosperms, of which thirty-nine are cycads, and eleven conifers. Among 
the cycads the predominance of Zamites, and among the ferns the numerous genera 
with leaves having reticulated veins (as in Figure 349), are mentioned as 
botanical characteristics of this era. (Tableau des Veg. Foss. 1849 page 105.) 
The absence as yet from the Lias and Oolite of all signs of dicotyledonous 
angiosperms is worthy of notice. The leaves of such plants are frequent in 
tertiary strata, and occur in the Cretaceous, though less plentifully (see 
Chapter 17). The angiosperms seem, therefore, to have been at the least 
comparatively rare in these older secondary periods, when more space was 
occupied by the Cycads and Conifers.

ORIGIN OF THE OOLITE AND LIAS.

The entire group of Oolite and Lias consists of repeated alternations of clay, 
sandstone, and limestone, following each other in the same order. Thus the clays 
of the Lias are followed by the sands now considered (see Chapter 20) as 
belonging to the same formation, though formerly referred to the Inferior 
Oolite, and these sands again by the shelly and coralline limestone called the 
Great or Bath Oolite. So, in the Middle Oolite, the Oxford Clay is followed by 
calcareous grit and coral rag; lastly, in the Upper Oolite, the Kimmeridge Clay 
is followed by the Portland Sand and limestone (see Figure 298). (Conybeare and 
Philips's Outlines etc. page 166.) The clay beds, however, as Sir H. de la Beche 
remarks, can be followed over larger areas than the sand or sandstones. 
(Geological Researches page 337.) It should also be remembered that while the 
Oolite system becomes arenaceous and resembles a coal-field in Yorkshire, it 
assumes in the Alps an almost purely calcareous form, the sands and clays being 
omitted; and even in the intervening tracts it is more complicated and variable 
than appears in ordinary descriptions. Nevertheless, some of the clays and 
intervening limestones do retain, in reality, a pretty uniform character for 
distances of from 400 to 600 miles from east to west and north to south.

In order to account for such a succession of events, we may imagine, first, the 
bed of the ocean to be the receptacle for ages of fine argillaceous sediment, 
brought by oceanic currents, which may have communicated with rivers, or with 
part of the sea near a wasting coast. This mud ceases, at length, to be conveyed 
to the same region, either because the land which had previously suffered 
denudation is depressed and submerged, or because the current is deflected in 
another direction by the altered shape of the bed of the ocean and neighbouring 
dry land. By such changes the water becomes once more clear and fit for the 
growth of stony zoophytes. Calcareous sand is then formed from comminuted shell 
and coral, or, in some cases, arenaceous matter replaces the clay; because it 
commonly happens that the finer sediment, being first drifted farthest from 
coasts, is subsequently overspread by coarse sand, after the sea has grown 
shallower, or when the land, increasing in extent, whether by upheaval or by 
sediment filling up parts of the sea, has approached nearer to the spots first 
occupied by fine mud.

The increased thickness of the limestones in those regions, as in the Alps and 
Jura, where the clays are comparatively thin, arises from the calcareous matter 
having been derived from species of corals and other organic beings which live 
in clear water, far from land, to the growth of which the influx of mud would be 
unfavourable. Portions therefore of these clays and limestones have probably 
been formed contemporaneously to a greater extent than we can generally prove, 
for the distinctness of the species of organic beings would be caused by the 
difference of conditions between the more littoral and the more pelagic areas 
and the different depths and nature of the sea-bottom. Independently of those 
ascending and descending movements which have given rise to the superposition of 
the limestones and clays, and by which the position of land and sea are made in 
the course of ages to vary, the geologist has the difficult task of allowing for 
the contemporaneous thinning out in one direction and thickening in another, of 
the successive organic and inorganic deposits of the same era.


CHAPTER XXI.

TRIAS, OR NEW RED SANDSTONE GROUP.

Beds of Passage between the Lias and Trias, Rhaetic Beds.
Triassic Mammifer.
Triple Division of the Trias.
Keuper, or Upper Trias of England.
Reptiles of the Upper Trias.
Foot-prints in the Bunter formation in England.
Dolomitic Conglomerate of Bristol.
Origin of Red Sandstone and Rock-salt.
Precipitation of Salt from inland Lakes and Lagoons.
Trias of Germany.
Keuper.
St. Cassian and Hallstadt Beds.
Peculiarity of their Fauna.
Muschelkalk and its Fossils.
Trias of the United States.
Fossil Foot-prints of Birds and Reptiles in the Valley of the Connecticut.
Triassic Mammifer of North Carolina.
Triassic Coal-field of Richmond, Virginia.
Low Grade of early Mammals favourable to the Theory of Progressive Development.

BEDS OF PASSAGE BETWEEN THE LIAS AND TRIAS-- RHAETIC BEDS.

We have mentioned in the last chapter that the base of the Lower Lias is 
characterised, both in England and Germany, by beds containing distinct species 
of Ammonites, the lowest subdivision having been called the zone of Ammonites 
planorbis. Below this zone, on the boundary line between the Lias and the strata 
of which we are about to treat, called "Trias," certain cream-coloured 
limestones devoid of fossils are usually found. These white beds were called by 
William Smith the White Lias, and they have been shown by Mr. Charles Moore to 
belong to a formation similar to one in the Rhaetian Alps of Bavaria, to which 
Mr. Gumbel has applied the name of Rhaetic. They have also long been known as 
the Koessen beds in Germany, and may be regarded as beds of passage between the 
Lias and Trias. They are named the Penarth beds by the Government surveyors of 
Great Britain, from Penarth, near Cardiff, in Glamorganshire, where they 
sometimes attain a thickness of fifty feet.

(FIGURE 383. Cardium rhaeticum, Merrian. Natural size. Rhaetic Beds.)

(FIGURE 384. Pecten Valoniensis. Dfr. 1/2 natural size. Portrush, Ireland, etc. 
Rhaetic Beds.)

(FIGURE 385. Avicula contorta. Portlock. Portrush, Ireland, etc. Natural size. 
Rhaetic Beds.)

The principal member of this group has been called by Dr. Wright the Avicula 
contorta bed, as this shell is very abundant, and has a wide range in Europe.  
(Dr. Wright, on Lias and Bone Bed, Quarterly Geological Journal 1860 volume 16.) 
General Portlock first described the formation as it occurs at Portrush, in 
Antrim, where the Avicula contorta is accompanied by Pecten Valoniensis, as in 
Germany.

The best known member of the group, a thin band or bone-breccia, is conspicuous 
among the black shales in the neighbourhood of Axmouth in Devonshire, and in the 
cliffs of Westbury-on-Severn, as well as at Aust and other places on the borders 
of the Bristol Channel. It abounds in the remains of saurians and fish, and was 
formerly classed as the lowest bed of the Lias; but Sir P. Egerton first pointed 
out, in 1841, that it should be referred to the Upper New Red Sandstone, because 
it contained an assemblage of fossil fish which are either peculiar to this 
stratum, or belong to species well-known in the Muschelkalk of Germany. These 
fish belong to the genera Acrodus, Hybodus, Gyrolepis, and Saurichthys.

(FIGURE 386. Hybodus plicatilis, Agassiz. Teeth. Bone-bed, Aust and Axmouth.)

(FIGURE 387. Saurichthys apicalis, Agassiz. Tooth; natural size and magnified. 
Axmouth.)

(FIGURE 388. Gyrolepis tenuistriatus, Agassiz. Scale; natural size and 
magnified. Axmouth.)

Among those common to the English bone-bed and the Muschelkalk of Germany are 
Hybodus plicatilis (Figure 386), Saurychthys apicalis (Figure 387), Gyrolepis 
tenuistriatus (Figure 388), and G. Albertii. Remains of saurians, Plesiosaurus 
among others, have also been found in the bone-bed, and plates of an Encrinus. 
It may be questioned whether some of those fossils which have the most Triassic 
character may not have been derived from the destruction of older strata, since 
in bone-beds, in general, many of the organic remains are undoubtedly 
derivative.

TRIASSIC MAMMIFER.

(FIGURE 389. Microlestes antiquus, Plieninger. Molar tooth, magnified. Upper 
Trias. Diegerloch, near Stuttgart, Wurtemberg.
a. View of inner side?
b. Same, outer side?
c. Same in profile.
d. Crown of same.)

In North-western Germany, as in England, there occurs beneath the Lias a 
remarkable bone breccia. It is filled with shells and with the remains of fishes 
and reptiles, almost all the genera of which, and some even of the species, 
agree with those of the subjacent Trias. This breccia has accordingly been 
considered by Professor Quenstedt, and other German geologists of high 
authority, as the newest or uppermost part of the Trias. Professor Plieninger 
found in it, in 1847, the molar tooth of a small Triassic mammifer, called by 
him Microlestes antiquus. He inferred its true nature from its double fangs, and 
from the form and number of the protuberances or cusps on the flat crown; and 
considering it as predaceous, probably insectivorous, he called it Microlestes 
from micros, little, and lestes, a beast of prey. Soon afterwards he found a 
second tooth, also at the same locality, Diegerloch, about two miles to the 
south-east of Stuttgart.

No anatomist had been able to give any feasible conjecture as to the affinities 
of this minute quadruped until Dr. Falconer, in 1857, recognised an unmistakable 
resemblance between its teeth and the two back molars of his new genus 
Plagiaulax (Figure 306), from the Purbeck strata. This would lead us to the 
conclusion that Microlestes was marsupial and plant-eating.

In Wurtemberg there are two bone-beds, namely, that containing the Microlestes, 
which has just been described, which constitutes, as we have seen, the uppermost 
member of the Trias, and another of still greater extent, and still more rich in 
the remains of fish and reptiles, which is of older date, intervening between 
the Keuper and Muschelkalk.

The genera Saurichthys, Hybodus, and Gyrolepis are found in both these breccias, 
and one of the species, Saurichthys Mongeoti, is common to both bone-beds, as is 
also a remarkable reptile called Nothosaurus mirabilis. The saurian called 
Belodon by H. von Meyer, of the Thecodont family, is another Triassic form, 
associated at Diegerloch with Microlestes.

TRIAS OF ENGLAND.

Between the Lias and the Coal (or Carboniferous group) there is interposed, in 
the midland and western counties of England, a great series of red loams, 
shales, and sandstones, to which the name of the "New Red Sandstone formation" 
was first given, to distinguish it from other shales and sandstones called the 
"Old Red," often identical in mineral character, which lie immediately beneath 
the coal. The name of "Red Marl" has been incorrectly applied to the red clays 
of this formation, as before explained (Chapter 2), for they are remarkably free 
from calcareous matter. The absence, indeed, of carbonate of lime, as well as 
the scarcity of organic remains, together with the bright red colour of most of 
the rocks of this group, causes a strong contrast between it and the Jurassic 
formations before described.

The group in question is more fully developed in Germany than in England or 
France. It has been called the Trias by German writers, or the Triple Group, 
because it is separable into three distinct formations, called the "Keuper," the 
"Muschelkalk," and the "Bunter-sandstein." Of these the middle division, or the 
Muschelkalk, is wholly wanting in England, and the uppermost (Keuper) and lowest 
(Bunter) members of the series are not rich in fossils.

UPPER TRIAS OR KEUPER.

In certain grey indurated marls below the bone-bed Mr. Boyd Dawkins has found at 
Watchet, on the coast of Somersetshire, a molar tooth of Microlestes, enabling 
him to refer to the Trias strata formerly supposed to be Liassic. Mr. Charles 
Moore had previously discovered many teeth of mammalia of the same family near 
Frome, in Somersetshire, in the contents of a vertical fissure traversing a mass 
of carboniferous limestone. The top of this fissure must have communicated with 
the bed of the Triassic sea, and probably at a point not far from the ancient 
shore on which the small marsupials of that era abounded.

This upper division of the Trias called the Keuper is of great thickness in the 
central counties of England, attaining, according to Mr. Hull's estimate, no 
less than 3450 feet in Cheshire, and it covers a large extent of country between 
Lancashire and Devonshire.

(FIGURE 390. Estheria minuta, Bronn.)

In Worcestershire and Warwickshire in sandstone belonging to the uppermost part 
of the Keuper the bivalve crustacean Estheria minuta occurs. The member of the 
English "New Red" containing this shell, in those parts of England, is, 
according to Sir Roderick Murchison and Mr. Strickland, 600 feet thick, and 
consists chiefly of red marl or slate, with a band of sandstone. 
Ichthyodorulites, or spines of Hybodus, teeth of fishes, and footprints of 
reptiles were observed by the same geologists in these strata.

(FIGURE 391. Hyperodapedon Gordoni. Left palate, maxillary. (Showing the two 
rows of palatal teeth on opposite sides of the jaw.)
a. Under surface.
b. Exterior right side.)

In the Upper Trias or Keuper the remains of two saurians of the order Lacertilia 
have been found. The one called Rhynchosaurus occurred at Grinsell near 
Shrewsbury, and is characterised by having a small bird-like skull and jaws 
without teeth. The other Hyperodapedon (Figure 391) was first noticed in 1858, 
near Elgin, in strata now recognised as Upper Triassic, and afterwards in beds 
of about the same age in the neighbourhood of Warwick. Remains of the same genus 
have been found both in Central India and Southern Africa in rocks believed to 
be of Triassic age. The Hyperodapedon has been shown by Professor Huxley to be a 
terrestrial reptile having numerous palatal teeth, and closely allied to the 
living Sphenodon of New Zealand.

The recent discoveries of a living saurian in New Zealand so closely allied to 
this supposed extinct division of the Lacertilia seems to afford an illustration 
of a principle pointed out by Mr. Darwin of the survival in insulated tracts, 
after many changes in physical geography, of orders of which the congeners have 
become extinct on continents where they have been exposed to the severer 
competition of a larger progressive fauna.

(FIGURE 392. Tooth of Labyrinthodon; natural size. Warwick sandstone.)

(FIGURE 393. Transverse section of upper part of tooth of Labyrinthodon Jaegeri, 
Owen (Mastodonsaurus Jaegeri, Meyer); natural size, and a segment magnified.
a. Pulp cavity, from which the processes of pulp and dentine radiate.)

Teeth of Labyrinthodon (Figure 392) found in the Keuper in Warwickshire were 
examined microscopically by Professor Owen, and compared with other teeth from 
the German Keuper. He found after careful investigation that neither of them 
could be referred to true saurians, although they had been named Mastodonsaurus 
and Phytosaurus by Jager. It appeared that they were of the Batrachian order, 
and of gigantic dimensions in comparison with any representatives of that order 
now living. Both the Continental and English fossil teeth exhibited a most 
complicated texture, differing from that previously observed in any reptile, 
whether recent or extinct, but most nearly analogous to the Ichthyosaurus. A 
section of one of these teeth exhibits a series of irregular folds, resembling 
the labyrinthic windings of the surface of the brain; and from this character 
Professor Owen has proposed the name Labyrinthodon for the new genus. Figure 393 
of part of one is given from his "Odontography," plate 64, a. The entire length 
of this tooth is supposed to have been about three inches and a half, and the 
breadth at the base one inch and a half.

ROCK-SALT.

In Cheshire and Lancashire there are red clays containing gypsum and salt of the 
age of the Trias which are between 1000 and 1500 feet thick. In some places 
lenticular masses of pure rock-salt nearly 100 feet thick are interpolated 
between the argillaceous beds. At the base of the formation beneath the rock-
salt occur the Lower Sandstones and Marl, called provincially in Cheshire 
"water-stones," which are largely quarried for building. They are often ripple-
marked, and are impressed with numerous footprints of reptiles.

The basement beds of the Keuper rest with a slight unconformability upon an 
eroded surface of the "Bunter" next to be described.

LOWER TRIAS OR BUNTER.

(FIGURE 394. Single footstep of Cheirotherium. Bunter-sandstein, Saxony, one-
eighth of natural size.)

(FIGURE 395. Line of footsteps on slab of sandstone. Hildburghausen, in Saxony.)

The lower division or English representative of the "Bunter" attains a thickness 
of 1500 feet in the counties last mentioned, according to Professor Ramsay. 
Besides red and green shales and red sandstones, it comprises much soft white 
quartzose sandstone, in which the trunks of silicified trees have been met with 
at Allesley Hill, near Coventry. Several of them were a foot and a half in 
diameter, and some yards in length, decidedly of coniferous wood, and showing 
rings of annual growth. (Buckland Proceedings of the Geological Society volume 2 
page 439 and Murchison and Strickland Geological Transactions Second Series 
volume 5 page 347.) Impressions, also, of the footsteps of animals have been 
detected in Lancashire and Cheshire in this formation. Some of the most 
remarkable occur a few miles from Liverpool, in the whitish quartzose sandstone 
of Storton Hill, on the west side of the Mersey. They bear a close resemblance 
to tracks first observed in this member of the Upper New Red Sandstone, at the 
village of Hesseberg, near Hildburghausen, in Saxony. For many years these 
footprints have been referred to a large unknown quadruped, provisionally named 
Cheirotherium by Professor Kaup, because the marks both of the fore and hind 
feet resembled impressions made by a human hand. (See Figure 394.) The foot-
marks at Hesseberg are partly concave, and partly in relief, the former, or the 
depressions, are seen upon the upper surface of the sandstone slabs, but those 
in relief are only upon the lower surfaces, being, in fact, natural casts, 
formed in the subjacent footprints as in moulds. The larger impressions, which 
seem to be those of the hind foot, are generally eight inches in length, and 
five in width, and one was twelve inches long. Near each large footstep, and at 
a regular distance (about an inch and a half) before it, a smaller print of a 
fore foot, four inches long and three inches wide, occurs. The footsteps follow 
each other in pairs, each pair in the same line, at intervals of fourteen inches 
from pair to pair. The large as well as the small steps show the great toes 
alternately on the right and left side; each step makes the print of five toes, 
the first, or great toe, being bent inward like a thumb. Though the fore and 
hind foot differ so much in size, they are nearly similar in form.

As neither in Germany nor in England had any bones or teeth been met with in the 
same identical strata as the footsteps, anatomists indulged, for several years, 
in various conjectures respecting the mysterious animals from which they might 
have been derived. Professor Kaup suggested that the unknown quadruped might 
have been allied to the Marsupialia; for in the kangaroo the first toe of the 
fore foot is in a similar manner set obliquely to the others, like a thumb, and 
the disproportion between the fore and hind feet is also very great. But M. Link 
conceived that some of the four species of animals of which the tracks had been 
found in Saxony might have been gigantic Batrachians, and when it was afterwards 
inferred that the Labyrinthodon was an air-breathing reptile, it was conjectured 
by Professor Owen that it might be one and the same as the Cheirotherium.

DOLOMITIC CONGLOMERATE OF BRISTOL.

(FIGURE 396. Tooth of Thecodontosaurus; three times magnified. Riley and 
Stutchbury. Dolomitic conglomerate. Redland, near Bristol.)

Near Bristol, in Somersetshire, and in other counties bordering the Severn, the 
lowest strata belonging to the Triassic series consist of a conglomerate or 
breccia resting unconformably upon the Old Red Sandstone, and on different 
members of the Carboniferous rocks, such as the Coal Measures, Millstone Grit, 
and Mountain Limestone. This mode of superposition will be understood by 
reference to the section below Dundry Hill (Figure 85), where No. 4 is the 
dolomitic conglomerate. Such breccias may have been partly the result of the 
subaerial waste of an old land-surface which gradually sank down and suffered 
littoral denudation in proportion as it became submerged. The pebbles and 
fragments of older rocks which constitute the conglomerate are cemented together 
by a red or yellow base of dolomite, and in some places the encrinites and other 
fossils derived from the Mountain Limestone are so detached from the parent 
rocks that they have the deceptive appearance of belonging to a fauna 
contemporaneous with the dolomitic beds in which they occur. The imbedded 
fragments are both rounded and angular, some consisting of sandstone from the 
coal-measures, being of vast size, and weighing nearly a ton. Fractured bones 
and teeth of saurians which are truly of contemporaneous origin are dispersed 
through some parts of the breccia, and two of these reptiles called Thecodont 
saurians, named from the manner in which the teeth were implanted in the 
jawbone, obtained great celebrity because the patches of red conglomerate in 
which they were found, near Bristol, were originally supposed to be of Permian 
or Palaeozoic age, and therefore the only representatives in England of 
vertebrate animals of so high a grade in rocks of such antiquity. The teeth of 
these saurians are conical, compressed, and with finely serrated edges (see 
Figure 396); they are referred by Professor Huxley to the Dinosaurian order.

ORIGIN OF RED SANDSTONE AND ROCK-SALT.

In various parts of the world, red and mottled clays and sandstones, of several 
distinct geological epochs, are found associated with salt, gypsum, and 
magnesian limestone, or with one or all of these substances. There is, 
therefore, in all likelihood, a general cause for such a coincidence. 
Nevertheless, we must not forget that there are dense masses of red and 
variegated sandstones and clays, thousands of feet in thickness, and of vast 
horizontal extent, wholly devoid of saliferous or gypseous matter. There are 
also deposits of gypsum and of common salt, as in the blue-clay formation of 
Sicily, without any accompanying red sandstone or red clay.

These red deposits may be accounted for by the decomposition of gneiss and mica 
schist, which in the eastern Grampians of Scotland has produced a mass of 
detritus of precisely the same colour as the Old Red Sandstone.

It is a general fact, and one not yet accounted for, that scarcely any fossil 
remains are ever preserved in stratified rocks in which this oxide of iron 
abounds; and when we find fossils in the New or Old Red Sandstone in England, it 
is in the grey, and usually calcareous beds, that they occur. The saline or 
gypseous interstratified beds may have been produced by submarine gaseous 
emanations, or hot mineral springs, which often continue to flow in the same 
spots for ages. Beds of rock-salt are, however, more generally attributed to the 
evaporation of lakes or lagoons communicating at intervals with the ocean. In 
Cheshire two beds of salt occur of the extraordinary thickness of 90 or even 100 
feet, and extending over an area supposed to be 150 miles in diameter. The 
adjacent beds present ripple-marked sandstones and footprints of animals at so 
many levels as to imply that the whole area underwent a slow and gradual 
depression during the formation of the red sandstone.

Major Harris, in his "Highlands of Ethiopia," describes a salt lake, called the 
Bahr Assal, near the Abyssinian frontier, which once formed the prolongation of 
the Gulf of Tadjara, but was afterwards cut off from the gulf by a broad bar of 
lava or of land upraised by an earthquake. "Fed by no rivers, and exposed in a 
burning climate to the unmitigated rays of the sun, it has shrunk into an 
elliptical basin, seven miles in its transverse axis, half filled with smooth 
water of the deepest caerulean hue, and half with a solid sheet of glittering 
snow-white salt, the offspring of evaporation." "If," says Mr. Hugh Miller, "we 
suppose, instead of a barrier of lava, that sand-bars were raised by the surf on 
a flat arenaceous coast during a slow and equable sinking of the surface, the 
waters of the outer gulf might occasionally topple over the bar, and supply 
fresh brine when the first stock had been exhausted by evaporation."

The Runn of Cutch, as I have shown elsewhere (Principles of Geology chapter 
27.), is a low region near the delta of the Indus, equal in extent to about a 
quarter of Ireland, which is neither land nor sea, being dry during part of 
every year, and covered by salt water during the monsoons. Here and there its 
surface is incrusted over with a layer of salt caused by the evaporation of sea-
water. A subsiding movement has been witnessed in this country during 
earthquakes, so that a great thickness of pure salt might result from a 
continuation of such sinking.

TRIAS OF GERMANY.

In Germany, as before hinted, chapter 21, the Trias first received its name as a 
Triple Group, consisting of two sandstones with an intermediate marine 
calcareous formation, which last is wanting in England.

NOMENCLATURE OF TRIAS.

COLUMN 1: GERMAN.

COLUMN 2: FRENCH.

COLUMN 3: ENGLISH.

Keuper: Marnes irisees: Saliferous and gypseous shales and sandstone.

Muschelkalk: Muschelkalk, ou calcaire coquillier: Wanting in England.

Bunter-sandstein: Gres bigarre: Sandstone and quartzose conglomerate.

KEUPER.

(FIGURE 397. Equisetites columnaris. (Syn. Equisetum columnare.) Fragment of 
stem, and a small portion of same magnified. Keuper.)

The first of these, or the Keuper, underlying the beds before described as 
Rhaetic, attains in Wurtemberg a thickness of about 1000 feet. It is divided by 
Alberti into sandstone, gypsum, and carbonaceous clay-slate. (Monog. des Bunter-
Sandsteins.) Remains of reptiles called Nothosaurus and Phytosaurus, have been 
found in it with Labyrinthodon; the detached teeth, also, of placoid fish and of 
Rays, and of the genera Saurichthys and Gyrolepis (Figures 387, 388). The plants 
of the Keuper are generically very analogous to those of the oolite and lias, 
consisting of ferns, equisetaceous plants, cycads, and conifers, with a few 
doubtful monocotyledons. A few species such as Equisetites columnaris, are 
common to this group and the oolite.

ST. CASSIAN AND HALLSTADT BEDS (SEE MAP, FIGURE 398).

(FIGURE 398. Map of Tyrol and Styria showing St. Cassian and Hallstadt Beds.)

The sandstones and clay of the Keuper resemble the deposits of estuaries and a 
shallow sea near the land, and afford, in the north-west of Germany, as in 
France and England, but a scanty representation of the marine life of that 
period. We might, however, have anticipated, from its rich reptilian fauna, that 
the contemporaneous inhabitants of the sea of the Keuper period would be very 
numerous, should we ever have an opportunity of bringing their remains to light. 
This, it is believed, has at length been accomplished, by the position now 
assigned to certain Alpine rocks called the "St. Cassian beds," the true place 
of which in the series was until lately a subject of much doubt and discussion. 
It has been proved that the Hallstadt beds on the northern flanks of the 
Austrian Alps correspond in age with the St. Cassian beds on their southern 
declivity, and the Austrian geologists, M. Suess of Vienna and others, have 
satisfied themselves that the Hallstadt formation is referable to the period of 
the Upper Trias. Assuming this conclusion to be correct, we become acquainted 
suddenly and unexpectedly with a rich marine fauna belonging to a period 
previously believed to be very barren of organic remains, because in England, 
France, and Northern Germany the upper Trias is chiefly represented by beds of 
fresh or brackish water origin.

(FIGURE 399. Scoliostoma, St. Cassian.)

(FIGURE 400. Platystoma Suessii, Hornes. From Hallstadt.)

(FIGURE 401. Koninckia Leonhardi, Wissmann.
a. Ventral view. Part of ventral valve removed to show the vascular impressions 
of dorsal valve.
b. Interior of dorsal valve, showing spiral processes restored.
c. Vertical section of both valves. Part shaded black showing place occupied by 
the animal, and the dorsal valve following the curve of the ventral.)

About 600 species of invertebrate fossils occur in the Hallstadt and St. Cassian 
beds, many of which are still undescribed; some of the Mollusca are of new and 
peculiar genera, as Scoliostoma, Figure 399, and Platystoma, Figure 400, among 
the Gasteropoda; and Koninckia, Figure 401, among the Brachiopoda.

TABLE 21.1 GENERA OF FOSSIL MOLLUSCA IN THE ST. CASSIAN AND HALLSTADT BEDS.

COLUMN 1: COMMON TO OLDER ROCKS.
Orthoceras.
Bactrites.
Macrocheilus.
Loxonema.
Holopella.
Murchisonia.
Porcellia.
Athyris.
Retzia.
Cyrtina.
Euomphalus.

COLUMN 2: CHARACTERISTIC TRIASSIC GENERA.
Ceratites.
Cochloceras.
Choristoceras.
Rhabdoceras.
Aulacoceras.
Scoliostoma (reaches its maximum in the Trias, but passes down to older rocks).
Naticella.
Platystoma.
Ptychostoma.
Euchrysalis.
Halobia.
Hornesia.
Amphiclina.
Koninckia.
Cassianella. (Reach their maximum in the Trias, but pass up to newer rocks.)
Myophoria. (Reach their maximum in the Trias, but pass up to newer rocks.)

COLUMN 3: COMMON TO NEWER ROCKS.
Ammonites.
Chemnitzia.
Cerithium.
Monodonta.
Opis.
Sphoera.
Cardita.
Myoconcha.
Hinnites.
Monotis.
Plicatula.
Pachyrisma.
Thecidium. 

Table 21.1 of genera of marine shells from the Hallstadt and St. Cassian beds, 
drawn up first on the joint authority of M. Suess and the late Dr. Woodward, and 
since corrected by Messrs. Etheridge and Tate, shows how many connecting links 
between the fauna of primary and secondary Palaeozoic and Mesozoic rocks are 
supplied by the St. Cassian and Hallstadt beds.

The first column marks the last appearance of several genera which are 
characteristic of Palaeozoic strata. The second shows those genera which are 
characteristic of the Upper Trias, either as peculiar to it, or, as in the three 
cases marked by asterisks, reaching their maximum of development at this era. 
The third column marks the first appearance in Triassic rocks of genera destined 
to become more abundant in later ages.

It is only, however, when we contemplate the number of species by which each of 
the above-mentioned genera are represented that we comprehend the peculiarities 
of what is commonly called the St. Cassian fauna. Thus, for example, the 
Ammonite, which is not common to older rocks, is represented by no less than 
seventy-three species; whereas Loxonema, which is only known as common to older 
rocks, furnishes fifteen Triassic species. Cerithium, so abundant in tertiary 
strata, and which still lives, is represented by no less than fourteen species. 
As the Orthoceras had never been met with in the marine Muschelkalk, much 
surprise was naturally felt that seven or eight species of the genus should 
appear in the Hallstadt beds, assuming these last to belong to the Upper Trias. 
Among these species are some of large dimensions, associated with large 
Ammonites with foliated lobes, a form never seen before so low in the series, 
while the Orthoceras had never been seen so high.

On the whole, the rich marine fauna of Hallstadt and St. Cassian, now generally 
assigned to the lowest members of the Upper Trias or Keuper, leads us to suspect 
that when the strata of the Triassic age are better known, especially those 
belonging to the period of the Bunter sandstone, the break between the 
Palaeozoic and Mesozoic Periods may be almost effaced. Indeed some geologists 
are not yet satisfied that the true position of the St. Cassian beds (containing 
so great an admixture of types, having at once both Mesozoic and Palaeozoic 
affinities) is made out, and doubt whether they have yet been clearly proved to 
be newer than the Muschelkalk.

MUSCHELKALK.

(FIGURE 402. Ceratites nodosus, Schloth. Muschelkalk, Germany. Side and front 
view, showing the denticulated outline of the septa dividing the chambers.)

(FIGURE 403. Gervilia (Avicula) socialis, Schloth. Characteristic shell of the 
Muschelkalk.)

The next member of the Trias in Germany, the Muschelkalk, which underlies the 
Keuper before described, consists chiefly of a compact greyish limestone, but 
includes beds of dolomite in many places, together with gypsum and rock-salt. 
This limestone, a formation wholly unrepresented in England, abounds in fossil 
shells, as the name implies. Among the Cephalopoda there are no belemnites, and 
no ammonites with foliated sutures, as in the Lias, and Oolite, and the 
Hallstadt beds; but we find instead a genus allied to the Ammonite, called 
Ceratites by de Haan, in which the descending lobes (Figure 402) terminate in a 
few small denticulations pointing inward. Among the bivalve crustacea, the 
Estheria minuta, Bronn (see Figure 390), is abundant, ranging through the 
Keuper, Muschelkalk, and Bunter-sandstein; and Gervillia socialis (Figure 403), 
having a similar range, is found in great numbers in the Muschelkalk of Germany, 
France, and Poland.

(FIGURE 404. Encrinus liliiformis, Schlott. Syn. E. moniliformis. Body, arms, 
and part of stem.
a. Section of stem. Muschelkalk.)

(FIGURE 405. Aspidura loricata, Agassiz.
a. Upper side.
b. Lower side. Muschelkalk.)

(FIGURE 406. Palatal teeth of Placodus gigas. Muschelkalk.)

The abundance of the heads and stems of lily encrinites, Encrinus liliiformis 
(Figure 404), (or Encrinites moniliformis), shows the slow manner in which some 
beds of this limestone have been formed in clear sea-water. The star-fish called 
Aspidura loricata (Figure 405) is as yet peculiar to the Muschelkalk. In the 
same formation are found the skull and teeth of a reptile of the genus Placodus 
(see Figure 406), which was referred originally by Munster, and afterwards by 
Agassiz, to the class of fishes. But more perfect specimens enabled Professor 
Owen, in 1858, to show that this fossil animal was a Saurian reptile, which 
probably fed on shell-bearing mollusks, and used its short and flat teeth, so 
thickly coated with enamel, for pounding and crushing the shells.

BUNTER-SANDSTEIN.

(FIGURE 407. Voltzia heterophylla. (Syn. Voltzia brevifolia.)
b. Portion of same magnified to show fructification. Sulzbad. Bunter-sandstein.)

The Bunter-sandstein consists of various-coloured sandstones, dolomites, and red 
clays, with some beds, especially in the Hartz, of calcareous pisolite or roe-
stone, the whole sometimes attaining a thickness of more than 1000 feet. The 
sandstone of the Vosges is proved, by its fossils, to belong to this lowest 
member of the Triassic group. At Sulzbad (or Soultz-les-bains), near Strasburg, 
on the flanks of the Vosges, many plants have been obtained from the "bunter," 
especially conifers of the extinct genus Voltzia, of which the fructification 
has been preserved. (See Figure 407.) Out of thirty species of ferns, cycads, 
conifers, and other plants, enumerated by M. Ad. Brongniart, in 1849, as coming 
from the "Gres bigarre," or Bunter, not one is common to the Keuper.

The footprints of Labyrinthodon observed in the clays of this formation at 
Hildburghausen, in Saxony, have already been mentioned. Some idea of the variety 
and importance of the terrestrial vertebrate fauna of the three members of the 
Trias in Northern Germany may be derived from the fact that in the great 
monograph by the late Hermann von Meyer on the reptiles of the Trias, the 
remains of no less than eighty distinct species are described and figured.

TRIAS OF THE UNITED STATES.

NEW RED SANDSTONE OF THE VALLEY OF THE CONNECTICUT RIVER.

(FIGURE 408. Footprints of a bird, Turner's Falls, Valley of the Connecticut.)

In a depression of the granitic or hypogene rocks in the States of Massachusetts 
and Connecticut strata of red sandstone, shale, and conglomerate are found, 
occupying an area more than 150 miles in length from north to south, and about 
five to ten miles in breadth, the beds dipping to the eastward at angles varying 
from 5 to 50 degrees. The extreme inclination of 50 degrees is rare, and only 
observed in the neighbourhood of masses of trap which have been intruded into 
the red sandstone while it was forming, or before the newer parts of the deposit 
had been completed. Having examined this series of rocks in many places, I feel 
satisfied that they were formed in shallow water, and for the most part near the 
shore, and that some of the beds were from time to time raised above the level 
of the water, and laid dry, while a newer series, composed of similar sediment, 
was forming.

According to Professor Hitchcock, the footprints of no less than thirty-two 
species of bipeds, and twelve of quadrupeds, have been already detected in these 
rocks. Thirty of these are believed to be those of birds, four of lizards, two 
of chelonians, and six of batrachians. The tracks have been found in more than 
twenty places, scattered through an extent of nearly 80 miles from north to 
south, and they are repeated through a succession of beds attaining at some 
points a thickness of more than 1000 feet. (Hitchcock Mem. of the American 
Academy New Series volume 3 page 129 1848.)

The bipedal impressions are, for the most part, trifid, and show the same number 
of joints as exist in the feet of living tridactylous birds. Now, such birds 
have three phalangeal bones for the inner toe, four for the middle, and five for 
the outer one (see Figure 408); but the impression of the terminal joint is that 
of the nail only. The fossil footprints exhibit regularly, where the joints are 
seen, the same number; and we see in each continuous line of tracks the three-
jointed and five-jointed toes placed alternately outward, first on the one side, 
and then on the other. In some specimens, besides impressions of the three toes 
in front, the rudiment is seen of the fourth toe behind. It is not often that 
the matrix has been fine enough to retain impressions of the integument or skin 
of the foot; but in one fine specimen found at Turner's Falls, on the 
Connecticut, by Dr. Deane, these markings are well preserved, and have been 
recognised by Professor Owen as resembling the skin of the ostrich, and not that 
of reptiles.

The casts of the footprints show that some of the fossil bipeds of the red 
sandstone of Connecticut had feet four times as large as the living ostrich, but 
scarcely, perhaps, larger than the Dinornis of New Zealand, a lost genus of 
feathered giants related to the Apteryx, of which there were many species which 
have left their bones and almost entire skeletons in the superficial alluvium of 
that island. By referring to what was said of the Iguanodon of the Wealden, the 
reader will perceive that the Dinosaur was somewhat intermediate between 
reptiles and birds, and left a series of tridactylous impressions on the sand.

To determine the exact age of the red sandstone and shale containing these 
ancient footprints, in the United States, is not possible at present. No fossil 
shells have yet been found in the deposit, nor plants in a determinable state. 
The fossil fish are numerous and very perfect; but they are of a peculiar type, 
called Ischypterus, by Sir Philip Egerton, from the great size and strength of 
the fulcral rays of the dorsal fin, from ischus, strength, and pteron, a fin.

The age of the Connecticut beds can not be proved by direct superposition, but 
may be presumed from the general structure of the country. That structure proves 
them to be newer than the movements to which the Appalachian or Allegheny chain 
owes its flexures, and this chain includes the ancient or palaeozoic coal-
formation among its contorted rocks.

COAL-FIELD OF RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.

In the State of Virginia, at the distance of about 13 miles eastward of 
Richmond, the capital of that State, there is a coal-field occurring in a 
depression of the granite rocks, and occupying a geological position analogous 
to that of the New Red Sandstone, above-mentioned, of the Connecticut valley. It 
extends 26 miles from north to south, and from four to twelve from east to west.

The plants consist chiefly of zamites, calamites, equiseta, and ferns, and, upon 
the whole, are considered by Professor Heer to have the nearest affinity to 
those of the European Keuper.

The equiseta are very commonly met with in a vertical position more or less 
compressed perpendicularly. It is clear that they grew in the places where they 
are now buried in strata of hardened sand and mud. I found them maintaining 
their erect attitude, at points many miles apart, in beds both above and between 
the seams of coal. In order to explain this fact, we must suppose such shales 
and sandstones to have been gradually accumulated during the slow and repeated 
subsidence of the whole region.

(FIGURE 409. Triassic coal-shale, Richmond, Virginia.
a. Estheria ovata.
b. Young of same.
c. Natural size of a.
d. Natural size of b.)

The fossil fish are Ganoids, some of them of the genus Catopterus, others 
belonging to the liassic genus Tetragonolepis (Aechmodus), see Figure 376. Two 
species of Entomostraca called Estheria are in such profusion in some shaly beds 
as to divide them like the plates of mica in micaceous shales (see Figure 409).

These Virginian coal-measures are composed of grits, sandstones, and shales, 
exactly resembling those of older or primary date in America and Europe, and 
they rival, or even surpass, the latter in the richness and thickness of the 
coal-seams. One of these, the main seam, is in some places from 30 to 40 feet 
thick, composed of pure bituminous coal. The coal is like the finest kinds 
shipped at Newcastle, and when analysed yields the same proportions of carbon 
and hydrogen-- a fact worthy of notice, when we consider that this fuel has been 
derived from an assemblage of plants very distinct specifically, and in part 
generically, from those which have contributed to the formation of the ancient 
or palaeozoic coal.

TRIASSIC MAMMIFER.

In North Carolina, the late Professor Emmons has described the strata of the 
Chatham coal-field, which correspond in age to those near Richmond, in Virginia. 
In beds underlying them he has met with three jaws of a small insectivorous 
mammal which he has called Dromatherium sylvestre, closely allied to 
Spalacotherium. Its nearest living analogue, says Professor Owen, "is found in 
Myrmecobius; for each ramus of the lower jaw contained ten small molars in a 
continuous series, one canine, and three conical incisors-- the latter being 
divided by short intervals."

LOW GRADE OF EARLY MAMMALS FAVOURABLE TO THE THEORY OF PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT.

There is every reason to believe that this fossil quadruped is at least as 
ancient as the Microlestes of the European Trias described in Chapter 21; and 
the fact is highly important, as proving that a certain low grade of marsupials 
had not only a wide range in time, from the Trias to the Purbeck, or uppermost 
oolitic strata of Europe, but had also a wide range in space, namely, from 
Europe to North America, in an east and west direction, and, in regard to 
latitude, from Stonesfield, in 52 degrees N., to that of North Carolina, 35 
degrees N.

If the three localities in Europe where the most ancient mammalia have been 
found-- Purbeck, Stonesfield, and Stuttgart-- had belonged all of them to 
formations of the same age, we might well have imagined so limited an area to 
have been peopled exclusively with pouched quadrupeds, just as Australia now is, 
while other parts of the globe were inhabited by placentals; for Australia now 
supports one hundred and sixty species of marsupials, while the rest of the 
continents and islands are tenanted by about seventeen hundred species of 
mammalia, of which only forty-six are marsupial, namely, the opossums of North 
and South America. But the great difference of age of the strata in each of 
these three localities seems to indicate the predominance throughout a vast 
lapse of time (from the era of the Upper Trias to that of the Purbeck beds) of a 
low grade of quadrupeds; and this persistency of similar generic and ordinal 
types in Europe while the species were changing, and while the fish, reptiles, 
and mollusca were undergoing great modifications, would naturally lead us to 
suspect that there must also have been a vast extension in space of the same 
marsupial forms during that portion of the Secondary or Mesozoic epoch which has 
been termed "the age of reptiles." Such an inference as to the wide geographical 
range of the ancient marsupials has been confirmed by the discovery in the Trias 
of North America of the above-mentioned Dromatherium. The predominance in 
earlier ages of these mammalia of a low grade, and the absence, so far as our 
investigations have yet gone, of species of higher organisation, whether aquatic 
or terrestrial, is certainly in favour of the theory of progressive development.


PRIMARY OR PALAEOZOIC SERIES.

CHAPTER XXII.

PERMIAN OR MAGNESIAN LIMESTONE GROUP.

Line of Separation between Mesozoic and Palaeozoic Rocks.
Distinctness of Triassic and Permian Fossils.
Term Permian.
Thickness of calcareous and sedimentary Rocks in North of England.
Upper, Middle, and Lower Permian.
Marine Shells and Corals of the English Magnesian Limestone.
Reptiles and Fish of Permian Marl-slate.
Foot-prints of Reptiles.
Angular Breccias in Lower Permian.
Permian Rocks of the Continent.
Zechstein and Rothliegendes of Thuringia.
Permian Flora.
Its generic Affinity to the Carboniferous.

In pursuing our examination of the strata in descending order, we have next to 
pass from the base of the Secondary or Mesozoic to the uppermost or newest of 
the Primary or Palaeozoic formations. As this point has been selected as a line 
of demarkation for one of the three great divisions of the fossiliferous series, 
the student might naturally expect that by aid of lithological and 
palaeontological characters he would be able to recognise without difficulty a 
distinct break between the newer and older group. But so far is this from being 
the case in Great Britain, that nowhere have geologists found more difficulty in 
drawing the line of separation than between the Secondary and Primary series. 
The obscurity has arisen from the great resemblance in colour and mineral 
character of the Triassic and Permian red marls and sandstones, and the scarcity 
and often total absence in them of organic remains. The thickness of the strata 
belonging to each group amounts in some places to several thousand feet; and by 
dint of a careful examination of their geological position, and of those fossil, 
animal, and vegetable forms which are occasionally met with in some members of 
each series, it has at length been made clear that the older or Permian rocks 
are more connected with the Primary or Palaeozoic than with the Secondary or 
Mesozoic strata already described.

The term Permian has been proposed for this group by Sir R. Murchison, from 
Perm, a Russian province, where it occupies an area twice the size of France, 
and contains a great abundance and variety of fossils, both vertebrate and 
invertebrate. Professor Sedgwick in 1832 described what is now recognised as the 
central member of this group, the Magnesian limestone, showing that it attained 
a thickness of 600 feet along the north-east of England, in the counties of 
Durham, Yorkshire, and Nottinghamshire, its lower part often passing into a 
fossiliferous marl-slate and resting on an inferior Red Sandstone, the 
equivalent of the Rothliegendes of Germany. (Transactions of the Geological 
Society London Second Series volume 3 page 37.) It has since been shown that 
some of the Red Sandstones of newer date also belong to the Permian group; and 
it appears from the observations of Mr. Binney, Sir R. Murchison, Mr. Harkness, 
and others, that it is in the region where the limestone is most largely 
developed, as, for example, in the county of Durham, that the associated red 
sandstones or sedimentary rocks are thinnest, whereas in the country where the 
latter are thickest the calcareous member is reduced to thirty, or even 
sometimes to ten feet. It is clear, therefore, says Mr. Hull, that the 
sedimentary region in the north of England area has been to the westward, and 
the calcareous area to the eastward; and that in this group there has been a 
development from opposite directions of the two types of strata.

In illustration of this he has given us the following table:

TABLE 22.1. THICKNESS OF PERMIAN STRATA IN NORTH OF ENGLAND.

COLUMN 1: NAME OF STRATA.

COLUMN 2: THICKNESS IN FEET IN N.W. OF ENGLAND.

COLUMN 3: THICKNESS IN FEET IN N.E. OF ENGLAND.

Upper Permian (Sedimentary):  600  :  50-100.
Middle Permian (Calcareous): 10-30 :  600.
Lower Permian (Sedimentary): 3000  :  100-250. (Edward Hull Ternary 
Classification Quarterly Journal of Science No. 23 1869.)

UPPER PERMIAN.

What is called in this table the Upper Permian will be seen to attain its chief 
thickness in the north-west, or on the coast of Cumberland, as at St. Bee's 
Head, where it is described by Sir Roderick Murchison as consisting of massive 
red sandstones with gypsum resting on a thin course of Magnesian Limestone with 
fossils, which again is connected with the Lower Red Sandstone, resembling the 
upper one in such a manner that the whole forms a continuous series. No fossil 
footprints have been found in this Upper as in the Lower Red Sandstone.

MIDDLE PERMIAN-- MAGNESIAN LIMESTONE AND MARL-SLATE.

(FIGURE 410. Schizodus Schlotheimi, Geinitz. Permian crystalline limestone.)

(FIGURE 411. The hinge of Schizodus truncatus, King. Permian.)

(FIGURE 412. Mytilus septifer, King. Syn. Modiola acuminata, Sowerby. Permian 
crystalline limestone.)

This formation is seen upon the coast of Durham and Yorkshire, between the Wear 
and the Tees. Among its characteristic fossils are Schizodus Schlotheimi (Figure 
410) and Mytilus septifer (Figure 412). These shells occur at Hartlepool and 
Sunderland, where the rock assumes an oolitic and botryoidal character. Some of 
the beds in this division are ripple-marked. In some parts of the coast of 
Durham, where the rock is not crystalline, it contains as much as 44 per cent of 
carbonate of magnesia, mixed with carbonate of lime. In other places-- for it is 
extremely variable in structure-- it consists chiefly of carbonate of lime, and 
has concreted into globular and hemispherical masses, varying from the size of a 
marble to that of a cannon-ball, and radiating from the centre. Occasionally 
earthy and pulverulent beds pass into compact limestone or hard granular 
dolomite. Sometimes the limestone appears in a brecciated form, the fragments 
which are united together not consisting of foreign rocks but seemingly composed 
of the breaking-up of the Permian limestone itself, about the time of its 
consolidation. Some of the angular masses in Tynemouth cliff are two feet in 
diameter.

(FIGURE 413. Magnesian Limestone, Humbleton Hill, near Sunderland. (King's 
Monograph Plate 2.)
a. Fenestella retiformis, Schlot, sp. Syn. Gorgonia infundibuliformis, Goldf.; 
Retepora flustracea, Phillips.
b. Part of the same highly magnified.)

The magnesian limestone sometimes becomes very fossiliferous and includes in it 
delicate bryozoa, one of which, Fenestella retiformis (Figure 413), is a very 
variable species, and has received many different names. It sometimes attains a 
large size, single specimens measuring eight inches in width. The same bryozoan, 
with several other British species, is also found abundantly in the Permian of 
Germany.

(FIGURE 414. Productus horridus, Sowerby. (P. calvus, Sowerby) Sunderland and 
Durham, in Magnesian Limestone; Zechstein and Kupferschiefer, Germany.)

(FIGURE 415. Lingula Crednerii. (Geinitz.) Magnesian Limestone, and 
Carboniferous Marl-slate, Durham; Zechstein, Thuringia.)

The total known fauna of the Permian series of Great Britain at present numbers 
147 species, of which 77, or more than half, are mollusca. Not one of these is 
common to rocks newer than the Palaeozoic, and the brachiopods are the only 
group which have furnished species common to the more ancient or Carboniferous 
rocks. Of these Lingula Crednerii (Figure 415) is an example. There are 25 
Gasteropods and only one cephalopod, Nautilus Freieslebeni, which is also found 
in the German Zechstein.

(FIGURE 416. Spirifera alata, Schloth. Syn. Trigonotreta undulata, Sowerby., 
King's Monograph. Magnesian Limestone.)

Shells of the genera Productus (Figure 414) and Strophalosia (the latter of 
allied form with hinge teeth), which do not occur in strata newer than the 
Permian, are abundant in the ordinary yellow magnesian limestone, as will be 
seen in the valuable memoirs of Messrs. King and Howse. They are accompanied by 
certain species of Spirifera (Figure 416), Lingula Crednerii (Figure 415), and 
other brachiopoda of the true primary or palaeozoic type. Some of this same 
tribe of shells, such as Camarophoria, allied to Rhynchonella, Spiriferina, and 
two species of Lingula, are specifically the same as fossils of the 
carboniferous rocks. Avicula, Arca, and Schizodus (Figure 410), and other 
lamellibranchiate bivalves, are abundant, but spiral univalves are very rare.

(FIGURE 417. Restored outline of a fish of the genus Palaeoniscus, Agassiz. 
Palaeothrissum, Blainville.)

Beneath the limestone lies a formation termed the marl-stone, which consists of 
hard calcareous shales, marl-slate, and thin-bedded limestones. At East 
Thickley, in Durham, where it is thirty feet thick, this slate has yielded many 
fine specimens of fossil fish-- of the genera Palaeoniscus ten species, 
Pygopterus two species, Coelacanthus two species, and Platysomus two species, 
which as genera are common to the older Carboniferous formation, but the Permian 
species are peculiar, and, for the most part, identical with those found in the 
marl-slate or copper-slate of Thuringia.

(FIGURE 418. Shark. Heterocercal.)

(FIGURE 419. Shad. (Clupea. Herring tribe. Homocercal.)

The Palaeoniscus above-mentioned belongs to that division of fishes which M. 
Agassiz has called "Heterocercal," which have their tails unequally bilobate, 
like the recent shark and sturgeon, and the vertebral column running along the 
upper caudal lobe. (See Figure 418.) The "Homocercal" fish, which comprise 
almost all the 9000 species at present known in the living creation, have the 
tail-fin either single or equally divided; and the vertebral column stops short, 
and is not prolonged into either lobe. (See Figure 419.) Now it is a singular 
fact, first pointed out by Agassiz, that the heterocercal form, which is 
confined to a small number of genera in the existing creation, is universal in 
the magnesian limestone, and all the more ancient formations. It characterises 
the earlier periods of the earth's history, whereas in the secondary strata, or 
those newer than the Permian, the homocercal tail predominates.

A full description has been given by Sir Philip Egerton of the species of fish 
characteristic of the marl-slate, in Professor King's monograph before referred 
to, where figures of the ichthyolites, which are very entire and well preserved, 
will be found. Even a single scale is usually so characteristically marked as to 
indicate the genus, and sometimes even the particular species. They are often 
scattered through the beds singly, and may be useful to a geologist in 
determining the age of the rock.

(FIGURES 420-425. SCALES OF FISH. MAGNESIAN LIMESTONE.

(FIGURE 420. Palaeoniscus comptus, Agassiz. Scale, magnified. Marl-slate.)

(FIGURE 421. Palaeoniscus elegans, Sedgwick. Under surface of scale, magnified. 
Marl-slate.)

(FIGURE 422. Palaeoniscus glaphyrus, Agassiz. Under surface of scale, magnified. 
Marl-slate.)

(FIGURE 423. Coelacanthus granulatus, Agassiz. Granulated surface of scale, 
magnified. Marl-slate.)

(FIGURE 424. Pygopterus mandibularis. Agassiz. Marl-slate.
a. Outside of scale, magnified.
b. Under surface of same.)

(FIGURE 425. Acrolepis Sedgwickii, Agassiz. Outside of scale, magnified. Marl-
slate.))

We are indebted to Messrs. Hancock and Howse for the discovery in this marl-
slate at Midderidge, Durham, of two species of Protosaurus, a genus of reptiles, 
one representative of which, P. Speneri, has been celebrated ever since the year 
1810 as characteristic of the Kupfer-schiefer or Permian of Thuringia. Professor 
Huxley informs us that the agreement of the Durham fossil with Hermann von 
Meyer's figure of the German specimen is most striking. Although the head is 
wanting in all the examples yet found, they clearly belong to the Lacertian 
order, and are therefore of a higher grade than any other vertebrate animal 
hitherto found fossil in a Palaeozoic rock. Remains of Labyrinthodont reptiles 
have also been met with in the same slate near Durham.

LOWER PERMIAN.

The inferior sandstones which lie beneath the marl-slate consist of sandstone 
and sand, separating the Magnesian Limestone from the coal, in Yorkshire and 
Durham. In some instances, red marl and gypsum have been found associated with 
these beds. They have been classed with the Magnesian Limestone by Professor 
Sedgwick, as being nearly co-extensive with it in geographical range, though 
their relations are very obscure. But the principal development of Lower Permian 
is, as we have seen by Mr. Hull's Table 22.1, in the northwest, where the 
Penrith sandstone, as it has been called, and the associated breccias and purple 
shales are estimated by Professor Harkness to attain a thickness of 3000 feet. 
Organic remains are generally wanting, but the leaves and wood of coniferous 
plants, and in one case a cone, have been found. Also in the purple marls of 
Corncockle Muir near Dumfries, very distinct footprints of reptiles occur, 
originally referred to the Trias, but shown by Mr. Binney in 1856 to be Permian. 
No bones of the animals which they represent have yet been discovered.

ANGULAR BRECCIAS IN LOWER PERMIAN.

A striking feature in these beds is the occasional occurrence, especially at the 
base of the formation, of angular and sometimes rounded fragments of 
Carboniferous and older rocks of the adjoining districts being included in a 
paste of red marl. Some of the angular masses are of huge size.

In the central and southern counties, where the Middle Permian or Magnesian 
Limestone is wanting, it is difficult to separate the upper and lower 
sandstones, and Mr. Hull is of opinion that the patches of this formation found 
here and there in Worcestershire, Shropshire, and other counties may have been 
deposited in a sea separated from the northern basin by a barrier of 
Carboniferous rocks running east and west, and now concealed under the Triassic 
strata of Cheshire. Similar breccias to those before described are found in the 
more southern counties last mentioned, where their appearance is rendered more 
striking by the marked contrast they present to the beds of well-rolled and 
rounded pebbles of the Trias occupying a large area in the same region.

Professor Ramsay refers the angular form and large size of the fragments 
composing these breccias to the action of floating ice in the sea. These masses 
of angular rock, some of them weighing more than half a ton, and lying 
confusedly in a red, unstratified marl, like stones in boulder-drift, are in 
some cases polished, striated, and furrowed like erratic blocks in the moraine 
of a glacier. They can be shown in some cases to have travelled from the parent 
rocks, thirty or more miles distant, and yet not to have lost their angular 
shape. (Ramsay Quarterly Geological Journal 1855; and Lyell Principles of 
Geology volume 1 page 223 10th edition.)

PERMIAN ROCKS OF THE CONTINENT.

Germany is the classic ground of the Magnesian Limestone now called Permian. The 
formation was well studied by the miners of that country a century ago as 
containing a thin band of dark-coloured cupriferous shale, characterised at 
Mansfield in Thuringia by numerous fossil fish. Beneath some variegated 
sandstones (not belonging to the Trias, though often confounded with it) they 
came down first upon a dolomitic limestone corresponding to the upper part of 
our Middle Permian, and then upon a marl-slate richly impregnated with copper 
pyrites, and containing fish and reptiles (Protosaurus) identical in species 
with those of the corresponding marl-slate of Durham. To the limestone they gave 
the name of Zechstein, and to the marl-slate that of Mergel-schiefer or Kupfer-
schiefer. Beneath the fossiliferous group lies the Rothliegendes or Rothtodt-
liegendes, meaning the red-lyer or red-dead-lyer, so-called by the German miners 
from its colour, and because the copper had DIED OUT when they reached this 
underlying non-metalliferous member of the series. This red under-lyer is, in 
fact, a great deposit of red sandstone, breccia, and conglomerate with 
associated porphyry, basalt, and amygdaloid.

According to Sir R. Murchison, the Permian rocks are composed, in Russia, of 
white limestone, with gypsum and white salt; and of red and green grits, 
occasionally with copper ore; also magnesian limestones, marl-stones, and 
conglomerates.

PERMIAN FLORA.

(FIGURE 426. Walchia piniformis, Schloth. Permian, Saxony. (Gutbier, Die 
Versteinerungen des Permischen Systemes in Sachsen volume 2 plate 10.)
a. Branch.
b. Twig of the same.
c. Leaf magnified.)

About 18 or 20 species of plants are known in the Permian rocks of England. None 
of them pass down into the Carboniferous series, but several genera, such as 
Alethopteris, Neuropteris, Walchia, and Ullmania, are common to the two groups. 
The Permian flora on the Continent appears, from the researches of MM. Murchison 
and de Verneuil in Russia, and of MM. Geinitz and von Gutbier in Saxony, to be, 
with a few exceptions, distinct from that of the coal.

In the Permian rocks of Saxony no less than 60 species of fossil plants have 
been met with. Two or three of these, as Calamites gigas, Sphenopteris erosa, 
and S. lobata, are also met with in the government of Perm in Russia. Seven 
others, and among them Neuropteris Loshii, Pecopteris arborescens, and P. 
similis, and several species of Walchia (see Figure 426), a genus of Conifers, 
called Lycopodites by some authors, are said by Geinitz to be common to the 
coal-measures.

(FIGURE 427. Cardiocarpon Ottonis. Gutbier, Permian, Saxony. 1/2 diameter.)

(FIGURE 428. Neoggerathia cuneifolia. Brongniart. (Murchison's Russia volume 2 
Plate A figure 3.)

Among the genera also enumerated by Colonel Gutbier are the fruit called 
Cardiocarpon (see Figure 427), Asterophyllites, and Annularia, so characteristic 
of the Carboniferous period; also Lepidodendron, which is common to the Permian 
of Saxony, Thuringia, and Russia, although not abundant. Neoggerathia (see 
Figure 428), the leaves of which have parallel veins without a midrib, and to 
which various generic synonyms, such as Cordaites, Flabellaria, and Poacites, 
have been given, is another link between the Permian and Carboniferous 
vegetation. Coniferae, of the Araucarian division, also occur; but these are 
likewise met with both in older and newer rocks. The plants called Sigillaria 
and Stigmaria, so marked a feature in the Carboniferous period, are as yet 
wanting in the true Permian.

Among the remarkable fossils of the Rothliegendes, or lowest part of the Permian 
in Saxony and Bohemia, are the silicified trunks of tree-ferns called 
generically Psaronius. Their bark was surrounded by a dense mass of air-roots, 
which often constituted a great addition to the original stem, so as to double 
or quadruple its diameter. The same remark holds good in regard to certain 
living extra-tropical arborescent ferns, particularly those of New Zealand.

Upon the whole, it is evident that the Permian plants approach much nearer to 
the Carboniferous flora than to the Triassic; and the same may be said of the 
Permian fauna.


CHAPTER XXIII.

THE COAL OR CARBONIFEROUS GROUP.

Principal Subdivisions of the Carboniferous Group.
Different Thickness of the sedimentary and calcareous Members in Scotland and 
the South of England.
Coal-measures.
Terrestrial Nature of the Growth of Coal.
Erect fossil Trees.
Uniting of many Coal-seams into one thick Bed.
Purity of the Coal explained.
Conversion of Coal into Anthracite.
Origin of Clay-ironstone.
Marine and brackish-water Strata in Coal.
Fossil Insects.
Batrachian Reptiles.
Labyrinthodont Foot-prints in Coal-measures.
Nova Scotia Coal-measures with successive Growths of erect fossil Trees.
Similarity of American and European Coal.
Air-breathers of the American Coal.
Changes of Condition of Land and Sea indicated by the Carboniferous Strata of 
Nova Scotia.

PRINCIPAL SUBDIVISIONS OF THE CARBONIFEROUS GROUP.

The next group which we meet with in the descending order is the Carboniferous, 
commonly called "The Coal," because it contains many beds of that mineral, in a 
more or less pure state, interstratified with sandstones, shales, and 
limestones. The coal itself, even in Great Britain and Belgium, where it is most 
abundant, constitutes but an insignificant portion of the whole mass. In South 
Wales, for example, the thickness of the coal-bearing strata has been estimated 
at between 11,000 and 12,000 feet, while the various coal seams, about 80 in 
number, do not, according to Professor Phillips, exceed in the aggregate 120 
feet.

The Carboniferous formation assumes various characters in different parts even 
of the British Islands. It usually comprises two very distinct members: first, 
the sedimentary beds, usually called the Coal-measures, of mixed fresh-water, 
terrestrial, and marine origin, often including seams of coal; secondly, that 
named in England the Mountain or Carboniferous Limestone, of purely marine 
origin, and made up chiefly of corals, shells, and encrinites, and resting on 
shales called the shales of the Mountain Limestone.

TABLE 23.1.

In the south-western part of our island, in Somersetshire and South Wales, the 
three divisions usually spoken of are:

1. Coal-measures: strata of shale, sandstone, and grit, from 600 to 12,000 feet 
thick, with occasional seams of coal.

2. Millstone grit: a coarse quartzose sandstone passing into a conglomerate, 
sometimes used for millstones, with beds of shale; usually devoid of coal; 
occasionally above 600 feet thick.

3. Mountain or Carboniferous Limestone: a calcareous rock containing marine 
shells, corals, and encrinites; devoid of coal; thickness variable, sometimes 
more than 1500 feet.

If the reader will refer to the section in Figure 85, he will see that the Upper 
and Lower Coal-measures of the coal-field near Bristol are divided by a 
micaceous flaggy sandstone called the Pennant Rock. The Lower Coal-measures of 
the same section rest sometimes, especially in the north part of the basin, on a 
base of coarse grit called the Millstone Grit (No. 2 of the above Table 23.1.)

In the South Welsh coal-field Millstone Grit occurs in like manner at the base 
of the productive coal. It is called by the miners the "Farewell Rock," as when 
they reach it they have no longer any hopes of obtaining coal at a greater depth 
in the same district. In the central and northern coal-fields of England this 
same grit, including quartz pebbles, with some accompanying sandstones and 
shales containing coal plants, acquires a thickness of several thousand feet, 
lying beneath the productive coal-measures, which are nearly 10,000 feet thick.

Below the Millstone Grit is a continuation of similar sandstones and shales 
called by Professor Phillips the Yoredale series, from Yoredale, in Yorkshire, 
where they attain a thickness of from 800 to 1000 feet. At several intervals 
bands of limestone divide this part of the series, one of which, called the Main 
Limestone or Upper Scar Limestone, composed in great part of encrinites, is 70 
feet thick. Thin seams of coal also occur in these lower Yoredale beds in 
Yorkshire, showing that in the same region there were great alternations in the 
state of the surface. For at successive periods in the same area there prevailed 
first terrestrial conditions favourable to the growth of pure coal, secondly, a 
sea of some depth suited to the formation of Carboniferous Limestone, and, 
thirdly, a supply of muddy sediment and sand, furnishing the materials for 
sandstone and shale. There is no clear line of demarkation between the Coal-
measures and the Millstone Grit, nor between the Millstone Grit and underlying 
Yoredale rocks.

On comparing a series of vertical sections in a north-westerly direction from 
Leicestershire and Warwickshire into North Lancashire, we find, says Mr. Hull, 
within a distance of 120 miles an augmentation of the sedimentary materials to 
the extent of 16,000 feet.

Leicestershire and Warwickshire: 2,600 feet.
North Staffordshire: 9,000 feet.
South Lancashire: 12,130 feet.
North Lancashire: 18,700 feet.

In central England, where the sedimentary beds are reduced to about 3000 feet in 
all, the Carboniferous Limestone attains an enormous thickness, as much as 4000 
feet at Ashbourne, near Derby, according to Mr. Hull's estimate. To a certain 
extent, therefore, we may consider the calcareous member of the formation as 
having originated simultaneously with the accumulation of the materials of grit, 
sandstone, and shale, with seams of coal; just as strata of mud, sand, and 
pebbles, several thousand feet thick, with layers of vegetable matter, are now 
in the process of formation in the cypress swamps and delta of the Mississippi, 
while coral reefs are forming on the coast of Florida and in the sea of the 
Bermuda islands. For we may safely conclude that in the ancient Carboniferous 
ocean those marine animals which were limestone builders were never freely 
developed in areas where the rivers poured in fresh water charged with sand or 
clay; and the limestone could only become several thousand feet thick in parts 
of the ocean which remained perfectly clear for ages.

The calcareous strata of the Scotch coal-fields, those of Lanarkshire, the 
Lothians, and Fife, for example, are very insignificant in thickness when 
compared to those of England. They consist of a few beds intercalated between 
the sandstones and shales containing coal and ironstone, the combined thickness 
of all the limestones amounting to no more than 150 feet. The vegetation of some 
of these northern sedimentary beds containing coal may be older than any of the 
coal-measures of central and southern England, as being coeval with the Mountain 
Limestone of the south. In Ireland the limestone predominates over the coal-
bearing sands and shales. We may infer the former continuity of several of the 
coal-fields in northern and central England, not only from the abrupt manner in 
which they are cut off at their outcrop, but from their remarkable 
correspondence in the succession and character of particular beds. But the 
limited extent to which these strata are exposed at the surface is not merely 
owing to their former denudation, but even in a still greater degree to their 
having been largely covered by the New Red Sandstone, as in Cheshire, and here 
and there by the Permian strata, as in Durham.

It has long been the opinion of the most eminent geologists that the coal-fields 
of Yorkshire and Lancashire were once united, the upper Coal-measures and the 
overlying Millstone Grit and Yoredale rocks having been subsequently removed; 
but what is remarkable, is the ancient date now assigned to this denudation, for 
it seems that a thickness of no less than 10,000 feet of the coal-measures had 
been carried away before the deposition even of the lower Permian rocks which 
were thrown down upon the already disturbed truncated edges of the coal-strata. 
(Edward Hull Quarterly Geological Journal volume 24 page 327.) The carboniferous 
strata most productive of workable coal have so often a basin-shaped arrangement 
that these troughs have sometimes been supposed to be connected with the 
original conformation of the surface upon which the beds were deposited. But it 
is now admitted that this structure has been owing to movements of the earth's 
crust of upheaval and subsidence, and that the flexure and inclination of the 
beds has no connection with the original geographical configuration of the 
district.

COAL-MEASURES.

I shall now treat more particularly of the productive coal-measures, and their 
mode of origin and organic remains.

COAL-FORMED ON LAND.

In South Wales, already alluded to, where the coal-measures attain a thickness 
of 12,000 feet, the beds throughout appear to have been formed in water of 
moderate depth, during a slow, but perhaps intermittent, depression of the 
ground, in a region to which rivers were bringing a never-failing supply of 
muddy sediment and sand. The same area was sometimes covered with vast forests, 
such as we see in the deltas of great rivers in warm climates, which are liable 
to be submerged beneath fresh or salt water should the ground sink vertically a 
few feet.

In one section near Swansea, in South Wales, where the total thickness of strata 
is 3246 feet, we learn from Sir H. De la Beche that there are ten principal 
masses of sandstone. One of these is 500 feet thick, and the whole of them make 
together a thickness of 2125 feet. They are separated by masses of shale, 
varying in thickness from 10 to 50 feet. The intercalated coal-beds, sixteen in 
number, are generally from one to five feet thick, one of them, which has two or 
three layers of clay interposed, attaining nine feet. At other points in the 
same coal-field the shales predominate over the sandstones. Great as is the 
diversity in the horizontal extent of individual coal-seams, they all present 
one characteristic feature, in having, each of them, what is called its 
UNDERCLAY. These underclays, co-extensive with every layer of coal, consist of 
arenaceous shale, sometimes called fire-stone, because it can be made into 
bricks which stand the fire of a furnace. They vary in thickness from six inches 
to more than ten feet; and Sir William Logan first announced to the scientific 
world in 1841 that they were regarded by the colliers in South Wales as an 
essential accompaniment of each of the eighty or more seams of coal met with in 
their coal-field. They are said to form the FLOOR on which the coal rests; and 
some of them have a slight admixture of carbonaceous matter, while others are 
quite blackened by it.

All of them, as Sir William Logan pointed out, are characterised by inclosing a 
peculiar species of fossil vegetable called Stigmaria, to the exclusion of other 
plants. It was also observed that, while in the overlying shales, or "roof" of 
the coal, ferns and trunks of trees abound without any Stigmariae, and are 
flattened and compressed, those singular plants of the underclay most commonly 
retain their natural forms, unflattened and branching freely, and sending out 
their slender rootlets, formerly thought to be leaves, through the mud in all 
directions. Several species of Stigmaria had long been known to botanists, and 
described by them, before their position under each seam of coal was pointed 
out, and before their true nature as the roots of trees (some having been 
actually found attached to the base of Sigillaria stumps) was recognised. It was 
conjectured that they might be aquatic, perhaps floating plants, which sometimes 
extended their branches and leaves freely in fluid mud, in which they were 
finally enveloped.

Now that all agree that these underclays are ancient soils, it follows that in 
every instance where we find them they attest the terrestrial nature of the 
plants which formed the overlying coal, which consists of the trunks, branches, 
and leaves of the same plants. The trunks have generally fallen prostrate in the 
coal, but some of them still remain at right angles to the ancient soils (see 
Figure 440). Professor Goppert, after examining the fossil vegetables of the 
coal-fields of Germany, has detected, in beds of pure coal, remains of plants of 
every family hitherto known to occur fossil in the carboniferous rocks. Many 
seams, he remarks, are rich in Sigillariae, Lepidodendra, and Stigmariae, the 
latter in such abundance as to appear to form the bulk of the coal. In some 
places, almost all the plants were calamites, in others ferns. (Quarterly 
Geological Journal volume 5 Mem. page 17.)

Between the years 1837 and 1840, six fossil trees were discovered in the coal-
fields of Lancashire, where it is intersected by the Bolton railway. They were 
all at right angles to the plane of the bed, which dips about 15 degrees to the 
south. The distance between the first and the last was more than 100 feet, and 
the roots of all were imbedded in a soft argillaceous shale. In the same plane 
with the roots is a bed of coal, eight or ten inches thick, which has been found 
to extend across the railway, or to the distance of at least ten yards. Just 
above the covering of the roots, yet beneath the coal-seam, so large a quantity 
of the Lepidostrobus variabilis was discovered inclosed in nodules of hard clay, 
that more than a bushel was collected from the small openings around the base of 
some of the trees (see Figure 457 of this genus). The exterior trunk of each was 
marked by a coating of friable coal, varying from one-quarter to three-quarters 
of an inch in thickness; but it crumbled away on removing the matrix. The 
dimensions of one of the trees is 15 1/2 feet in circumference at the base, 7 
1/2 feet at the top, its height being eleven feet. All the trees have large 
spreading roots, solid and strong, sometimes branching, and traced to a distance 
of several feet, and presumed to extend much farther.

In a colliery near Newcastle a great number of Sigillariae occur in the rock as 
if they had retained the position in which they grew. No less than thirty, some 
of them four or five feet in diameter, were visible within an area of 50 yards 
square, the interior being sandstone, and the bark having been converted into 
coal. Such vertical stems are familiar to our coal-miners, under the name of 
coal-pipes. They are much dreaded, for almost every year in the Bristol, 
Newcastle, and other coal-fields, they are the cause of fatal accidents. Each 
cylindrical cast of a tree, formed of solid sandstone, and increasing gradually 
in size towards the base, and being without branches, has its whole weight 
thrown downward, and receives no support from the coating of friable coal which 
has replaced the bark. As soon, therefore, as the cohesion of this external 
layer is overcome, the heavy column falls suddenly in a perpendicular or oblique 
direction from the roof of the gallery whence coal has been extracted, wounding 
or killing the workman who stands below. It is strange to reflect how many 
thousands of these trees fell originally in their native forests in obedience to 
the law of gravity; and how the few which continued to stand erect, obeying, 
after myriads of ages, the same force, are cast down to immolate their human 
victims.

(FIGURE 429. Ground-plan of a fossil forest, Parkfield Colliery, near 
Wolverhampton, showing the position of 73 trees in a quarter of an acre.)

It has been remarked that if, instead of working in the dark, the miner was 
accustomed to remove the upper covering of rock from each seam of coal, and to 
expose to the day the soils on which ancient forests grew, the evidence of their 
former growth would be obvious. Thus in South Staffordshire a seam of coal was 
laid bare in the year 1844, in what is called an open work at Parkfield 
colliery, near Wolverhampton. In the space of about a quarter of an acre the 
stumps of no less than 73 trees with their roots attached appeared, as shown in 
Figure 429, some of them more than eight feet in circumference. The trunks, 
broken off close to the root, were lying prostrate in every direction, often 
crossing each other. One of them measured 15, another 30 feet in length, and 
others less. They were invariably flattened to the thickness of one or two 
inches, and converted into coal. Their roots formed part of a stratum of coal 
ten inches thick, which rested on a layer of clay two inches thick, below which 
was a second forest resting on a two-foot seam of coal. Five feet below this, 
again, was a third forest with large stumps of Lepidodendra, Calamites, and 
other trees.

BLENDING OF COAL-SEAMS.

Both in England and North America seams of coal are occasionally observed to be 
parted from each other by layers of clay and sand, and, after they have been 
persistent for miles, to come together and blend in one single bed, which is 
then found to be equal in the aggregate to the thickness of the several seams. I 
was shown by Mr. H.D. Rogers a remarkable example of this in Pennsylvania. In 
the Shark Mountain, near Pottsville, in that State, there are thirteen seams of 
anthracite coal, some of them more than six feet thick, separated by beds of 
white quartzose grit and a conglomerate of quartz pebbles, often of the size of 
a hen's egg. Between Pottsville and the Lehigh Summit Mine, seven of these seams 
of coal, at first widely separated, are, in the course of several miles, brought 
nearer and nearer together by the gradual thinning out of the intervening 
coarse-grained strata and their accompanying shales, until at length they 
successively unite and form one mass of coal between forty and fifty feet thick, 
very pure on the whole, though with a few thin partings of clay. This mass of 
coal I saw quarried in the open air at Mauch Chunk, on the Bear Mountain. The 
origin of such a vast thickness of vegetable remains, so unmixed, on the whole, 
with earthy ingredients, can be accounted for in no other way than by the 
growth, during thousands of years, of trees and ferns in the manner of peat-- a 
theory which the presence of the Stigmaria in situ under each of the seven 
layers of anthracite fully bears out. The rival hypothesis, of the drifting of 
plants into a sea or estuary, leaves the non-intermixture of sediment, or of 
clay, sand, and pebbles, with the pure coal wholly unexplained.

(FIGURE 430. Uniting of distinct coal-seams.)

The late Mr. Bowman was the first who gave a satisfactory explanation of the 
manner in which distinct coal-seams, after maintaining their independence for 
miles, may at length unite, and then persist throughout another wide area with a 
thickness equal to that which the separate seams had previously maintained.

Let A-C (Figure 430) be a three-foot seam of coal originally laid down as a mass 
of vegetable matter on the level area of an extensive swamp, having an under-
clay, f-g, through which the Stigmariae or roots of the trees penetrate as 
usual. One portion, B-C, of this seam of coal is now inclined; the area of the 
swamp having subsided as much as 25 feet at E-C, and become for a time submerged 
under salt, fresh, or brackish water. Some of the trees of the original forest 
A-B-C fell down, others continued to stand erect in the new lagoon, their stumps 
and part of their trunks becoming gradually enveloped in layers of sand and mud, 
which at length filled up the new piece of water C-E.

When this lagoon has been entirely silted up and converted into land, the 
forest-covered surface A-B will extend once more over the whole area A-B-E, and 
a second mass of vegetable matter, D-E, forming three feet more of coal, will 
accumulate. We then find in the region E-C two seams of coals, each three feet 
thick, with their respective under-clays, with erect buried trees based upon the 
surface of the lower coal, the two seams being separated by 25 feet of 
intervening shale and sandstone. Whereas in the region A-B, where the growth of 
the forest has never been interrupted by submergence, there will simply be one 
seam, two yards thick, corresponding to the united thickness of the beds B-E and 
B-C. It may be objected that the uninterrupted growth of plants during the 
interval of time required for the filling up of the lagoon will have caused the 
vegetable matter in the region D-A-B to be thicker than the two distinct seams E 
and C, and no doubt there would actually be a slight excess representing one or 
more generation of trees and plants forming the undergrowth; but this excess of 
vegetable matter, when compressed into coal, would be so insignificant in 
thickness that the miner might still affirm that the seam D-A throughout the 
area D-A-B was equal to the two seams C and E.

CAUSE OF THE PURITY OF COAL.

The purity of the coal itself, or the absence in it of earthy particles and 
sand, throughout areas of vast extent, is a fact which appears very difficult to 
explain when we attribute each coal-seam to a vegetation growing in swamps. It 
has been asked how, during river inundations capable of sweeping away the leaves 
of ferns and the stems and roots of Sigillariae and other trees, could the 
waters fail to transport some fine mud into the swamps? One generation after 
another of tall trees grew with their roots in mud, and their leaves and 
prostrate trunks formed layers of vegetable matter, which was afterwards covered 
with mud since turned to shale. Yet the coal itself, or altered vegetable 
matter, remained all the while unsoiled by earthy particles. This enigma, 
however perplexing at first sight, may, I think, be solved by attending to what 
is now taking place in deltas. The dense growth of reeds and herbage which 
encompasses the margins of forest-covered swamps in the valley and delta of the 
Mississippi is such that the fluviatile waters, in passing through them, are 
filtered and made to clear themselves entirely before they reach the areas in 
which vegetable matter may accumulate for centuries, forming coal if the climate 
be favourable. There is no possibility of the least intermixture of earthy 
matter in such cases. Thus in the large submerged tract called the "Sunk 
Country," near New Madrid, forming part of the western side of the valley of the 
Mississippi, erect trees have been standing ever since the year 1811-12, killed 
by the great earthquake of that date; lacustrine and swamp plants have been 
growing there in the shallows, and several rivers have annually inundated the 
whole space, and yet have been unable to carry in any sediment within the outer 
boundaries of the morass, so dense is the marginal belt of reeds and brush-wood. 
It may be affirmed that generally, in the "cypress swamps" of the Mississippi, 
no sediment mingles with the vegetable matter accumulated there from the decay 
of trees and semi-aquatic plants. As a singular proof of this fact, I may 
mention that whenever any part of a swamp in Louisiana is dried up, during an 
unusually hot season, and the wood set on fire, pits are burnt into the ground 
many feet deep, or as far down as the fire can descend without meeting with 
water, and it is then found that scarcely any residuum or earthy matter is left. 
At the bottom of all these "cypress swamps" a bed of clay is found, with roots 
of the tall cypress (Taxodium distichum), just as the under-clays of the coal 
are filled with Stigmaria.

CONVERSION OF COAL INTO ANTHRACITE.

It appears from the researches of Liebig and other eminent chemists, that when 
wood and vegetable matter are buried in the earth exposed to moisture, and 
partially or entirely excluded from the air, they decompose slowly and evolve 
carbonic acid gas, thus parting with a portion of their original oxygen. By this 
means they become gradually converted into lignite or wood-coal, which contains 
a larger proportion of hydrogen than wood does. A continuance of decomposition 
changes this lignite into common or bituminous coal, chiefly by the discharge of 
carbureted hydrogen, or the gas by which we illuminate our streets and houses. 
According to Bischoff, the inflammable gases which are always escaping from 
mineral coal, and are so often the cause of fatal accidents in mines, always 
contain carbonic acid, carbureted hydrogen, nitrogen, and olefiant gas. The 
disengagement of all these gradually transforms ordinary or bituminous coal into 
anthracite, to which the various names of glance-coal, coke, hard-coal, culm, 
and many others, have been given.

There is an intimate connection between the extent to which the coal has in 
different regions parted with its gaseous contents, and the amount of 
disturbance which the strata have undergone. The coincidence of these phenomena 
may be attributed partly to the greater facility afforded for the escape of 
volatile matter, when the fracturing of the rocks has produced an infinite 
number of cracks and crevices. The gases and water which are made to penetrate 
these cracks are probably rendered the more effective as metamorphic agents by 
increased temperature derived from the interior. It is well known that, at the 
present period, thermal waters and hot vapours burst out from the earth during 
earthquakes, and these would not fail to promote the disengagement of volatile 
matter from the Carboniferous rocks.

In Pennsylvania the strata of coal are horizontal to the westward of the 
Alleghany Mountains, where the late Professor H.D. Rogers pointed out that they 
were most bituminous; but as we travel south-eastward, where they no longer 
remain level and unbroken, the same seams become progressively debitumenized in 
proportion as the rocks become more bent and distorted. At first, on the Ohio 
River, the proportion of hydrogen, oxygen, and other volatile matters ranges 
from forty to fifty per cent. Eastward of this line, on the Monongahela, it 
still approaches forty per cent, where the strata begin to experience some 
gentle flexures. On entering the Alleghany Mountains, where the distinct 
anticlinal axes begin to show themselves, but before the dislocations are 
considerable, the volatile matter is generally in the proportion of eighteen or 
twenty per cent. At length, when we arrive at some insulated coal-fields 
associated with the boldest flexures of the Appalachian chain, where the strata 
have been actually turned over, as near Pottsville, we find the coal to contain 
only from six per cent of volatile matter, thus becoming a genuine anthracite.

CLAY-IRONSTONE.

Bands and nodules of clay-ironstone are common in coal-measures, and are formed, 
says Sir H. De la Beche, of carbonate of iron mingled mechanically with earthy 
matter, like that constituting the shales. Mr. Hunt, of the Museum of Practical 
Geology, instituted a series of experiments to illustrate the production of this 
substance, and found that decomposing vegetable matter, such as would be 
distributed through all coal strata, prevented the further oxidation of the 
proto-salts of iron, and converted the peroxide into protoxide by taking a 
portion of its oxygen to form carbonic acid. Such carbonic acid, meeting with 
the protoxide of iron in solution, would unite with it and form a carbonate of 
iron; and this mingling with fine mud, when the excess of carbonic acid was 
removed, might form beds or nodules of argillaceous ironstone. (Memoirs of the 
Geological Survey pages 51, 255, etc.)

INTERCALATED MARINE BEDS IN COAL.

(FIGURE 431. Microconchus (Spirorbis) carbonarius, Murchison. Natural size and 
magnified.
b. Variety of same.)

(FIGURE 432. Cythere (Leperditia) inflata. Natural size and magnified. 
Murchison.)

(FIGURE 433. Goniatites Listeri, Martin. Coal-measures, Yorkshire and 
Lancashire.)

(FIGURE 434. Aviculopecten papyraceus, Goldf. (Pecten papyraceus, Sowerby.))

Both in the coal-fields of Europe and America the association of fresh, 
brackish-water, and marine strata with coal-seams of terrestrial origin is 
frequently recognised. Thus, for example, a deposit near Shrewsbury, probably 
formed in brackish water, has been described by Sir R. Murchison as the youngest 
member of the coal-measures of that district, at the point where they are in 
contact with the overlying Permian group. It consists of shales and sandstones 
about 150 feet thick, with coal and traces of plants; including a bed of 
limestone varying from two to nine feet in thickness, which is cellular, and 
resembles some lacustrine limestones of France and Germany. It has been traced 
for 30 miles in a straight line, and can be recognised at still more distant 
points. The characteristic fossils are a small bivalve, having the form of a 
Cyclas or Cyrena, also a small entomostracan, Cythere inflata (Figure 432), and 
the microscopic shell of an annelid of an extinct genus called Microconchus 
(Figure 431), allied to Spirorbis. In the coal-field of Yorkshire there are 
fresh-water strata, some of which contain shells referred to the family 
Unionidae; but in the midst of the series there is one thin but very widely-
spread stratum, abounding in fishes and marine shells, such as Goniatites 
Listeri (Figure 433), Orthoceras, and Aviculopecten papyraceus, Goldf. (Figure 
434).

INSECTS IN EUROPEAN COAL.

Articulate animals of the genus Scorpion were found by Count Sternberg in 1835 
in the coal-measures of Bohemia, and about the same time in those of Coalbrook 
Dale by Mr. Prestwich, were also true insects, such as beetles of the family 
Curculionidae, a neuropterous insect of the genus Corydalis, and another related 
to the Phasmidae, have been found.

(FIGURE 435. Wing of a Grasshopper. Gryllacris lithanthraca, Goldenberg. Coal, 
Saarbruck, near Treves.)

From the coal of Wetting, in Westphalia, several specimens of the cockroach or 
Blatta family, and the wing of a cricket (Acridites) have been described by 
Germar. Professor Goldenberg published, in 1854, descriptions of no less than 
twelve species of insects from the nodular clay-ironstone of Saarbruck, near 
Treves. (Dunker and V. Meyer Palaeontology volume 4 page 17.) Among them are 
several Blattinae, three species of Neuroptera, one beetle of the Scarabaeus 
family, a grasshopper or locust, Gryllacris (see Figure 435), and several white 
ants or Termites. Professor Goldenberg showed me, in 1864, the wing of a white 
ant, found low down in the productive coal-measures of Saarbruck, in the 
interior of a flattened Lepidodendron. It is much larger than that of any known 
living species of the same genus.

BATRACHIAN REPTILES IN COAL. 

(FIGURE 436. Archegosaurus minor, Goldfuss. Fossil reptile from the coal-
measures, Saarbruck.)

(FIGURE 437. Imbricated covering of skin of Archegosaurus medius, Goldf. 
Magnified.)

No vertebrated animals more highly organised than fish were known in rocks of 
higher antiquity than the Permian until the year 1844, when the Apateon 
pedestris, Meyer, was discovered in the coal-measures of Munster-Appel in 
Rhenish Bavaria, and three years later, in 1847, Professor von Dechen found 
three other distinct species of the same family of Amphibia in the Saarbruck 
coal-field above alluded to. These were described by the late Professor Goldfuss 
under the generic name of Archegosaurus. The skulls, teeth, and the greater 
portions of the skeleton, nay, even a large part of the skin, of two of these 
reptiles have been faithfully preserved in the centre of spheroidal concretions 
of clay-ironstone. The largest of these, Archegosaurus Decheni, must have been 
three feet six inches long. Figure 436 represents the skull and neck bones of 
the smallest of the three, of the natural size. They were considered by Goldfuss 
as saurians, but by Herman von Meyer as most nearly allied to the Labyrinthodon 
before mentioned (Chapter 21), and the remains of the extremities leave no doubt 
they were quadrupeds, "provided," says Von Meyer, "with hands and feet 
terminating in distinct toes; but these limbs were weak, serving only for 
swimming or creeping." The same anatomist has pointed out certain points of 
analogy between their bones and those of the Proteus anguinus; and Professor 
Owen has observed that they make an approach to the Proteus in the shortness of 
their ribs. Two specimens of these ancient reptiles retain a large part of the 
outer skin, which consisted of long, narrow, wedge-shaped, tile-like, and horny 
scales, arranged in rows (see Figure 437).

In 1865, several species belonging to three different genera of the same family 
of perennibranchiate Batrachians were found in the coal-field of Kilkenny in 
bituminous shale at the junction of the coal with the underlying Stigmaria-
bearing clay. They were, probably, inhabitants of a marsh, and the large 
processes projecting from the vertebrae of their tail imply, according to 
Professor Huxley, great powers of swimming. They were of the Labyrinthodont 
family, and their association with the fish of the coal, of which so large a 
proportion are ganoids, reminds us that the living perennibranchiate amphibia of 
America frequent the same rivers as the ganoid Lepidostei or bony pikes.

LABYRINTHODONT FOOTPRINTS IN COAL-MEASURES.

(FIGURE 438. Slab of sandstone from the coal-measures of Pennsylvania, with 
footprints of air-breathing reptile and casts of cracks. Scale one-sixth the 
original.)

In 1844, the very year when the Apateon, before mentioned, of the coal was first 
met with in the country between the Moselle and the Rhine, Dr. King published an 
account of the footprints of a large reptile discovered by him in North America. 
These occur in the coal-strata of Greensburg, in Westmoreland County, 
Pennsylvania; and I had an opportunity of examining them when in that country in 
1846. The footmarks were first observed standing out in relief from the lower 
surface of slabs of sandstone, resting on thin layers of fine unctuous clay. I 
brought away one of these masses, which is represented in Figure 438. It 
displays, together with footprints, the casts of cracks (a, a') of various 
sizes. The origin of such cracks in clay, and casts of the same, has before been 
explained, and referred to the drying and shrinking of mud, and the subsequent 
pouring of sand into open crevices. It will be seen that some of the cracks, as 
at b, c, traverse the footprints, and produce distortion in them, as might have 
been expected, for the mud must have been soft when the animal walked over it 
and left the impressions; whereas, when it afterwards dried up and shrank, it 
would be too hard to receive such indentations.

We may assume that the reptile which left these prints on the ancient sands of 
the coal-measures was an air-breather, because its weight would not have been 
sufficient under water to have made impressions so deep and distinct. The same 
conclusion is also borne out by the casts of the cracks above described, for 
they show that the clay had been exposed to the air and sun, so as to have dried 
and shrunk.

NOVA SCOTIA COAL-MEASURES.

The sedimentary strata in which thin seams of coal occur attain a thickness, as 
we have seen, of 18,000 feet in the north of England exclusive of the Mountain 
Limestone, and are estimated by Von Dechen at over 20,000 feet in Rhenish 
Prussia. But the finest example in the world of a natural exposure in a 
continuous section ten miles long, occurs in the sea-cliffs bordering a branch 
of the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia. These cliffs, called the "South Joggins," 
which I first examined in 1842, and afterwards with Dr. Dawson in 1845, have 
lately been admirably described by the last-mentioned geologist  in detail, and 
his evidence is most valuable as showing how large a portion of this dense mass 
was formed on land, or in swamps where terrestrial vegetation flourished, or in 
fresh-water lagoons. (Acadian Geology second edition 1868.) His computation of 
the thickness of the whole series of carboniferous strata as exceeding three 
miles, agrees with the measurement made independently by Sir William Logan in 
his survey of this coast.

There is no reason to believe that in this vast succession of strata, comprising 
some marine as well as many fresh-water and terrestrial formations, there is any 
repetition of the same beds. There are no faults to mislead the geologist, and 
cause him to count the same beds over more than once, while some of the same 
plants have been traced from the top to the bottom of the whole series, and are 
distinct from the flora of the antecedent Devonian formation of Canada. Eighty-
one seams of coal, varying in thickness from an inch to about five feet, have 
been discovered, and no less than seventy-one of these have been actually 
exposed in the sea-cliffs.

(FIGURE 439. Section of the cliffs of the South Joggins, near Minudie, Nova 
Scotia (from north to south through coal with upright trees and sandstone and 
shale).
c. Grindstone.
d, g. Alternations of sandstone, shale, and coal containing upright trees.
e, f. Portion of cliff, given on a larger scale in Figure 440.
f. Four-foot coal, main seam.
h, i. Shale with fresh-water mussels, see below.)

In the section in Figure 439, which I examined in 1842, the beds from c to i are 
seen all dipping the same way, their average inclination being at an angle of 24 
degrees S.S.W. The vertical height of the cliffs is from 150 to 200 feet; and 
between d and g-- in which space I observed seventeen trees in an upright 
position, or, to speak more correctly, at right angles to the planes of 
stratification-- I counted nineteen seams of coal, varying in thickness from two 
inches to four feet. At low tide a fine horizontal section of the same beds is 
exposed to view on the beach, which at low tide extends sometimes 200 yards from 
the base of the cliff. The thickness of the beds alluded to, between d and g, is 
about 2500 feet, the erect trees consisting chiefly of large Sigillariae, 
occurring at ten distinct levels, one above the other. The usual height of the 
buried trees seen by me was from six to eight feet; but one trunk was about 25 
feet high and four feet in diameter, with a considerable bulge at the base. In 
no instance could I detect any trunk intersecting a layer of coal, however thin; 
and most of the trees terminated downward in seams of coal. Some few only were 
based on clay and shale; none of them, except Calamites, on sandstone. The erect 
trees, therefore, appeared in general to have grown on beds of vegetable matter. 
In the underclays Stigmaria abounds.

These root-bearing beds have been found under all the coal-seams, and such old 
soils are at present the most destructible masses in the whole cliff, the 
sandstones and laminated shales being harder and more capable of resisting the 
action of the waves and the weather. Originally the reverse was doubtless true, 
for in the existing delta of the Mississippi those clays in which the 
innumerable roots of the deciduous cypress and other swamp trees ramify in all 
directions are seen to withstand far more effectually the undermining power of 
the river, or of the sea at the base of the delta, than do beds of loose sand or 
layers of mud not supporting trees. It is obvious that if this sand or mud be 
afterwards consolidated and turned to sandstone and hard shale, it would be the 
least destructible.

(FIGURE 440. Erect fossil trees. Coal-measures, Nova Scotia.)

In regard to the plants, they belonged to the same genera, and most of them to 
the same species, as those met with in the distant coal-fields of Europe. Dr. 
Dawson has enumerated more than 150 species, two-thirds of which are European, a 
greater agreement than can be said to exist between the same Nova Scotia flora 
and that of the coal-fields of the United States. By referring to the section in 
Figure 439, the position of the four-foot coal will be perceived, and in Figure 
440 (a section made by me in 1842 of a small portion) that from e to f of the 
same cliff is exhibited, in order to show the manner of occurrence of erect 
fossil trees at right angles to the planes of the inclined strata.

In the sandstone which filled their interiors, I frequently observed fern-
leaves, and sometimes fragments of Stigmaria, which had evidently entered 
together with sediment after the trunk had decayed and become hollow, and while 
it was still standing under water. Thus the tree, a, Figure 440, represented in 
the bed e in the section, Figure 439, is a hollow trunk five feet eight inches 
in length, traversing various strata, and cut off at the top by a layer of clay 
two feet thick, on which rests a seam of coal (b, Figure 440) one foot thick. On 
this coal again stood two large trees (c and d), while at a greater height the 
trees f and g rest upon a thin seam of coal (e), and above them is an underclay, 
supporting the four-foot coal.

Occasionally the layers of matter in the inside of the tree are more numerous 
than those without; but it is more common in the coal-measures of all countries 
to find a cylinder of pure sandstone-- the cast of the interior of a tree-- 
intersecting a great many alternating beds of shale and sandstone, which 
originally enveloped the trunk as it stood erect in the water. Such a want of 
correspondence in the materials outside and inside, is just what we might expect 
if we reflect on the difference of time at which the deposition of sediment will 
take place in the two cases; the imbedding of the tree having gone on for many 
years before its decay had made much progress. In many places distinct proof is 
seen that the enveloping strata took years to accumulate, for some of the 
sandstones surrounding erect sigillarian trunks support at different levels 
roots and stems of Calamites; the Calamites having begun to grow after the older 
Sigillariae had been partially buried.

The general absence of structure in the interior of the large fossil trees of 
the Coal implies the very durable nature of their bark, as compared with their 
woody portion. The same difference of durability of bark and wood exists in 
modern trees, and was first pointed out to me by Dr. Dawson, in the forests of 
Nova Scotia, where the Canoe Birch (Betula papyracea) has such tough bark that 
it may sometimes be seen in the swamps looking externally sound and fresh, 
although consisting simply of a hollow cylinder with all the wood decayed and 
gone. When portions of such trunks have become submerged in the swamps they are 
sometimes found filled with mud. One of the erect fossil trees of the South 
Joggins fifteen feet in height, occurring at a higher level than the main coal, 
has been shown by Dr. Dawson to have a coniferous structure, so that some 
Coniferae of the Coal period grew in the same swamps as Sigillariae, just as now 
the deciduous Cypress (Taxodium distichum) abounds in the marshes of Louisiana 
even to the edge of the sea.

When the carboniferous forests sank below high-water mark, a species of 
Spirorbis or Serpula (Figure 431), attached itself to the outside of the stumps 
and stems of the erect trees, adhering occasionally even to the interior of the 
bark-- another proof that the process of envelopment was very gradual. These 
hollow upright trees, covered with innumerable marine annelids, reminded me of a 
"cane-brake," as it is commonly called, consisting of tall reeds, Arundinaria 
macrosperma, which I saw in 1846, at the Balize, or extremity of the delta of 
the Mississippi. Although these reeds are fresh-water plants, they were covered 
with barnacles, having been killed by an incursion of salt-water over an extent 
of many acres, where the sea had for a season usurped a space previously gained 
from it by the river. Yet the dead reeds, in spite of this change, remained 
standing in the soft mud, enabling us to conceive how easily the larger 
Sigillariae, hollow as they were but supported by strong roots, may have 
resisted an incursion of the sea.

The high tides of the Bay of Fundy, rising more than 60 feet, are so destructive 
as to undermine and sweep away continually the whole face of the cliffs, and 
thus a new crop of erect fossil trees is brought into view every three or four 
years. They are known to extend over a space between two and three miles from 
north to south, and more than twice that distance from east to west, being seen 
in the banks of streams intersecting the coal-field.

STRUCTURE OF COAL.

The bituminous coal of Nova Scotia is similar in composition and structure to 
that of Great Britain, being chiefly derived from sigillarioid trees mixed with 
leaves of ferns and of a Lycopodiaceous tree called Cordaites (Noeggerathia, 
etc., for genus, see Figure 428), supposed by Dawson to have been deciduous, and 
which had broad parallel veined leaves without a mid-rib. On the surface of the 
seams of coal are large quantities of mineral charcoal, which doubtless consist, 
as Dr. Dawson suggests, of fragments of wood which decayed in the open air, as 
would naturally be expected in swamps where so many erect trees were preserved. 
Beds of cannel-coal display, says Dr. Dawson, such a microscopical structure and 
chemical composition as shows them to have been of the nature of fine vegetable 
mud such as accumulates in the shallow ponds of modern swamps. The underclays 
are loamy soils, which must have been sufficiently above water to admit of 
drainage, and the absence of sulphurets, and the occurrence of carbonate of iron 
in them, prove that when they existed as soils, rain-water, and not sea-water, 
percolated them. With the exception, perhaps, of Asterophyllites (see Figure 
461), there is a remarkable absence from the coal-measures of any form of 
vegetation properly aquatic, the true coal being a sub-aerial accumulation in 
soil that was wet and swampy but not permanently submerged.

AIR-BREATHERS OF THE COAL.

If we have rightly interpreted the evidence of the former existence at more than 
eighty different levels of forests of trees, some of them of vast extent, and 
which lasted for ages, giving rise to a great accumulation of vegetable matter, 
it is natural to ask whether there were not many air-breathing inhabitants of 
these same regions. As yet no remains of mammalia or birds have been found, a 
negative character common at present to all the Palaeozoic formations; but in 
1852 the osseous remains of a reptile, the first ever met with in the 
carboniferous strata of the American continent, were found by Dr. Dawson and 
myself. We detected them in the interior of one of the erect Sigillariae before 
alluded to as of such frequent occurrence in Nova Scotia. The tree was about two 
feet in diameter, and consisted of an external cylinder of bark, converted into 
coal, and an internal stony axis of black sandstone, or rather mud and sand 
stained black by carbonaceous matter, and cemented together with fragments of 
wood into a rock. These fragments were in the state of charcoal, and seem to 
have fallen to the bottom of the hollow tree while it was rotting away. The 
skull, jaws, and vertebrae of a reptile, probably about 2 1/2 feet in length 
(Dendrerpeton Acadianum, Owen), were scattered through this stony matrix. The 
shell, also, of a Pupa (see Figure 442), the first land-shell ever met with in 
the coal or in beds older than the tertiary, was observed in the same stony 
mass. Dr. Wyman of Boston pronounced the reptile to be allied in structure to 
Menobranchus and Menopoma, species of batrachians, now inhabiting the North 
American rivers. The same view was afterwards confirmed by Professor Owen, who 
also pointed out the resemblance of the cranial plates to those seen in the 
skull of Archegosaurus and Labyrinthodon. (Quarterly Geological Journal volume 9 
page 58.) Whether the creature had crept into the hollow tree while its top was 
still open to the air, or whether it was washed in with mud during a flood, or 
in whatever other manner it entered, must be matter of conjecture.

Footprints of two reptiles of different sizes had previously been observed by 
Dr. Harding and Dr. Gesner on ripple-marked flags of the lower coal-measures in 
Nova Scotia (No. 2, Figure 447), evidently made by quadrupeds walking on the 
ancient beach, or out of the water, just as the recent Menopoma is sometimes 
observed to do.

The remains of a second and smaller species of Dendrerpeton, D. Oweni, were also 
found accompanying the larger one, and still retaining some of its dermal 
appendages; and in the same tree were the bones of a third small lizard-like 
reptile, Hylonomus Lyelli, seven inches long, with stout hind limbs, and fore 
limbs comparatively slender, supposed by Dr. Dawson to be capable of walking and 
running on land. (Dawson Air-Breathers of the Coal in Nova Scotia Montreal 
1863.)

(FIGURE 441. Xylobius Sigillariae, Dawson. Coal, Nova Scotia.
a. Natural size.
b. Anterior part, magnified.
c. Caudal extremity, magnified.)

(FIGURE 442. Pupa vetusta, Dawson.
a. Natural size.
b. Magnified.)

In a second specimen of an erect stump of a hollow tree 15 inches in diameter, 
the ribbed bark of which showed that it was a Sigillaria, and which belonged to 
the same forest as the specimen examined by us in 1852, Dr. Dawson obtained not 
only fifty specimens of Pupa vetusta (Figure 442), and nine skeletons of 
reptiles belonging to four species, but also several examples of an articulated 
animal resembling the recent centipede or gally-worm, a creature which feeds on 
decayed vegetable matter (see Figure 441). Under the microscope, the head, with 
the eyes, mandible, and labrum, are well seen. It is interesting, as being the 
earliest known representative of the myriapods, none of which had previously 
been met with in rocks older than the oolite or lithographic slate of Germany.

Some years after the discovery of the first Pupa, Dr. Dawson, carefully 
examining the same great section containing so many buried forests in the cliffs 
of Nova Scotia, discovered another bed, separated from the tree containing 
Dendrerpeton by a mass of strata more than 1200 feet thick. As there were 21 
seams of coal in this intervening mass, the length of time comprised in the 
interval is not to be measured by the mere thickness of the sandstones and 
shales. This lower bed is an underclay seven feet thick, with stigmarian 
rootlets, and the small land-shells occurring in it are in all stages of growth. 
They are chiefly confined to a layer about two inches thick, and are unmixed 
with any aquatic shells. They were all originally entire when imbedded, but are 
most of them now crushed, flattened, and distorted by pressure; they must have 
been accumulated, says Dr. Dawson, in mud deposited in a pond or creek.

(FIGURE 443. Zonites (Conulus) priscus, Carpenter.
a. Natural size.
b. Magnified.)

The surface striae of Pupa vetusta, when magnified 50 diameters, present exactly 
the same appearance as a portion corresponding in size of the common English 
Pupa juniperi, and the internal hexagonal cells, magnified 500 diameters, show 
the internal structure of the fossil and recent Pupa to be identical. In 1866 
Dr. Dawson discovered in this lower bed, so full of the Pupa, another land-shell 
of the genus Helix (sub-genus Zonites), see Figure 443. (Dawson Acadian Geology 
1868 page 385.)

None of the reptiles obtained from the coal-measures of the South Joggins are of 
a higher grade than the Labyrinthodonts, but some of these were of very great 
size, two caudal vertebrae found by Mr. Marsh in 1862 measuring two and a half 
inches in diameter, and implying a gigantic aquatic reptile with a powerful 
swimming tail.

Except some obscure traces of an insect found by Dr. Dawson in a coprolite of a 
terrestrial reptile occurring in a fossil tree, no specimen of this class has 
been brought to light in the Joggins. But Mr. James Barnes found in a bed of 
shale at Little Grace Bay, Cape Breton, the wing of an Ephemera, which must have 
measured seven inches from tip to tip of the expanded wings-- larger than any 
known living insect of the Neuropterous family.

That we should have made so little progress in obtaining a knowledge of the 
terrestrial fauna of the Coal is certainly a mystery, but we have no reason to 
wonder at the extreme rarity of insects, seeing how few are known in the 
carboniferous rocks of Europe, worked for centuries before America was 
discovered, and now quarried on so enormous a scale. These European rocks have 
not yet produced a single land-shell, in spite of the millions of tons of coal 
annually extracted, and the many hundreds of soils replete with the fossil roots 
of trees, and the erect trunks and stumps preserved in the position in which 
they grew. In many large coal-fields we continue as much in the dark respecting 
the invertebrate air-breathers then living, as if the coal had been thrown down 
in mid-ocean. The early date of the carboniferous strata can not explain the 
enigma, because we know that while the land supported a luxuriant vegetation, 
the contemporaneous seas swarmed with life-- with Articulata, Mollusca, Radiata, 
and Fishes. The perplexity in which we are involved when we attempt to solve 
this problem may be owing partly to our want of diligence as collectors, but 
still more perhaps to ignorance of the laws which govern the fossilisation of 
land-animals, whether of high or low degree.

CARBONIFEROUS RAIN-PRINTS.

(FIGURES 444 and 445. On green shale, from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

(FIGURE 444. Carboniferous rain-prints with worm-tracks (a, b) on green shale, 
from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Natural size.)

(FIGURE 445. Casts of rain-prints on a portion of the same slab (Figure 444), 
seen to project on the under side of an incumbent layer of arenaceous shale. 
Natural size. The arrow represents the supposed direction of the shower.))

At various levels in the coal measures of Nova Scotia, ripple-marked sandstones, 
and shales with rain-prints, were seen by Dr. Dawson and myself, but still more 
perfect impressions of rain were discovered by Mr. Brown, near Sydney, in the 
adjoining island of cape Breton. They consist of very delicate markings on 
greenish slates, accompanied by worm-tracks (a, b, Figure 444), such as are 
often seen between high and low water mark on the recent mud of the Bay of 
Fundy.

The great humidity of the climate of the Coal period had been previously 
inferred from the number of its ferns and the continuity of its forests for 
hundreds of miles; but it is satisfactory to have at length obtained such 
positive proofs of showers of rain, the drops of which resembled in their 
average size those which now fall from the clouds. From such data we may presume 
that the atmosphere of the Carboniferous period corresponded in density with 
that now investing the globe, and that different currents of air varied then as 
now in temperature, so as to give rise, by their mixture, to the condensation of 
aqueous vapour.

FOLDING AND DENUDATION OF THE BEDS INDICATED BY THE NOVA SCOTIA COAL-STRATA.

(FIGURE 446. Cone and branch of Lepidodendron corrugatum. Lower Carboniferous, 
New Brunswick.)

The series of events which are indicated by the great section of the coal-strata 
in Nova Scotia consist of a gradual and long-continued subsidence of a tract 
which throughout most of the period was in the state of a delta, though 
occasionally submerged beneath a sea of moderate depth. Deposits of mud and sand 
were first carried down into a shallow sea on the low shores of which the 
footprints of reptiles were sometimes impressed (see above). Though no regular 
seams of coal were formed, the characteristic imbedded coal-plants are of the 
genera Cyclopteris and Alethopteris, agreeing with species occurring at much 
higher levels, and distinct from those of the antecedent Devonian group. The 
Lepidodendron corrugatum (see Figure 446), a plant predominating in the Lower 
Carboniferous group of Europe, is also conspicuous in these shallow-water beds, 
together with many fishes and entomostracans. A more rapid rate of subsidence 
sometimes converted part of the sea into deep clear water, in which there was a 
growth of coral which was afterwards turned into crystalline limestone, and 
parts of it, apparently by the action of sulphuric acid, into gypsum. In spite 
of continued sinking, amounting to several thousand feet, the sea might in time 
have been rendered shallow by the growth of coral, had not its conversion into 
land or swampy ground been accelerated by the pouring in of sand and the advance 
of the delta accompanied with such fluviatile and brackish-water formations as 
are common in lagoons.

(FIGURE 447. Diagram section from north, through Minudie, S. Joggins, Shoulie R. 
and Cobequid Mountains, south, showing the curvature and supposed denudation of 
the Carboniferous strata in Nova Scotia.
A. Anticlinal axis of Minudie.
B. Synclinal of Shoulie River.
1. Coal-measures.
2. Lower Carboniferous.)

The amount to which the bed of the sea sank down in order to allow of the 
formation of so vast a thickness of rock of sedimentary and organic origin is 
expressed by the total thickness of the Carboniferous strata, including the 
coal-measures, No. 1, and the rocks which underlie them, No. 2, Figure 447.

After the strata No. 2 had been elaborated, the conditions proper to a great 
delta exclusively prevailed, the subsidence still continuing so that one forest 
after another grew and was submerged until their under-clays with roots, and 
usually seams of coal, were left at more than eighty distinct levels. Here and 
there, also, deposits bearing testimony to the existence of fresh or brackish-
water lagoons, filled with calcareo-bituminous mud, were formed. In these beds 
(h and i, Figure 439) are found fresh-water bivalves or mussels allied to 
Anodon, though not identical with that or any living genus, and called Naiadites 
carbonarius by Dawson. They are associated with small entomostracous crustaceans 
of the genus Cythere, and scales of small fishes. Occasionally some of the 
calamite brakes and forests of Sigillariae and Coniferae were exposed in the 
flood season, or sometimes, perhaps, by slight elevatory movements to the 
denuding action of the river or the sea.

In order to interpret the great coast section exposed to view on the shores of 
the Bay of Fundy, the student must, in the first place, understand that the 
newest or last-mentioned coal formations would have been the only ones known to 
us (for they would have covered all the others), had there not been two great 
movements in opposite directions, the first consisting of a general sinking of 
three miles, which took place during the Carboniferous Period, and the second an 
upheaval of more limited horizontal extent, by which the anticlinal axis A was 
formed. That the first great change of level was one of subsidence is proved by 
the fact that there are shallow-water deposits at the base of the Carboniferous 
series, or in the lowest beds of No. 2.

Subsequent movements produced in the Nova Scotia and the adjoining New Brunswick 
coal-fields the usual anticlinal and synclinal flexures. In order to follow 
these, we must survey the country for about thirty miles round the South 
Joggins, or the region where the erect trees described in the foregoing pages 
are seen. As we pass along the cliffs for miles in a southerly direction, the 
beds containing these fossil trees, which were mentioned as dipping about 18 
degrees south, are less and less inclined, until they become nearly horizontal 
in the valley of a small river called the Shoulie, as ascertained by Dr. Dawson. 
After passing this synclinal line the beds begin to dip in an opposite or north-
easterly direction, acquiring a steep dip where they rest unconformably on the 
edges of the Upper Silurian strata of the Cobequid Hills, as shown in Figure 
447. But if we travel northward towards Minudie from the region of the coal-
seams and buried forests, we find the dip of the coal-strata increasing from an 
angle of 18 degrees to one of more than 40 degrees, lower beds being continually 
exposed to view until we reach the anticlinal axis A and see the lower 
Carboniferous formation, No. 2, at the surface. The missing rocks removed by 
denudation are expressed by the faint lines at A, and thus the student will see 
that, according to the principles laid down in the seventh chapter, we are 
enabled, by the joint operations of upheaval and denudation, to look, as it 
were, about three miles into the interior of the earth without passing beyond 
the limits of a single formation.


CHAPTER XXIV.

FLORA AND FAUNA OF THE CARBONIFEROUS PERIOD.

Vegetation of the Coal Period.
Ferns, Lycopodiaceae, Equisetaceae, Sigillariae, Stigmariae, Coniferae.
Angiosperms.
Climate of the Coal Period.
Mountain Limestone.
Marine Fauna of the Carboniferous Period.
Corals.
Bryozoa, Crinoidea.
Mollusca.
Great Number of fossil Fish.
Foraminifera.

VEGETATION OF THE COAL PERIOD.

In the last chapter we have seen that the seams of coal, whether bituminous or 
anthracitic, are derived from the same species of plants, and Goppert has 
ascertained that the remains of every family of plants scattered through the 
shales and sandstones of the coal-measures are sometimes met with in the pure 
coal itself-- a fact which adds greatly to the geological interest of this 
flora.

The coal-period was called by Adolphe Brongniart the age of Acrogens, so great 
appears to have been the numerical preponderance of flowerless or cryptogamic 
plants of the families of ferns, club-mosses, and horse-tails. (For botanical 
nomenclature see Chapter 17.) He reckoned the known species in 1849 at 500, and 
the number has been largely increased by recent research in spite of reductions 
owing to the discovery that different parts of even the same plants had been 
taken for distinct species. Notwithstanding these changes, Brongniart's 
generalisation concerning this flora still holds true, namely, that the state of 
the vegetable world was then extremely different from that now prevailing, not 
only because the cryptogamous plants constituted nearly the whole flora, but 
also because they were, on the whole, more highly developed than any belonging 
to the same class now existing, and united some forms of structure now only 
found separately and in distinct orders. The only phaenogamous plants were 
constitute any feature in the coal are the coniferae; monocotyledonous 
angiosperms appear to have been very rare, and the dicotyledonous, with one or 
two doubtful exceptions, were wanting. For this we are in some measure prepared 
by what we have seen of the Secondary or Mesozoic floras if, consistently with 
the belief in the theory of evolution, we expect to find the prevalence of 
simpler and less specialised organisms in older rocks.

FERNS.

(FIGURE 448. Pecopteris elliptica, Bunbury. (Sir C. Bunbury Quarterly Geological 
Journal volume 2 1845.) Frostburg.)

We are struck at the first glance with the similarity of the ferns to those now 
living. In the fossil genus Pecopteris, for example (Figure 448), it is not easy 
to decide whether the fossils might not be referred to the same genera as those 
established for living ferns; whereas, in regard to some of the other 
contemporary families of plants, with the exception of the fir tribe, it is not 
easy to guess even the class to which they belong. The ferns of the 
Carboniferous period are generally without organs of fructification, but in the 
few instances in which these do occur in a fit state for microscopical 
investigations they agree with those of the living ferns.

(FIGURE 449. Caulopteris primaeva, Lindley.)

When collecting fossil specimens from the coal-measures of Frostburg, in 
Maryland, I found in the iron-shales several species with well-preserved rounded 
spots or marks of the sori (see Figure 448). In the general absence of such 
characters they have been divided into genera distinguished chiefly by the 
branching of the fronds and the way in which the veins of the leaves are 
disposed. The larger portion are supposed to have been of the size of ordinary 
European ferns, but some were decidedly arborescent, especially the group called 
Caulopteris (see Figure 449) by Lindley, and the Psaronius of the upper or 
newest coal-measures, before alluded to (Chapter 22). All the recent tree-ferns 
belong to one tribe (Polypodiaceae), and to a small number only of genera in 
that tribe, in which the surface of the trunk is marked with scars, or 
cicatrices, left after the fall of the fronds. These scars resemble those of 
Caulopteris.

(FIGURES 450, 451 and 452. Living tree-ferns of different genera. (Ad. Brong.)

(FIGURE 450. Tree-fern from Isle of Bourbon.)

(FIGURE 451. Cyathea glauca, Mauritius.)

(FIGURE 452. Tree-fern from Brazil.))

No less than 130 species of ferns are enumerated as having been obtained from 
the British coal-strata, and this number is more than doubled if we include the 
Continental and American species. Even if we make some reduction on the ground 
of varieties which have been mistaken, in the absence of their fructification, 
for species, still the result is singular, because the whole of Europe affords 
at present no more than sixty-seven indigenous species.

LYCOPODIACEAE-- LEPIDODENDRON.

(FIGURES 453, 454 and 455. Lepidodendron Sternbergii. Coal-measures, near 
Newcastle.

(FIGURE 453. Branching trunk, 49 feet long, supposed to have belonged to L. 
Sternbergii. (Foss. Flo. 203.))

(FIGURE 454. Branching stem with bark and leaves of L. Sternbergii. (Foss. Flo. 
4.)

(FIGURE 455. Portion of same nearer the root. Natural size. (Ibid.)))

(FIGURE 456. Lycopodium densum.
a. Living species. New Zealand.
b. Branch; natural size.
c. Part of same, magnified.)

About forty species of fossil plants of the Coal have been referred to this 
genus, more than half of which are found in the British coal-measures. They 
consist of cylindrical stems or trunks, covered with leaf-scars. In their mode 
of branching, they are always dichotomous (see Figure 454). They belong to the 
Lycopodiaceae, bearing sporangia and spores similar to those of the living 
representatives of this family (Figure 457); and although most of the 
Carboniferous species grew to the size of large trees, Mr. Carruthers has found 
by careful measurement that the volume of the fossil spores did not exceed that 
of the recent club-moss, a fact of some geological importance, as it may help to 
explain the facility with which these seeds may have been transported by the 
wind, causing the same wide distribution of the species of the fossil forests in 
Europe and America which we now observe in the geographical distribution of so 
many living families of cryptogamous plants. The Figures 453-455 represent a 
fossil Lepidodendron, 49 feet long, found in Jarrow Colliery, near Newcastle, 
lying in shale parallel to the planes of stratification. Fragments of others, 
found in the same shale, indicate, by the size of the rhomboidal scars which 
cover them, a still greater magnitude. The living club-mosses, of which there 
are about 200 species, are most abundant in tropical climates. They usually 
creep on the ground, but some stand erect, as the Lycopodium densum from New 
Zealand (see Figure 456), which attains a height of three feet.

(FIGURE 457. Lepidostrobus ornatus, Brong. Shropshire.
a. (Body) half natural size.
b. Portion of a section, showing the large sporangia in their natural position, 
and each supported by its bract or scale.
c. Spores in these sporangia, highly magnified. (Hooker Mem. Geological Survey 
volume 2 part 2 page 440.)

In the Carboniferous strata of Coalbrook Dale, and in many other coal-fields, 
elongated cylindrical bodies, called fossil cones, named Lepidostrobus by M. 
Adolphe Brongniart, are met with. (See Figure 457.) They often form the nucleus 
of concretionary balls of clay-ironstone, and are well preserved, exhibiting a 
conical axis, around which a great quantity of scales were compactly imbricated. 
The opinion of M. Brongniart that the Lepidostrobus is the fruit of 
Lepidodendron has been confirmed, for these strobili or fruits have been found 
terminating the tip of a branch of a well-characterised Lepidodendron in 
Coalbrook Dale and elsewhere.

EQUISETACEAE.

(FIGURE 458. Calamites Sucowii, Brong.; natural size. Common in coal throughout 
Europe.)

(FIGURE 459. Stem of Figure 458, as restored by Dr. Dawson.)

(FIGURE 460. Radical termination of a Calamite. Nova Scotia.)

To this family belong two fossil genera of the coal, Equisetites and Calamites. 
The Calamites were evidently closely related to the modern horse-tails 
(Equiseta) differing principally in their great size, the want of sheaths at the 
joints, and some details of fructification. They grew in dense brakes on sandy 
and muddy flats in the manner of modern Equisetaceae, and their remains are 
frequent in the coal. Seven species of this plant occur in the great Nova Scotia 
section before described, where the stems of some of them five inches in 
diameter, and sometimes eight feet high, may be seen terminating downward in a 
tapering root (see Figure 460).

(FIGURE 461. Asterophillites foliosus. (Foss. Flo. 25.) Coal-measures, 
Newcastle.)

(FIGURE 462. Annularia sphenophylloides, Dawson.)

(FIGURE 463. Sphenophyllum erosum, Dawson.)

Botanists are not yet agreed whether the Asterophyllites, a species of which is 
represented in Figure 461, can form a separate genus from the Calamite, from 
which, however, according to Dr. Dawson, its foliage is distinguished by a true 
mid-rib, which is wanting in the leaves known to belong to some Calamites. 
Figures 462 and 463 represent leaves of Annularia and Sphenophyllum, common in 
the coal, and believed by Mr. Carruthers to be leaves of Calamites. Dr. 
Williamson, who has carefully studied the Calamites, thinks that they had a 
fistular pith, exogenous woody stem, and thick smooth bark, which last having 
always disappeared, leaves a fluted stem, as represented in Figure 459.

SIGILLARIA.

(FIGURE 464. Sigillaria laevigata, Brong.)

A large portion of the trees of the Carboniferous period belonged to this genus, 
of which as many as 28 species are enumerated as British. The structure, both 
internal and external, was very peculiar, and, with reference to existing types, 
very anomalous. They were formerly referred, by M. Ad. Brongniart, to ferns, 
which they resemble in the scalariform texture of their vessels and, in some 
degree, in the form of the cicatrices left by the base of the leaf-stalks which 
have fallen off (see Figure 464). But some of them are ascertained to have had 
long linear leaves, quite unlike those of ferns. They grew to a great height, 
from 30 to 60, or even 70 feet, with regular cylindrical stems, and without 
branches, although some species were dichotomous towards the top. Their fluted 
trunks, from one to five feet in diameter, appear to have decayed more rapidly 
in the interior than externally, so that they became hollow when standing; and 
when thrown prostrate, they were squeezed down and flattened. Hence, we find the 
bark of the two opposite sides (now converted into bright shining coal) 
constitute two horizontal layers, one upon the other, half an inch, or an inch, 
in their united thickness. These same trunks, when they are placed obliquely or 
vertically to the planes of stratification, retain their original rounded form, 
and are uncompressed, the cylinder of bark having been filled with sand, which 
now affords a cast of the interior.

Dr. Hooker inclined to the belief that the Sigillariae may have been 
cryptogamous, though more highly developed than any flowerless plants now 
living. Dr. Dawson having found in some species what he regards as medullary 
rays, thinks with Brongniart that they have some relation to gymnogens, while 
Mr. Carruthers leans to the opinion that they belong to the Lycopodiaceae.

STIGMARIA.

(FIGURE 465. Stigmaria attached to a trunk of Sigillaria.)

This fossil, the importance of which has already been pointed out in Chapter 23, 
was originally conjectured to be an aquatic plant. It is now ascertained to be 
the root of Sigillaria. The connection of the roots with the stem, previously 
suspected, on botanical grounds, by Brongniart, was first proved, by actual 
contact, in the Lancashire coal-field, by Mr. Binney. The fact has lately been 
shown, even more distinctly, by Mr. Richard Brown, in his description of the 
Stigmariae occurring in the under-clays of the coal-seams of the Island of Cape 
Breton, in Nova Scotia. In a specimen of one of these, represented in Figure 
465, the spread of the roots was sixteen feet, and some of them sent out 
rootlets, in all directions, into the surrounding clay.

(FIGURE 466. Stigmaria ficoides, Brong. 1/4 natural size. (Foss. Flo. 32.))

(FIGURE 467. Stigmaria ficoides, Brong. Surface of another individual of same 
species, showing form of tubercles. (Foss. Flo. 34.))

In the sea-cliffs of the South Joggins in Nova Scotia, I examined several erect 
Sigillariae, in company with Dr. Dawson, and we found that from the lower 
extremities of the trunk they sent out Stigmariae as roots. All the stools of 
the fossil trees dug out by us divided into four parts, and these again 
bifurcated, forming eight roots, which were also dichotomous when traceable far 
enough. The cylindrical rootlets formerly regarded as leaves are now shown by 
more perfect specimens to have been attached to the root by fitting into deep 
cylindrical pits. In the fossil there is rarely any trace of the form of these 
cavities, in consequence of the shrinkage of the surrounding tissues. Where the 
rootlets are removed, nothing remains on the surface of the Stigmaria but rows 
of mammillated tubercles (see Figures 466, 467), which have formed the base of 
each rootlet. These protuberances may possibly indicate the place of a joint at 
the lower extremity of the rootlet. Rows of these tubercles are arranged 
spirally round each root, which have always a medullary axis and woody system 
much resembling that of Sigillaria, the structure of the vessels being, like it, 
scalariform.

CONIFERAE.

(FIGURE 468. Fragment of coniferous wood, Dadoxylon, of Endlicher, fractured 
longitudinally; from Coalbrook Dale. W.C. Williamson. (Manchester Philosophical 
Mem. volume 9 1851.)
a. Bark.
b. Woody zone or fibre (pleurenchyma).
c. Medulla or pith.
d. Cast of hollow pith or "Sternbergia.")

(FIGURE 469. Fragment of coniferous wood, Dadoxylon, of Endlicher. Magnified 
portion of Figure 468; transverse section.
b-b. Woody fibre.
c. Pith.
e, e, e. Medullary rays.)

The coniferous trees of this period are referred to five genera; the woody 
structure of some of them showing that they were allied to the Araucarian 
division of pines, more than to any of our common European firs. Some of their 
trunks exceeded forty-four feet in height. Many, if not all of them, seem to 
have differed from living Coniferae in having large piths; for Professor 
Williamson has demonstrated the fossil of the coal-measures called Sternbergia 
to be the pith of these trees, or rather the cast of cavities formed by the 
shrinking or partial absorption of the original medullary axis (see Figures 468, 
469). This peculiar type of pith is observed in living plants of very different 
families, such as the common Walnut and the White Jasmine, in which the pith 
becomes so reduced as simply to form a thin lining of the medullary cavity, 
across which transverse plates of pith extend horizontally, so as to divide the 
cylindrical hollow into discoid interspaces. When these interspaces have been 
filled up with inorganic matter, they constitute an axis to which, before their 
true nature was known, the provisional name of Sternbergia (d, d, Figure 468) 
was given. In the above specimen the structure of the wood (b, Figures 468 and 
469) is coniferous, and the fossil is referable to Endlicher's fossil genus 
Dadoxylon.

(FIGURE 470. Trigonocarpum ovatum, Lindley and Hutton. Peel Quarry, Lancashire.)

(FIGURE 471. Trigonocarpum olivaeforme, Lindley, with its fleshy envelope. 
Felling Colliery, Newcastle.)

The fossil named Trigonocarpon (Figures 470 and 471), formerly supposed to be 
the fruit of a palm, may now, according to Dr. Hooker, be referred, like the 
Sternbergia, to the Coniferae. Its geological importance is great, for so 
abundant is it in the coal-measures, that in certain localities the fruit of 
some species may be procured by the bushel; nor is there any part of the 
formation where they do not occur, except the under-clays and limestone. The 
sandstone, ironstone, shales, and coal itself, all contain them. Mr. Binney has 
at length found in the clay-ironstone of Lancashire several specimens displaying 
structure, and from these, says Dr. Hooker, we learn that the Trigonocarpon 
belonged to that large section of existing coniferous plants which bear fleshy 
solitary fruits, and not cones. It resembled very closely the fruit of the 
Chinese genus Salisburia, one of the Yew tribe, or Taxoid conifers.

ANGIOSPERMS.

(FIGURE 472. Antholithes. Felling Colliery, Newcastle.)

The curious fossils called Antholithes by Lindley have usually been considered 
to be flower spikes, having what seems a calyx and linear petals (see Figure 
472). Dr. Hooker, after seeing very perfect specimens, also thought that they 
resembled the spike of a highly-organised plant in full flower, such as one of 
the Bromeliaceae, to which Professor Lindley had at first compared them. Mr. 
Carruthers, who has lately examined a large series in different museums, 
considers it to be a dicotyledonous angiosperm allied to Orobanche (broom-rape), 
which grew, not on the soil, but parasitically on the trees of the coal forests.

(FIGURE 473. Pothocites Grantonii, Pat. Coal-measures, Edinburgh.
c. Stem and spike; 1/2 natural size.
b. Remains of the spathe magnified.
c. Portion of spike magnified.
d. One of the calyces magnified.)

In the coal-measures of Granton, near Edinburgh, a remarkable fossil (Figure 
473) was found and described in 1840, by Dr. Robert Paterson. (Transactions of 
the Botanical Society of Edinburgh volume 1 1844.) It was compressed between 
layers of bituminous shale, and consists of a stem bearing a cylindrical spike, 
a, which in the portion preserved in the slate exhibits two subdivisions and 
part of a third. The spike is covered on the exposed surface with the four-cleft 
calyces of the flowers arranged in parallel rows. The stem shows, at b, a little 
below the spike, remains of a lateral appendage, which is supposed to indicate 
the beginning of the spathe. The fossil has been referred to the Aroidiae, and 
there is every probability that it is a true member of this order. There can at 
least be no doubt as to the high grade of its organisation, and that it belongs 
to the monocotyledonous angiosperms. Mr. Carruthers has carefully examined the 
original specimen in the Botanical Museum, Edinburgh, and thinks it may have 
been an epiphyte.

CLIMATE OF THE COAL PERIOD.

As to the climate of the Coal, the Ferns and the Coniferae are perhaps the two 
classes of plants which may be most relied upon as leading us to safe 
conclusions, as the genera are nearly allied to living types. All botanists 
admit that the abundance of ferns implies a moist atmosphere. But the coniferae, 
says Hooker, are of more doubtful import, as they are found in hot and dry, and 
in cold and dry climates; in hot and moist, and in cold and moist regions. In 
New Zealand the coniferae attain their maximum in numbers, constituting 1/62 
part of all the flowering plants; whereas in a wide district around the Cape of 
Good Hope they do not form 1/1600 of the phenogamic flora. Besides the conifers, 
many species of ferns flourish in New Zealand, some of them arborescent, 
together with many lycopodiums; so that a forest in that country may make a 
nearer approach to the carboniferous vegetation than any other now existing on 
the globe.

MARINE FAUNA OF THE CARBONIFEROUS PERIOD.

It has already been stated that the Carboniferous or Mountain Limestone 
underlies the coal-measures in the South of England and Wales, whereas in the 
North, and in Scotland, marine calcareous rocks partly of the age of the 
Mountain Limestone alternate with shales and sandstones, containing seams of 
coal. In its most calcareous form the Mountain Limestone is destitute of land-
plants, and is loaded with marine remains-- the greater part, indeed, of the 
rock being made up bodily of crinoids, corals, and bryozoa with interspersed 
mollusca.

CORALS.

(FIGURE 474. Palaeozoic type of lamelliferous cup-shaped Coral. Order ZOANTHARIA 
RUGOSA, Milne Edwards and Jules Haime.
a. Vertical section of Campophyllum flexuosum, (Cyathophyllum, Goldfuss); 1/2 
natural size: from the Devonian of the Eifel. The lamellae are seen around the 
inside of the cup; the walls consist of cellular tissue; and large transverse 
plates, called tubulae, divide the interior into chambers.
b. Arrangement of the lamellae in Polycoelia profunda, Germar, sp.; natural 
size: from the Magnesian Limestone, Durham.
This diagram shows the quadripartite arrangement of the primary septa, 
characteristic of palaeozoic corals, there being four principal and eight 
intermediate lamellae, the whole number in this type being always a multiple of 
four.
c. Stauria astraeiformis, Milne Edwards. Young group, natural size. Upper 
Silurian, Gothland. The lamellae or septal system in each cup are divided by 
four prominent ridges into four groups.)

(FIGURE 475. Neozoic type of lamelliferous cup-shaped Coral. Order ZOANTHARIA 
APOROSA, M. Edwards and J. Haime.
a. Parasmilia centralis, Mantell, sp. Vertical section; natural size. Upper 
Chalk, Gravesend. In this type the lamellae are massive, and extend to the axis 
or columella composed of loose cellular tissue, without any transverse plates 
like those in Figure 474, a.
b. Cyathina Bowerbankii, Ed. and H. Transverse section, enlarged. Gault, 
Folkestone. In this coral the primary septa are a multiple of six. The twelve 
principal plates reach the columella, and between each pair there are three 
secondaries, in all forty-eight. The short intermediate plates which proceed 
from the columella are not counted. They are called pali.
c. Fungia patellaris, Lamarck. Recent; very young state. Diagram of its six 
primary and six secondary septa, magnified. The sextuple arrangement is always 
more manifest in the young than in the adult state.)

The corals deserve especial notice, as the cup-and-star corals, which have the 
most massive and stony skeletons, display peculiarities of structure by which 
they may be distinguished generally, as MM. Milne Edwards and Haime first 
pointed out, from all species found in strata newer than the Permian. There is, 
in short, an ancient or PALAEOZOIC, and a modern or NEOZOIC type, if, by the 
latter term, we designate (as proposed by Professor E. Forbes) all strata from 
the triassic to the most modern, inclusive. The accompanying diagrams (Figures 
474, 475) may illustrate these types.

It will be seen that the more ancient corals have what is called a quadripartite 
arrangement of the chief plates or LAMELLAE-- parts of the skeleton which 
support the organs of reproduction. The number of these lamellae in the 
Palaeozoic type is 4, 8, 16, etc.; while in the Neozoic type the number is 6, 
12, 24, or some other multiple of six; and this holds good, whether they be 
simple forms, as in Figures 474, a, and 475, a, or aggregate clusters of 
corallites, as in 474, c. But further investigations have shown in this, as in 
all similar grand generalisations in natural history, that there are exceptions 
to the rule. Thus in the Lower Greensand Holocystis elegans (Ed. and H.) and 
other forms have the Palaeozoic type, and Dr. Duncan has shown to what extent 
the Neozoic forms penetrate downward into the Carboniferous and Devonian rocks.

(FIGURE 476. Lithostrotion basaltiforme, Phil. sp. (Lithostrotion striatum, 
Fleming; Astraea basaltiformis, Conyb. and Phill.). England, Ireland, Russia, 
Iowa, and westward of the Mississippi, United States. (D.D. Owen.)

(FIGURE 477. Lonsdaleia floriformis, Martin, sp., M. Edwards. (Lithostrotion 
floriforme, Fleming. Strombodes.)
a. Young specimen, with buds or corallites on the disk, illustrating calicular 
gemmation.
b. Part of a full-grown compound mass. Bristol, etc.; Russia.)

From a great number of lamelliferous corals met with in the Mountain Limestone, 
two species (Figures 476, 477) have been selected, as having a very wide range, 
extending from the eastern borders of Russia to the British Isles, and being 
found almost everywhere in each country. These fossils, together with numerous 
species of Zaphrentis, Amplexus, Cyathophyllum, Clisiophyllum, Syringopora, and 
Michelinia, form a group of rugose corals widely different from any that 
followed them. (For figures of these corals, see Palaeontographical Society's 
Monographs 1852.)

BRYOZOA AND CRINOIDEA.

(FIGURE 478. Cyathocrinus planus, Miller. Body and arms. Mountain Limestone.)

(FIGURE 479. Cyathocrinus caryocrinoides, M'Coy.
a. Surface of one of the joints of the stem.
b. Pelvis or body; called also calyx or cup.
c. One of the pelvic plates.)

Of the Bryozoa, the prevailing forms are Fenestella, Hemitrypa, and Polypora, 
and these often form considerable beds. Their net-like fronds are easily 
recognised. Crinoidea are also numerous in the Mountain Limestone (see Figures 
478, 479), two genera, Pentremites and Codonaster, being peculiar to this 
formation in Europe and North America.

(FIGURE 480. Palaechinus gigas, M'Coy. Reduced one-third. Mountain Limestone. 
Ireland.)

In the greater part of them, the cup or pelvis, Figure 479, b, is greatly 
developed in size in proportion to the arms, although this is not the case in 
Figure 478. The genera Poteriocrinus, Cyathocrinus, Pentremites, Actinocrinus, 
and Platycrinus, are all of them characteristic of this formation. Other 
Echinoderms are rare, a few Sea-Urchins only being known: these have a complex 
structure, with many more plates on their surface than are seen in the modern 
genera of the same group. One genus, the Palaechinus (Figure 480), is the 
analogue of the modern Echinus, but has four, five, or six rows of plates in the 
interambulacral region or area, whereas the modern genera have only two. The 
other, Archaeocidaris, represents, in like manner, the Cidaris of the present 
seas.

MOLLUSCA.

(FIGURE 481. Productus semireticulatus, Martin, sp. (P. antiquatus, Sowerby.) 
Mountain Limestone. England, Russia, the Andes, etc.)

(FIGURE 482. Spirifera trigonalis, Martin, sp. Mountain Limestone. Derbyshire, 
etc.)

(FIGURE 483. Spirifera glabra, Martin, sp. Mountain Limestone.)

The British Carboniferous mollusca enumerated by Mr. Etheridge comprise 653 
species referable to 86 genera, occurring chiefly in the Mountain Limestone.  
(Quarterly Geological Journal volume 23 page 674 1867.) Of this large number 
only 40 species are common to the underlying Devonian rocks, 9 of them being 
Cephalopods, 7 Gasteropods, and the rest bivalves, chiefly Brachiopoda (or 
Palliobranchiates). This latter group constitutes the larger part of the 
Carboniferous Mollusca, 157 species being known in Great Britain alone, and it 
will be found to increase in importance in the fauna of the primary rocks the 
lower we descend in the series. Perhaps the most characteristic shells of the 
formation are large species of Productus, such as P. giganteus, p. 
hemisphericus, P. semireticulatus (Figure 481), and P. scabriculus. Large 
plaited spirifers, as Spirifera striata, S. rotundata, and S. trigonalis (Figure 
482), also abound; and smooth species, such as Spirifera glabra (Figure 483), 
with its numerous varieties.

(FIGURE 484. Terebratula hastata, Sowerby, with radiating bands of colour. 
Mountain Limestone. Derbyshire, Ireland, Russia, etc.)

(FIGURE 485. Aviculopecten sublobatus, Phill. Mountain Limestone. Derbyshire, 
Yorkshire.)

(FIGURE 486. Pleurotomaria carinata, Sowerby. (P. flammigera, Phillips). 
Mountain Limestone. Derbyshire, etc.)

Among the brachiopoda, Terebratula hastata (Figure 484) deserves mention, not 
only for its wide range, but because it often retains the pattern of the 
original coloured stripes which ornamented the living shell. These coloured 
bands are also preserved in several lamellibranchiate bivalves, as in 
Aviculopecten (Figure 485), in which dark stripes alternate with a light ground. 
In some also of the spiral univalves the pattern of the original painting is 
distinctly retained, as in Pleurotomaria (Figure 486), which displays wavy 
blotches, resembling the colouring in many recent trochidae.

(FIGURE 487. Euomphalus pentangulatus, Sowerby. Mountain Limestone.
a. Upper side.
b. Lower or umbilical side.
c. View showing mouth, which is less pentagonal in older individuals.
d. View of polished section, showing internal chambers.)

Some few of the carboniferous mollusca, such as Avicula, Nucula (sub-genus 
Ctenodonta), Solemya, and Lithodomus, belong no doubt to existing genera; but 
the majority, though often referred to as living types, such as Isocardia, 
Turritella, and Buccinum, belong really to forms which appear to have become 
extinct at the close of the Palaeozoic epoch. Euomphalus is a characteristic 
univalve shell of this period. In the interior it is divided into chambers 
(Figure 487, d), the septa or partitions not being perforated as in 
foraminiferous shells, or in those having siphuncles, like the Nautilus. The 
animal appears to have retreated at different periods of its growth from the 
internal cavity previously formed, and to have closed all communication with it 
by a septum. The number of chambers is irregular, and they are generally wanting 
in the innermost whorl. The animal of the recent Turritella communis partitions 
off in like manner as it advances in age a part of its spire, forming a shelly 
septum.

(FIGURE 488. Bellerophon costatus, Sowerby. Mountain Limestone.)

More than twenty species of the genus Bellerophon (see Figure 488), a shell like 
the living Argonaut without chambers, occur in the Mountain Limestone. The genus 
is not met with in strata of later date. It is most generally regarded as 
belonging to the pelagic Nucleobranchiata and the family Atlantidae, partly 
allied to the Glass-Shell, Carinaria; but by some few it is thought to be a 
simple form of Cephalopod.

(FIGURE 489. Portion of Orthoceras laterale. Phill. Mountain Limestone.)

(FIGURE 490. Goniatites crenistra, Phillips. Mountain Limestone. North America, 
Britain, Germany, etc.
a. Lateral view.
b. Front view, showing the mouth.)

The carboniferous Cephalopoda do not depart so widely from the living type (the 
Nautilus) as do the more ancient Silurian representatives of the same order; yet 
they offer some remarkable forms. Among these is Orthoceras, a siphuncled and 
chambered shell, like a Nautilus uncoiled and straightened (Figure 489). Some 
species of this genus are several feet long. The Goniatite is another genus, 
nearly allied to the Ammonite, from which it differs in having the lobes of the 
septa free from lateral denticulations, or crenatures; so that the outline of 
these is angular, continuous, and uninterrupted. The species represented in 
Figure 490 is found in most localities, and presents the zigzag character of the 
septal lobes in perfection. The dorsal position of the siphuncle, however, 
clearly distinguishes the Goniatite from the Nautilus, and proves it to have 
belonged to the family of the Ammonites, from which, indeed, some authors do not 
believe it to be generically distinct.

FOSSIL FISH.

(FIGURE 491. Psammodus porosus, Agassiz. Bone-bed, Mountain Limestone. Bristol, 
Armagh.)

(FIGURE 492. Cochliodus contortus, Agassiz. Bone-bed, Mountain Limestone. 
Bristol, Armagh.)

The distribution of these is singularly partial; so much so, that M. De Koninck 
of Liege, the eminent palaeontologist, once stated to me that, in making his 
extensive collection of the fossils of the Mountain Limestone of Belgium, he had 
found no more than four or five examples of the bones or teeth of fishes. 
Judging from Belgian data, he might have concluded that this class of vertebrata 
was of extreme rarity in the Carboniferous seas; whereas the investigation of 
other countries has led to quite a different result. Thus, near Clifton, on the 
Avon, as well as at numerous places around the Bristol basin from the Mendip 
Hills to Tortworth, there is a celebrated "bone-bed," almost entirely made up of 
ichthyolites. It occurs at the base of the Lower Limestone shales immediately 
resting upon the passage beds of the Old Red Sandstone. Similar bone-beds occur 
in the Carboniferous Limestone of Armagh, in Ireland, where they are made up 
chiefly of the teeth of fishes of the Placoid order, nearly all of them rolled 
as if drifted from a distance. Some teeth are sharp and pointed, as in ordinary 
sharks, of which the genus Cladodus afford an illustration; but the majority, as 
in Psammodus and Cochliodus, are, like the teeth of the Cestracion of Port 
Jackson (see Figure 261), massive palatal teeth fitted for grinding. (See 
Figures 491, 492.)

There are upward of seventy other species of fossil fish known in the Mountain 
Limestone of the British Islands. The defensive fin-bones of these creatures are 
not infrequent at Armagh and Bristol; those known as Oracanthus, Ctenocanthus, 
and Onchus are often of a very large size. Ganoid fish, such as Holoptychius, 
also occur; but these are far less numerous. The great Megalichthys Hibberti 
appears to range from the Upper Coal-measures to the lowest Carboniferous 
strata.

FORAMINIFERA.

(FIGURE 493. Fusulina cylindrica, d'Orbigny. Magnified 3 diameters. Mountain 
Limestone.)

In the upper part of the Mountain Limestone group in the south-west of England, 
near Bristol, limestones having a distinct oolitic structure alternate with 
shales. In these rocks the nucleus of every minute spherule is seen, under the 
microscope, to consist of a small rhizopod or foraminifer. This division of the 
lower animals, which is represented so fully at later epochs by the Nummulites 
and their numerous minute allies, appears in the Mountain Limestone to be 
restricted to a very few species, among which Textularia, Nodosaria, Endothyra, 
and Fusulina (Figure 493), have been recognised. The first two genera are common 
to this and all the after periods; the third has been found in the Upper 
Silurian, but is not known above the Carboniferous strata; the fourth (Figure 
493) is characteristic of the Mountain Limestone in the United States, Arctic 
America, Russia, and Asia Minor, but is also known in the Permian.


CHAPTER XXV.

DEVONIAN OR OLD RED SANDSTONE GROUP.

Classification of the Old Red Sandstone in Scotland and in Devonshire.
Upper Old Red Sandstone in Scotland, with Fish and Plants.
Middle Old Red Sandstone.
Classification of the Ichthyolites of the Old Red, and their Relation to Living 
Types.
Lower Old Red Sandstone, with Cephalaspis and Pterygotus.
Marine or Devonian Type of Old Red Sandstone.
Table of Devonian Series.
Upper Devonian Rocks and Fossils.
Middle.
Lower.
Eifel Limestone of Germany.
Devonian of Russia.
Devonian Strata of the United States and Canada.
Devonian Plants and Insects of Canada.

CLASSIFICATION OF THE TWO TYPES OF OLD RED SANDSTONE.

We have seen that the Carboniferous strata are surmounted by the Permian and 
Trias, both originally included in England under the name "New Red Sandstone," 
from the prevailing red colour of the strata. Under the coal came other red 
sandstones and shales which were distinguished by the title of "Old Red 
Sandstone." Afterwards the name of "Devonian" was given by Sir R. Murchison and 
Professor Sedgwick to marine fossiliferous strata which, in the south of 
England, occupy a similar position between the overlying coal and the underlying 
Silurian formations.

It may be truly said that in the British Isles the rocks of this age present 
themselves in their mineral aspect, and even to some extent in their fossil 
contents, under two very different forms; the one as distinct from the other as 
are often lacustrine or fluviatile from marine strata. It has indeed been 
suggested that by far the greater part of the deposits belonging to what may be 
termed the Old Red Sandstone type are of fresh-water origin. The number of land-
plants, the character of the fishes, and the fact that the only shell yet 
discovered belongs to the genus Anodonta, must be allowed to lend no small 
countenance to this opinion. In this case the difficulty of classification when 
the strata of this type are compared in different regions, even where they are 
contiguous, may arise partly from their having been formed in distinct 
hydrographical basins, or in the neighbourhood of the land in shallow parts of 
the sea into which large bodies of fresh-water entered, and where no marine 
mollusca or corals could flourish. Under such geographical conditions the 
limited extent of some kinds of sediment, as well as the absence of those marine 
forms by which we are able to identify or contrast marine formations, may be 
explained, while the great thickness of the rocks, which might seem at first 
sight to require a corresponding depth of water, can often be shown to have been 
due to the gradual sinking down of the bottom of the estuary or sea where the 
sediment was accumulated.

Another active cause of local variation in Scotland was the frequency of 
contemporaneous volcanic eruptions; some of the rocks derived from this source, 
as between the Grampians and the Tay, having formed islands in the sea, and 
having been converted into shingle and conglomerate, before the upper portions 
of the red shales and sandstones were superimposed.

The dearth of calcareous matter over wide areas is characteristic of the Old Red 
Sandstone. This is, no doubt, in great part due to the absence of shells and 
corals; but why should these be so generally wanting in all sedimentary rocks 
the colour of which is determined by the red oxide of iron? Some geologists are 
of opinion that the waters impregnated with this oxide were prejudicial to 
living beings, others that strata permeated with this oxide would not preserve 
such fossil remains.

In regard to the two types, the Old Red Sandstone and the Devonian, I shall 
first treat of them separately, and then allude to the proofs of their having 
been to a great extent contemporaneous. That they constitute a series of rocks 
intermediate in date between the lowest Carboniferous and the uppermost Silurian 
is not disputed by the ablest geologists; and it can no longer be contended that 
the Upper, Middle, and Lower Old Red Sandstone preceded in date the three 
divisions to which, by aid of the marine shells, the Devonian rocks have been 
referred, while, on the other hand, we have not yet data for enabling us to 
affirm to what extent the subdivisions of the one series may be the equivalents 
in time of those of the other.

UPPER OLD RED SANDSTONE.

(FIGURE 494. Anodonta Jukesii, Forbes. Upper Devonian, Kiltorkan, Ireland.)

(FIGURE 495. Bifurcating branch of Lepidodendron Griffithsii, Brongn. Upper 
Devonian, Kilkenny.)

(FIGURE 496. Palaeopteris Hibernica, Schimp. (Cyclopteris Hibernica), Edward 
Forbes (Adiantites, Gop.). Upper Devonian, Kilkenny.)

The highest beds of the series in Scotland, lying immediately below the coal in 
Fife, are composed of yellow sandstone well seen at Dura Den, near Coupar, in 
Fife, where, although the strata contain no mollusca, fish have been found 
abundantly, and have been referred to the genera Holoptychius, Pamphractus, 
Glyptopomus, and many others. In the county of Cork, in Ireland, a similar 
yellow sandstone occurs containing fish of genera characteristic of the Scotch 
Old Red Sandstone, as for example Coccosteus (a form represented by many species 
in the Old Red Sandstone and by one only in the Carboniferous group), and 
Glytolepis and Asterolepis, both exclusively confined to the "Old Red." In the 
same Irish sandstone at Kiltorkan has been found an Anodonta or fresh-water 
mussel, the only shell hitherto discovered in the Old Red Sandstone of the 
British Isles (see Figure 494). In the same formation are found the fern (Figure 
496) and the Lepidodendron (Figure 495), and other species of plants, some of 
which, Professor Heer remarks, agree specifically with species from the lower 
carboniferous beds. This induces him to lean to the opinion long ago advocated 
by Sir Richard Griffiths, that the yellow sandstone, in spite of its fish 
remains, should be classed as Lower Carboniferous, an opinion which I am not yet 
prepared to adopt. Between the Mountain Limestone and the yellow sandstone in 
the south-west of Ireland there intervenes a formation no less than 5000 feet 
thick, called the "Carboniferous slate," and at the base of this, in some 
places, are local deposits, such as the Glengariff Grits, which appear to be 
beds of passage between the Carboniferous and Old Red Sandstone groups.

It is a remarkable result of the recent examination of the fossil flora of Bear 
Island, latitude 74 degrees 30' N., that Professor Heer has described as 
occurring in that part of the Arctic region (nearly twenty-six degrees to the 
north of the Irish locality) a flora agreeing in several of its species with 
that of the yellow sandstones of Ireland. This Bear Island flora is believed by 
Professor Heer to comprise species of plants some of which ascend even to the 
higher stages of the European Carboniferous formation, or as high as the 
Mountain Limestone and Millstone Grit. Palaeontologists have long maintained 
that the same species which have a wide range in space are also the most 
persistent in time, which may prepare us to find that some plants having a vast 
geographical range may also have endured from the period of the Upper Devonian 
to that of the Millstone Grit.

(FIGURE 497. Scale of Holoptychius nobilissimus, Agassiz. Clashbinnie. 1/2 
natural size.)

(FIGURE 498. Holoptychius, as restored by Professor Huxley.
a. The fringed pectoral fins.
b. The fringed ventral fins.
c. Anal fin.
d, e. Dorsal fins.)

Outliers of the Upper "Old Red" occur unconformably on older members of the 
group, and the formation represented at Whiteness, near Arbroath, a, Figure 55, 
may probably be one of these outliers, though the want of organic remains 
renders this uncertain. It is not improbable that the beds given in this section 
as Nos. 1, 2, and 3, may all belong to the early part of the period of the Upper 
Old Red, as some scales of Holoptychius nobilissimus have been found scattered 
through these beds, No. 2, in Strathmore. Another nearly allied Holoptychius 
occurs in Dura Den, see Figure 498 of this fish and also Figure 497 of one of 
its scales, as these last are often the only parts met with; being scattered in 
Forfarshire through red-coloured shales and sandstones, as are scales of a large 
species of the same genus in a corresponding matrix in Herefordshire. (Siluria 
4th edition page 265.) The number of fish obtained from the British Upper Old 
Red Sandstone amounts to fifteen species referred to eleven genera.

Sir R. Murchison groups with this upper division of the Old Red of Scotland 
certain light-red and yellow sandstones and grits which occur in the 
northernmost part of the mainland, and extend also into the Orkney and Shetland 
Islands. They contain Calamites and other plants which agree generically with 
Carboniferous forms.

MIDDLE OLD RED SANDSTONE.

In the northern part of Scotland there occur a great series of bituminous 
schists and flagstones, to the fossil fish of which attention was first called 
by the late Hugh Miller. They were afterwards described by Agassiz, and the 
rocks containing them were examined by Sir R. Murchison and Professor Sedgwick, 
in Caithness, Cromarty, Moray, Nairn, Gamrie in Banff, and the Orkneys and 
Shetlands, in which great numbers of fossil fish have been found. These were at 
first supposed to be the oldest known vertebrate animals, as in Cromarty the 
beds in which they occur seem to form the base of the Old Red system resting 
almost immediately on the crystalline or metamorphic rocks. But in fact these 
fish-bearing beds, when they are traced from north to south, or to the central 
parts of Scotland, thin out, so that their relative age to the Lower Old Red 
Sandstone, presently to be mentioned, was not at first detected, the two 
formations not appearing in superposition in the same district. In Caithness, 
however, many hundred feet below the fish-zone of the middle division, remains 
of Pteraspis were found by Mr. Peach in 1861. This genus has never yet been 
found in either of the two higher divisions of the Old Red Sandstone, and 
confirms Sir R. Murchison's previous suspicion that the rocks in which it occurs 
belong to the Lower "Old Red," or agree in age with the Arbroath paving-stone. 
(Siluria 4th edition page 258.)

FOSSIL FISH OF THE MIDDLE OLD RED SANDSTONE.

The Devonian fish were referred by Agassiz to two of his great orders, namely, 
the Placoids and Ganoids. Of the first of these, which in the Recent period 
comprise the shark, the dog-fish, and the ray, no entire skeletons are 
preserved, but fin-spines, called ichthyodorulites, and teeth occur. On such 
remains the genera Onchus, Odontacanthus, and Ctenodus, a supposed cestraciont, 
and some others, have been established.

(FIGURE 499. Polypterus. See Agassiz, "Recherces sur les Poissons Fossiles." 
Living in the Nile and other African rivers.
a. One of the fringed pectoral fins.
b. One of the ventral fins.
c. Anal fin.
d. Dorsal fin, or row of finlets.)

(FIGURE 500. Restoration of Osteolepis. Pander. Old Red Sandstone, or Devonian.
a. One of the fringed pectoral fins.
b. One of the ventral fins.
c. Anal fin.
d, e. Dorsal fins.)

By far the greater number of the Old Red Sandstone fishes belong to a sub-order 
of Ganoids instituted by Huxley in 1861, and for which he has proposed the name 
of Crossopterygidae (Abridged from crossotos, a fringe, and pteryx, a fin.), or 
the fringe-finned, in consideration of the peculiar manner in which the fin-rays 
of the paired fins are arranged so as to form a fringe round a central lobe, as 
in the Polypterus (see a, Figure 499), a genus of which there are several 
species now inhabiting the Nile and other African rivers. The reader will at 
once recognise in Osteolepis (Figure 500), one of the common fishes of the Old 
Red Sandstone, many points of analogy with Polypterus. They not only agree in 
the structure of the fin, at first pointed out by Huxley, but also in the 
position of the pectoral, ventral, and anal fins, and in having an elongated 
body and rhomboidal scales. On the other hand, the tail is more symmetrical in 
the recent fish, which has also an apparatus of dorsal finlets of a very 
abnormal character, both as to number and structure. As to the dorsals of 
Osteolepis, they are regular in structure and position, having nothing 
remarkable about them, except that there are two of them, which is comparatively 
unusual in living fish.

Among the "fringe-finned" Ganoids we find some with rhomboidal scales, such as 
Osteolepis, Figure 500; others with cycloidal scales, as Holoptychius, before 
mentioned (see Figure 498). In the genera Dipterus and Diplopterus, as Hugh 
Miller pointed out, and in several other of the fringe-finned genera, as in 
Gyroptychius and Glyptolepis, the two dorsals are placed far backward, or 
directly over the ventral and anal fins. The Asterolepis was a ganoid fish of 
gigantic dimensions. A. Asmusii, Eichwald, a species characteristic of the Old 
Red Sandstone of Russia, as well as that of Scotland, attained the length of 
between twenty and thirty feet. It was clothed with strong bony armour, embossed 
with star-like tubercles, but it had only a cartilaginous skeleton. The mouth 
was furnished with two rows of teeth, the outer ones small and fish-like, the 
inner larger and with a reptilian character. The Asterolepis occurs also in the 
Devonian rocks of North America.

	If we except the Placoids already alluded to, and a few other families of 
doubtful affinities, all the Old Red Sandstone fishes are Ganoids, an order so 
named by Agassiz from the shining outer surface of their scales; but Professor 
Huxley has also called our attention to the fact that, while a few of the 
primary and the great majority of the secondary Ganoids resemble the living bony 
pike, Lepidosteus, or the Amia, genera now found in North American rivers, and 
one of them, Lepidosteus, extending as far south as Guatemala, the 
Crossopterygii, or fringe-finned Ichthyolites, of the Old Red are closely 
related to the African Polypterus, which is represented by five or six species 
now inhabiting the Nile and the rivers of Senegal. These North American and 
African Ganoids are quite exceptional in the living creation; they are entirely 
confined to the northern hemisphere, unless some species of Polypterus range to 
the south of the line in Africa; and, out of about 9000 living species of fish 
known to M. Gunther, and of which more than 6000 are now preserved in the 
British Museum, they probably constitute no more than nine.

If many circumstances favour the theory of the fresh-water origin of the Old Red 
Sandstone, this view of its nature is not a little confirmed by our finding that 
it is in Llake Superior and the other inland Canadian seas of fresh water, and 
in the Mississippi and African rivers, that we at present find those fish which 
have the nearest affinity to the fossil forms of this ancient formation.

(FIGURE 501. Pterichthys, Agassiz; Upper side, showing mouth; as restored by H. 
Miller.)

Among the anomalous forms of Old Red fishes not referable to Huxley's 
Crossopterygii is the Pterichthys, of which five species have been found in the 
middle division of the Old Red of Scotland. Some writers have compared their 
shelly covering to that of Crustaceans, with which, however, they have no real 
affinity. The wing-like appendages, whence the genus is named, were first 
supposed by Hugh Miller to be paddles, like those of the turtle; and there can 
now be no doubt that they do really correspond with the pectoral fins.

The number of species of fish already obtained from the middle division of the 
Old Red Sandstone in Great Britain is about 70, and the principal genera, 
besides Osteolepis and Pterichthys, already mentioned, are Glyptolepis, 
Diplacanthus, Dendrodus, Coccosteus, Cheirancanthus, and Acanthoides.

LOWER OLD RED SANDSTONE.

(FIGURE 502. Cephalaspis Lyellii, Agassiz. Length 6 3/4 inches. From a specimen 
in my collection found at Glammiss, in Forfarshire. (See other figures, Agassiz, 
volume 2 table 1 a and 1 b.
a. One of the peculiar scales with which the head is covered when perfect. These 
scales are generally removed, as in the specimen above figured.
b, c. Scales from different parts of the body and tail.)

The third or lowest division south of the Grampians consists of grey paving-
stone and roofing-slate, with associated red and grey shales; these strata 
underlie a dense mass of conglomerate. In these grey beds several remarkable 
fish have been found of the genus named by Agassiz Cephalaspis, or "buckler-
headed," from the extraordinary shield which covers the head (see Figure 502), 
and which has often been mistaken for that of a trilobite, such as Asaphus. A 
species of Pteraspis, of the same family, has also been found by the Reverend 
Hugh Mitchell in beds of corresponding age in Perthshire; and Mr. Powrie 
enumerates no less than five genera of the family Acanthodidae, the spines, 
scales, and other remains of which have been detected in the grey flaggy 
sandstones. (Powrie Geological Quarterly Journal volume 20 page 417.)

(FIGURE 503. Pterygotus anglicus, Agassiz. Middle portion of the back of the 
head called the seraphim.)

(FIGURE 504. Pterygotus anglicus, Agassiz. Forfarshire. Ventral aspect. Restored 
by H. Wodward, F.G.S.
a. Carapace, showing the large sessile eyes at the anterior angles.
b. The metastoma or post-oral plate (serving the office of a lower lip).
c, c. Chelate appendages (antennules).
d. First pair of simple palpi (antennae).
e. Second pair of simple palpi (mandibles).
f. Third pair of simple palpi (first maxillae).
g. Pair of swimming feet with their broad basal joints, whose serrated edges 
serve the office of maxillae.
h. Thoracic plate covering the first two thoracic segments, which are indicated 
by the figures 1, 2, and a dotted line.
1-6. Thoracic segments.
7-12. Abdominal segments.
13. Telson, or tail-plate.)

In the same formation at Carmylie, in Forfarshire, commonly known as the 
Arbroath paving-stone, fragments of a huge crustacean have been met with from 
time to time. They are called by the Scotch quarrymen the "Seraphim," from the 
wing-like form and feather-like ornament of the thoracic appendage, the part 
most usually met with. Agassiz, having previously referred some of these 
fragments to the class of fishes, was the first to recognise their crustacean 
character, and, although at the time unable correctly to determine the true 
relation of the several parts, he figured the portions on which he founded his 
opinion, in the first plate of his "Poissons Fossiles du Vieux Gres Rouge."

A restoration in correct proportion to the size of the fragments of P. anglicus 
(Figure 504), from the Lower Old Red Sandstone of Perthshire and Forfarshire, 
would give us a creature measuring from five to six feet in length, and more 
than one foot across.

The largest crustaceans living at the present day are the Inachus Kaempferi, of 
De Haan, from Japan (a brachyurous or short-tailed crab), chiefly remarkable for 
the extraordinary length of its limbs; the fore-arm measuring four feet in 
length, and the others in proportion, so that it covers about 25 square feet of 
ground; and the Limulus Moluccanus, the great King Crab of China and the Eastern 
seas, which, when adult, measures 1 1/2 foot across its carapace, and is three 
feet in length.

(FIGURE 505. Parka decipiens, Fleming. In sandstone of lower beds of Old Red, 
Ley's Mill, Forfarshire.)

(FIGURE 506. Parka decipiens, Fleming. In shale of Lower Old Red, Park Hill, 
Fife.)

(FIGURE 507. Shale of Old Red Sandstone. Forfarshire. With impression of plants 
and eggs of Crustaceans.
a. Two pair of ova? resembling those of large Salamanders or Tritons-- on the 
same leaf.
b, b. Detached ova.)

Besides some species of Pterygotus, several of the allied genus Eurypterus occur 
in the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and with them the remains of grass-like plants 
so abundant in Forfarshire and Kincardineshire as to be useful to the geologist 
by enabling him to identify the inferior strata at distant points. Some 
botanists have suggested that these plants may be of the family Fluviales, and 
of fresh-water genera. They are accompanied by fossils, called "berries" by the 
quarrymen, which they compared to a compressed blackberry (see Figures 505, 
506), and which were called "Parka" by Dr. Fleming. They are now considered by 
Mr. Powrie to be the eggs of crustaceans, which is highly probable, for they 
have not only been found with Pterygotus anglicus in Forfarshire and Perthshire, 
but also in the Upper Silurian strata of England, in which species of the same 
genus, Pterygotus, occur.

The grandest exhibitions, says Sir R. Murchison, of the Old Red Sandstone in 
England and Wales appear in the escarpments of the Black Mountains and in the 
Fans of Brecon and Carmarthen, the one 2862, and the other 2590 feet above the 
sea. The mass of red and brown sandstone in these mountains is estimated at not 
less than 10,000 feet, clearly intercalated between the Carboniferous and 
Silurian strata. No shells or corals have ever been found in the whole series, 
not even where the beds are calcareous, forming irregular courses of 
concretionary lumps called "corn-stones," which may be described as mottled red 
and green earthy limestones. The fishes of this lowest English Old Red are 
Cephalaspis and Pteraspis, specifically different from species of the same 
genera which occur in the uppermost Ludlow or Silurian tilestones. Crustaceans 
also of the genus Eurypterus are met with.

MARINE OR DEVONIAN TYPE.

We may now speak of the marine type of the British strata intermediate between 
the Carboniferous and Silurian, in treating of which we shall find it much more 
easy to identify the Upper, Middle, and Lower divisions with strata of the same 
age in other countries. It was not until the year 1836 that Sir R. Murchison and 
Professor Sedgwick discovered that the culmiferous or anthracitic shales and 
sandstones of North Devon, several thousand feet thick, belonged to the coal, 
and that the beds below them, which are of still greater thickness, and which, 
like the carboniferous strata, had been confounded under the general name 
"graywacke," occupied a geological position corresponding to that of the Old Red 
Sandstone already described. In this reform they were aided by a suggestion of 
Mr. Lonsdale, who, after studying the Devonshire fossils, perceived that they 
belonged to a peculiar palaeontological type of intermediate character between 
the Carboniferous and Silurian.

It is in the north of Devon that these formations may best be studied, where 
they have been divided into an Upper, Middle, and Lower Group, and where, 
although much contorted and folded, they have for the most part escaped being 
altered by intrusive trap-rocks and by granite, which in Dartmoor and the more 
southern parts of the same county have often reduced them to a crystalline or 
metamorphic state.

TABLE 25.1 DEVONIAN SERIES IN NORTH DEVON.

UPPER DEVONIAN OR PILTON GROUP.

a. Sandy slates and schists with fossils, 36 species out of 110 common to the 
Carboniferous group (Pilton, Barnstaple, etc.), resting on soft schists in which 
fossils are very abundant (Croyde, etc.), and which pass down into

b. Yellow, brown, and red sandstone, with land plants (Cyclopteris, etc.) and 
marine shells. One zone, characterised by the abundance of cucullaea (Baggy 
Point, Marwood, Sloly, etc.) resting on hard grey and reddish sandstone and 
micaceous flags, no fossils yet found (Dulverton, Pickwell, Down, etc.)

MIDDLE DEVONIAN OR ILFRACOMBE GROUP.

a. Green glossy slates of considerable thickness, no fossils yet recorded from 
these beds (Mortenoe, Lee Bay, etc.).

b. Slates and schists, with several irregular courses of limestone containing 
shells and corals like those of the Plymouth Limestone (Combe Martin, 
Ilfracombe, etc.).

LOWER DEVONIAN OR LYNTON GROUP.

a. Hard, greenish, red, and purple sandstone-- no fossils yet found (Hangman 
Hill, etc.).

b. Soft slates with subordinate sandstones-- fossils numerous at various 
horizons-- Orthis, Corals, Encrinites, etc. (Valley of Rocks, Lynmouth, etc.).

Table 25.1 exhibits the sequence of the strata or subdivisions as seen both on 
the sea-coast of the British Channel and in the interior of Devon. It will be 
seen that in all main points it agrees with the table drawn up in 1864 for the 
sixth edition of my "Elements." Mr. Etheridge has since published an excellent 
account of the different subdivisions of the rocks and their fossils, and has 
also pointed out their relation to the corresponding marine strata of the 
Continent. (Quarterly Geological Journal volume 23 1867.) The slight 
modifications introduced in my table since 1864 are the result of a tour made in 
1870 in company with Mr. T. Mck. Hughes, when we had the advantage of Mr. 
Etheridge's memoir as our guide.

The place of the sandstones of the Foreland is not yet clearly made out, as they 
are cut off by a great fault and disturbance.

UPPER DEVONIAN ROCKS.

(FIGURE 508. Spirifera disjuncta, Sowerby. Syn. Sp. Verneuilii, Murch. Upper 
Devonian, Boulogne.)

(FIGURE 509. Phacops latifrons, Bronn. Characteristic of the Devonian in Europe, 
Asia, and N. and S. America.)

(FIGURE 510. Clymenia linearis, Munster. Petherwyn, Cornwall; Elbersreuth, 
Bavaria.)

(FIGURE 511. Cypridina serrato-striata, Sandberger, Weilburg, etc.; Cornwall, 
Nassau, Saxony, Belgium.)

The slates and sandstones of Barnstaple (a and b of the preceding section) 
contain the shell Spirifera disjuncta, Sowerby (S. Verneuilii, Murch.), (see 
Figure 508), which has a very wide range in Europe, Asia Minor, and even China; 
also Strophalosia caperata, together with the large trilobite Phacops latifrons, 
Bronn. (See Figure 509), which is all but world-wide in its distribution. The 
fossils are numerous, and comprise about 150 species of mollusca, a fifth of 
which pass up into the overlying Carboniferous rocks. To this Upper Devonian 
belong a series of limestones and slates well developed at Petherwyn, in 
Cornwall, where they have yielded 75 species of fossils. The genus of 
Cephalopoda called Clymenia (Figure 510) is represented by no less than eleven 
species, and strata occupying the same position in Germany are called Clymenien-
Kalk, or sometimes Cypridinen-Schiefer, on account of the number of minute 
bivalve shells of the crustacean called Cypridina serrato-striata (Figure 511), 
which is found in these beds, in the Rhenish provinces, the Harz, Saxony, and 
Silesia, as well as in Cornwall and Belgium.

MIDDLE DEVONIAN ROCKS.

(FIGURE 512. Heliolites porosa, Goldf. sp. (Porites pyriformis, Lonsd.)
a. Portion of the same magnified. Middle Devonian, Torquay, Plymouth; Eifel.)

(FIGURE 513. Favosites cervicornis, Blainv. S. Devon, from a polished specimen.
a. Portion of the same magnified, to show the pores.)

(FIGURE 514. Cyathophyllum caespitosum, Goldf.; Plymouth and Ilfracombe.
b. A terminal star.
c. Vertical section, exhibiting transverse plates, and part of another branch.)

We come next to the most typical portion of the Devonian system, including the 
great limestones of Plymouth and Torbay, replete with shells, trilobites, and 
corals. Of the corals 51 species are enumerated by Mr. Etheridge, none of which 
pass into the Carboniferous formation. Among the genera we find Favosites, 
Heliolites, and Cyathophyllum. The two former genera are very frequent in 
Silurian rocks: some few even of the species are said to be common to the 
Devonian and Silurian groups, as, for example, Favosites cervicornis (Figure 
513), one of the commonest of all the Devonshire fossils. The Cyathophyllum 
caespitosum (Figure 514) and Heliolites pyriformis (Figure 512) are species 
peculiar to this formation.

(FIGURE 515. Stringocephalus Burtini, Def.
a. Valves united.
b. Interior of ventral or large valve, showing thick partition and portion of a 
large process which projects from the dorsal valve across the shell.)

(FIGURE 516. Uncites Gryphus, Def. Middle Devonian. S. Devon and the Continent.)

With the above are found no less than eleven genera of stone-lilies or crinoids, 
some of them, such as Cupressocrinites, distinct from any Carboniferous forms. 
The mollusks, also, are no less characteristic; of 68 species of Brachiopoda, 
ten only are common to the Carboniferous Limestone. The Stringocephalus Burtini 
(Figure 515) and Uncites Gryphus (Figure 516) may be mentioned as exclusively 
Middle Devonian genera, and extremely characteristic of the same division in 
Belgium. The Stringocephalus is also so abundant in the Middle Devonian of the 
banks of the Rhine as to have suggested the name of Stringocephalus Limestone. 
The only two species of Brachiopoda common to the Silurian and Devonian 
formations are Atrypa reticularis (Figure 532), which seems to have been a 
cosmopolite species, and Strophomena rhomboidalis.

(FIGURE 517. Megalodon cucullatus, Sowerby. Eifel; also Bradley, S. Devon.
a. The valves united.
b. Interior of valve, showing the large cardinal tooth.)

(FIGURE 518. Conularia ornata, D'Arch. and De Vern. (Geological Transactions 
Sec. Ser. volume 6. Plate 29.) Refrath, near Cologne.)

(FIGURE 519. Bronteus flabellifer, Goldf. Mid. Devon; S. Devon; and the Eifel.)

Among the peculiar lamellibranchiate bivalves common to the Plymouth limestone 
of Devonshire and the Continent, we find the Megalodon (Figure 517). There are 
also twelve genera of Gasteropods which have yielded 36 species, four of which 
pass to the Carboniferous group, namely Macrocheilus, Acroculia, Euomphalus, and 
Murchisonia. Pteropods occur, such as Conularia (Figure 518), and Cephalopods, 
such as Cyrtoceras, Gyroceras, Orthoceras, and others, nearly all of genera 
distinct from those prevailing in the Upper Devonian Limestone, or Clymenien-
kalk of the Germans already mentioned. Although but few species of Trilobites 
occur, the characteristic Bronteus flabellifer (Figure 519) is far from rare, 
and all collectors are familiar with its fan-like tail. In this same group, 
called, as before stated, the Stringocephalus, or Eifel Limestone, in Germany, 
several fish remains have been detected, and among others the remarkable genus 
Coccosteus, covered with its tuberculated bony armour; and these ichthyolites 
serve, as Sir R. Murchison observes (Siluria page 362), to identify this middle 
marine Devonian with the Old Red Sandstone of Britain and Russia.

(FIGURE 520. Calceola sandalina, Lam. Eifel; also South Devon.
a. Ventral valve.
b. Inner side of dorsal valve.)

Beneath the Eifel Limestone (the great central and typical member of "the 
Devonian" on the Continent) lie certain schists called by German writers 
"Calceola-schiefer," because they contain in abundance a fossil body of very 
curious structure, Calceola sandalina (Figure 520), which has been usually 
considered a brachiopod, but which some naturalists have lately referred to a 
Goniophyllum, supposing it to be an abnormal form of the order Zoantharia rugosa 
(see Figure 474), differing from all other corals in being furnished with a 
strong operculum. This is by no means a rare fossil in the slaty limestone of 
South Devon, and, like the Eifel form, is confined to the middle group of this 
country.

LOWER DEVONIAN ROCKS.

(FIGURE 521. Spirifera mucronata, Hall. Devonian of Pennsylvania.)

A great series of sandstones and glossy slates, with Crinoids, Brachiopods, and 
some corals, occurring on the coast at Lynmouth and the neighbourhood, and 
called the Lynton Group (see Table 25.1), form the lowest member of the Devonian 
in North Devon. Among the 18 species of all classes enumerated by Mr. Etheridge, 
two-thirds are common to the Middle Devonian, but only one, the ubiquitous 
Atrypa reticularis, can with certainty be identified with Silurian species. 
Among the characteristic forms are Alveolites suborbicularis, also common to 
this formation in the Rhine, and Orthis arcuata, very widely spread in the North 
Devon localities. But we may expect a large addition to the number of fossils 
whenever these strata shall have been carefully searched. The Spirifer Sandstone 
of Sandberger, as exhibited in the rocks bordering the Rhine between Coblentz 
and Caub, belong to this Lower division, and the same broad-winged Spirifers 
distinguish the Devonian strata of North America.

(FIGURE 522. Homalonotus armatus, Burmeister. Lower Devonian; Daun, in the 
Eifel; and S. Devon.
Obs. The two rows of spines down the body give an appearance of more distinct 
trilobation than really occurs in this or most other species of the genus.)

Among the Trilobites of this era several large species of Homalonotus (Figure 
522) are conspicuous. The genus is still better known as a Silurian form, but 
the spinose species appear to belong exclusively to the "Lower Devonian," and 
are found in Britain, Europe, and the Cape of Good Hope.

DEVONIAN OF RUSSIA.

The Devonian strata of Russia extend, according to Sir R. Murchison, over a 
region more spacious than the British Isles; and it is remarkable that, where 
they consist of sandstone like the "Old Red" of Scotland and Central England, 
they are tenanted by fossil fishes often of the same species and still oftener 
of the same genera as the British, whereas when they consist of limestone they 
contain shells similar to those of Devonshire, thus confirming, as Sir Roderick 
has pointed out, the contemporaneous origin which had been previously assigned 
to formations exhibiting two very distinct mineral types in different parts of 
Britain. (Murchison's Siluria page 329.) The calcareous and the arenaceous rocks 
of Russia above alluded to alternate in such a manner as to leave no doubt of 
their having been deposited in different parts of the same great period.

DEVONIAN STRATA IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA.

(FIGURE 523. Psilophyton princeps, Dawson, Quarterly Geological Journal volume 
15 1863; and Canada Survey 1863. Species characteristic of the whole Devonian 
series in North America.
a. Fruit; natural size.
b. Stem; natural size.
c. Scalariform tissue of the axis highly magnified.)

Between the Carboniferous and Silurian strata there intervenes, in the United 
States and Canada, a great series of formations referable to the Devonian group, 
comprising some strata of marine origin abounding in shells and corals, and 
others of shallow-water and littoral origin in which terrestrial plants abound. 
The fossils, both of the deep and shallow water strata, are very analogous to 
those of Europe, the species being in some cases the same. In Eastern Canada Sir 
W. Logan has pointed out that in the peninsula of Gaspe, south of the estuary of 
St. Lawrence, a mass of sandstone, conglomerate, and shale referable to this 
period occurs, rich in vegetable remains, together with some fish-spines. Far 
down in the sandstones of Gaspe, Dr. Dawson found, in 1869, an entire specimen 
of the genus Cephalaspis, a form so characteristic, as we have already seen, of 
the Scotch Lower Old Red Sandstone. Some of the sandstones are ripple-marked, 
and towards the upper part of the whole series a thin seam of coal has been 
observed, measuring, together with some associated carbonaceous shale, about 
three inches in thickness. It rests on an under-clay in which are the roots of 
Psilophyton (see Figure 523). At many other levels rootlets of this same plant 
have been shown by Principal Dawson to penetrate the clays, and to play the same 
part as do the rootlets of Stigmaria in the coal formation.

We had already learnt from the works of Goppert, Unger, and Bronn that the 
European plants of the Devonian epoch resemble generically, with few exceptions, 
those already known as Carboniferous; and Dr. Dawson, in 1859, enumerated 32 
genera and 69 species which he had then obtained from the State of New York and 
Canada. A perusal of his catalogue (Quarterly Geological Journal volume 15 page 
477 1859; also volume 18 page 296 1862.), comprising Coniferae, Sigillariae, 
Calamites, Asterophyllites, Lepidodendra, and ferns of the genera Cyclopteris, 
Neuropteris, Sphenopteris, and others, together with fruits, such as 
Cardiocarpum and Trigonocarpum, might dispose geologists to believe that they 
were presented with a list of Carboniferous fossils, the difference of the 
species from those of the coal-measures, and even a slight admixture of genera 
unknown in Europe, being naturally ascribed to geographical distribution and the 
distance of the New from the Old World. But fortunately the coal formation is 
fully developed on the other side of the Atlantic, and is singularly like that 
of Europe, both lithologically and in the species of its fossil plants. There is 
also the most unequivocal evidence of relative age afforded by superposition, 
for the Devonian strata in the United States are seen to crop out from beneath 
the Carboniferous on the borders of Pennsylvania and New York, where both 
formations are of great thickness.

The number of American Devonian plants has now been raised by Dr. Dawson to 120, 
to which we may add about 80 from the European flora of the same age, so that 
already the vegetation of this period is beginning to be nearly half as rich as 
that of the coal-measures which have been studied for so much longer a time and 
over so much wider an area. The Psilophyton above alluded to is believed by Dr. 
Dawson to be a lycopodiaceous plant, branching dichotomously (see P. princeps, 
Figure 523), with stems springing from a rhizome, which last has circular 
areoles, much resembling those of Stigmaria, and like it sending forth 
cylindrical rootlets. The extreme points of some of the branchlets are rolled up 
so as to resemble the croziers or circinate vernation of ferns; the leaves or 
bracts, a, supposed to belong to the same plant, are described by Dawson as 
having inclosed the fructification. The remains of Psilophyton princeps have 
been traced through all the members of the Devonian series in America, and Dr. 
Dawson has lately recognised it in specimens of Old Red Sandstone from the north 
of Scotland.

The monotonous character of the Carboniferous flora might be explained by 
imagining that we have only the vegetation handed down to us of one set of 
stations, consisting of wide swampy flats. But Dr. Dawson supposes that the 
geographical conditions under which the Devonian plants grew were more varied, 
and had more of an upland character. If so, the limitation of this more ancient 
flora, represented by so many genera and species, to the gymnospermous and 
cryptogamous orders, and the absence or extreme rarity of plants of higher 
grade, lead us naturally to speculate on the theory of progressive development, 
however difficult it may be to avail ourselves of this explanation, so long as 
we meet with even a few exceptional cases of what may seem to be 
monocotyledonous or dicotyledonous exogens.

DEVONIAN INSECTS OF CANADA.

The earliest known insects were brought to light in 1865 in the Devonian strata 
of St. John's, New Brunswick, and are referred by Mr. Scudder to four species of 
Neuroptera. One of them is a gigantic Ephemera, and measured five inches in 
expanse of wing.

Like many other ancient animals, says Dr. Dawson, they show a remarkable union 
of characters now found in distinct orders of insects, or constitute what have 
been named "synthetic types." Of this kind is a stridulating or musical 
apparatus like that of the cricket in an insect otherwise allied to the 
Neuroptera. This structure, as Dr. Dawson observes, if rightly interpreted by 
Mr. Scudder, introduces us to the sounds of the Devonian woods, bringing before 
our imagination the trill and hum of insect life that enlivened the solitudes of 
these strange old forests.


CHAPTER XXVI.

SILURIAN GROUP.

Classification of the Silurian Rocks.
Ludlow Formation and Fossils.
Bone-bed of the Upper Ludlow.
Lower Ludlow Shales with Pentamerus.
Oldest known Remains of fossil Fish.
Table of the progressive Discovery of Vertebrata in older Rocks.
Wenlock Formation, Corals, Cystideans and Trilobites.
Llandovery Group or Beds of Passage.
Lower Silurian Rocks.
Caradoc and Bala Beds.
Brachiopoda.
Trilobites.
Cystideae.
Graptolites.
Llandeilo Flags.
Arenig or Stiper-stones Group.
Foreign Silurian Equivalents in Europe.
Silurian Strata of the United States.
Canadian Equivalents.
Amount of specific Agreement of Fossils with those of Europe.

CLASSIFICATION OF THE SILURIAN ROCKS.

We come next in descending order to that division of Primary or Palaeozoic rocks 
which immediately underlie the Devonian group or Old Red Sandstone. For these 
strata Sir Roderick Murchison first proposed the name of Silurian when he had 
studied and classified them in that part of Wales and some of the contiguous 
counties of England which once constituted the kingdom of the Silures, a tribe 
of ancient Britons. Table 26.1 will explain the two principal divisions, Upper 
and Lower, of the Silurian rocks, and the minor subdivisions usually adopted, 
comprehending all the strata originally embraced in the Silurian system by Sir 
Roderick Murchison. The formations below the Arenig or Stiper-stones group are 
treated of in the next chapter, when the "Primordial" or Cambrian group is 
described.

TABLE 26.1. SILURIAN ROCKS (THICKNESS GIVEN IN FEET).

UPPER SILURIAN ROCKS.

1. LUDLOW FORMATION:

a. Upper Ludlow beds: 780.
b. Lower Ludlow beds: 1,050.

2. WENLOCK FORMATION:

a. Wenlock limestone and shale and
b. Woolhope limestone and shale, and Denbighshire grits: above 4,000.

3. LLANDOVERY FORMATION (Beds of passage between Upper and Lower Silurian):

a. Upper Llandovery (May-Hill beds): 800.
b. Lower Llandovery: 600-1,000.

LOWER SILURIAN ROCKS.

1. BALA AND CARADOC BEDS, including volcanic rocks: 12,000.

2. LLANDEILO FLAGS, including volcanic rocks: 4,500.

3. ARENIG OR STIPER-STONES GROUP, including volcanic rocks: above 10,000.

UPPER SILURIAN ROCKS.

1. LUDLOW FORMATION.

This member of the Upper Silurian group, as will be seen by Table 26.1, is of 
great thickness, and subdivided into two parts-- the Upper Ludlow and the Lower 
Ludlow. Each of these may be distinguished near the town of Ludlow, and at other 
places in Shropshire and Herefordshire, by peculiar organic remains; but out of 
more than 500 species found in the Ludlow formation as a whole, not more than 
five species per hundred are common to the overlying Devonian. The student may 
refer to the excellent tables given in the last edition of Sir R. Murchison's 
Siluria for a list of the organic remains of all classes distributed through the 
different subdivisions of the Upper and Lower Silurian.

A. UPPER LUDLOW: DOWNTON SANDSTONE.

At the top of this subdivision there occur beds of fine-grained yellowish 
sandstone and hard reddish grits which were formerly referred by Sir R. 
Murchison to the Old Red Sandstone, under the name of "Tilestones." In mineral 
character this group forms a transition from the Silurian to the Old Red 
Sandstone, the strata of both being conformable; but it is now ascertained that 
the fossils agree in great part specifically, and in general character entirely, 
with those of the underlying Upper Ludlow rocks. Among these are Orthoceras 
bullatum, Platyschisma helicites, Bellerophon trilobatus, Chonetes lata, etc., 
with numerous defenses of fishes.

These beds, therefore, now generally called the "Downton Sandstone," are classed 
as the newest member of the Upper Silurian. They are well seen at Downton 
Castle, near Ludlow, where they are quarried for building, and at Kington, in 
Herefordshire. In the latter place, as well as at Ludlow, crustaceans of the 
genera Pterygotus (for genus see Figure 504) and Eurypterus are met with.

BONE-BED OF THE UPPER LUDLOW.

At the base of the Downton sandstones there occurs a bone-bed which deserves 
especial notice as affording the most ancient example of fossil fish occurring 
in any considerable quantity. It usually consists of one or two thin layers of 
brown bony fragments near the junction of the Old Red Sandstone and the Ludlow 
rocks, and was first observed by Sir R. Murchison near the town of Ludlow, where 
it is three or four inches thick. It has since been traced to a distance of 45 
miles from that point into Gloucestershire and other counties, and is commonly 
not more than an inch thick, but varies to nearly a foot. Near Ludlow two bone-
beds are observable, with 14 feet of intervening strata full of Upper Ludlow 
fossils. (Murchison's Siluria page 140.) At that point immediately above the 
upper fish-bed numerous small globular bodies have been found, which were 
determined by Dr. Hooker to be the sporangia of a cryptogamic land-plant, 
probably lycopodiaceous.

(FIGURE 524. Onchus tenuistriatus, Agassiz. Bone-bed. Upper Silurian. Ludlow.)

(FIGURE 525. Shagreen-scales of a placoid fish, Thelodus parvidens, Agassiz. 
Bone-bed, Upper Ludlow.)

(FIGURE 526. Plectrodus mirabilis, Agassiz. Bone-bed, Upper Ludlow.)

Most of the fish have been referred by Agassiz to his placoid order, some of 
them to the genus Onchus, to which the spine (Figure 524) and the minute scales 
(Figure 525) are supposed to belong. It has been suggested, however, that Onchus 
may be one of those Acanthodian fish referred by Agassiz to his Ganoid order, 
which are so characteristic of the base of the Old Red Sandstone in Forfarshire, 
although the species of the Old Red are all different from these of the Silurian 
beds now under consideration. The jaw and teeth of another predaceous genus 
(Figure 526) have also been detected, together with some specimens of Pteraspis 
Ludensis. As usual in bone-beds, the teeth and bones are, for the most part, 
fragmentary and rolled.

GREY SANDSTONE AND MUDSTONE, ETC.

(FIGURE 527. Orthis elegantula, Dalm. Var. Orbicularis, Sowerby. Upper Ludlow.)

(FIGURE 528. Rhynchonella navicula, Sowerby. Ludlow Beds.)

The next subdivision of the Upper Ludlow consists of grey calcareous sandstone, 
or very commonly a micaceous stone, decomposing into soft mud, and contains, 
besides the shells mentioned above, Lingula cornea, Orthis orbicularis, a round 
variety of O. elegantula, Modiolopsis platyphylla, Grammysia cingulata, all 
characteristic of the Upper Ludlow. The lowest or mud-stone beds contain 
Rhynchonella navicula (Figure 528), which is common to this bed and the Lower 
Ludlow. As usual in Palaeozoic strata older than the coal, the brachiopodous 
mollusca greatly outnumber the lamellibranchiate (see below); but the latter are 
by no means unrepresented. Among other genera, for example, we observe Avicula 
and Pterinea, Cardiola, Ctenodonta (sub-genus of Nucula), Orthonota, 
Modiolopsis, and Palaearca.

Some of the Upper Ludlow sandstones are ripple-marked, thus affording evidence 
of gradual deposition; and the same may be said of the accompanying fine 
argillaceous shales, which are of great thickness, and have been provincially 
named "mud-stones." In some of these shales stems of crinoidea are found in an 
erect position, having evidently become fossil on the spots where they grew at 
the bottom of the sea. The facility with which these rocks, when exposed to the 
weather, are resolved into mud, proves that, notwithstanding their antiquity, 
they are nearly in the state in which they were first thrown down.

b. LOWER LUDLOW BEDS.

(FIGURE 529. Pentamerus Knightii, Sowerby. Aymestry. One-half natural size.
a. View of both valves united.
b. Longitudinal section through both valves, showing the central plates or 
septa.)

The chief mass of this formation consists of a dark grey argillaceous shale with 
calcareous concretions, having a maximum thickness of 1000 feet. In some places, 
and especially at Aymestry, in Herefordshire, a subcrystalline and argillaceous 
limestone, sometimes 50 feet thick, overlies the shale. Sir R. Murchison 
therefore classes this Aymestry limestone as holding an intermediate position 
between the Upper and Lower Ludlow, but Mr. Lightbody remarks that at Mocktrie, 
near Leintwardine, the Lower Ludlow shales, with their characteristic fossils, 
occur both above and below a similar limestone. This limestone around Aymestry 
and Sedgeley is distinguished by the abundance of Pentamerus Knightii, Sowerby 
(Figure 529), also found in the Lower Ludlow and Wenlock shale. This genus of 
brachiopoda was first found in Silurian strata, and is exclusively a palaeozoic 
form. The name was derived from pente, five, and meros, a part, because both 
valves are divided by a central septum, making four chambers, and in one valve 
the septum itself contains a small chamber, making five. The size of these septa 
is enormous compared with those of any other brachiopod shell; and they must 
nearly have divided the animal into two equal halves; but they are, 
nevertheless, of the same nature as the septa or plates which are found in the 
interior of Spirifera, Terebratula, and many other shells of this order. Messrs. 
Murchison and De Verneuil discovered this species dispersed in myriads through a 
white limestone of Upper Silurian age, on the banks of the Is, on the eastern 
flank of the Urals in Russia, and a similar species is frequent in Sweden.

(FIGURE 530. Lingula Lewisii, J. Sowb. Abberley Hills.)

(FIGURE 531. Rhynchonella (Terebratula) Wilsoni, Sowerby. Aymestry.)

(FIGURE 532. Atrypa reticularis, Linn. (Terebratula affinis, Min. Con.) 
Aymestry.
a. Upper valve.
b. Lower valve.
c. Anterior margin of the valves.)

Three other abundant shells in the Aymestry limestone are, 1st, Lingula Lewisii 
(Figure 530); second, Rhynchonella Wilsoni, Sowerby. (Figure 531), which is also 
common to the Lower Ludlow and Wenlock limestone; third, Atrypa reticularis, 
Linn. (Figure 532), which has a very wide range, being found in every part of 
the Upper Silurian system, and even ranging up into the Middle Devonian series.

The Aymestry Limestone contains many shells, especially brachiopoda, corals, 
trilobites, and other fossils, amounting on the whole to 74 species, all except 
three or four being common to the beds either above or below.

(FIGURE 533. Phragmoceras ventricosum, J. Sowerby. (Orthoceras ventricosum, 
Stein.) Aymestry; one-quarter natural size.)

(FIGURE 534. Lituites (Trochoceras) giganteus, J. Sowerby. Near Ludlow; also in 
the Aymestry and Wenlock Limestones; 1/4 natural size.)

(FIGURE 535. Fragment of Orthoceras Ludense, J. Sowerby. Leintwardine, 
Shropshire.)

The Lower Ludlow Shale contains, among other fossils, many large cephalopoda not 
known in newer rocks, as the Phragmoceras of Broderip, and the Lituites of 
Breynius (see Figures 533, 534). The latter is partly straight and partly 
convoluted in a very flat spire. The Orthoceras Ludense (Figure 535), as well as 
the cephalopod last mentioned, occurs in this member of the species.

A species of Graptolite, G. priodon, Bronn (Figure 545), occurs plentifully in 
the Lower Ludlow. This fossil, referred, though somewhat doubtfully, to a form 
of hydrozoid or sertularian polyp, has not yet been met with in strata above the 
Silurian.

Star-fish, as Sir R. Murchison points out, are by no means rare in the Lower 
Ludlow rock. These fossils, of which six extinct genera are now known in the 
Ludlow series, represented by 18 species, remind us of various living forms now 
found in our British seas, both of the families Asteriadae and Ophiuridae. 

OLDEST KNOWN FOSSIL FISH.

Until 1859 there was no example of a fossil fish older than the bone-bed of the 
Upper Ludlow, but in that year a specimen of Pteraspis was found at Church Hill, 
near Leintwardine, in Shropshire, by Mr. J.E. Lee of Caerleon, F.G.S., in shale 
below the Aymestry limestone, associated with fossil shells of the Lower Ludlow 
formation-- shells which differ considerably from those characterising the Upper 
Ludlow already described. This discovery is of no small interest as bearing on 
the theory of progressive development, because, according to Professor Huxley, 
the genus Pteraspis is allied to the sturgeon, and therefore by no means of low 
grade in the piscine class.

It is a fact well worthy of notice that no remains of vertebrata have yet been 
met with in any strata older than the Lower Ludlow.

When we reflect on the hundreds of Mollusks, Echinoderms, Trilobites, Corals, 
and other fossils already obtained from more ancient Silurian formations, Upper, 
Middle, and Lower, we may well ask whether any set of fossiliferous rocks newer 
in the series were ever studied with equal diligence, and over so vast an area, 
without yielding a single ichthyolite. Yet we must hesitate before we accept, 
even on such evidence, so sweeping a conclusion, as that the globe, for ages 
after it was inhabited by all the great classes of invertebrata, remained wholly 
untenanted by vertebrate animals.

TABLE 26.2. DATES OF THE DISCOVERY OF DIFFERENT CLASSES OF FOSSIL VERTEBRATA; 
SHOWING THE GRADUAL PROGRESS MADE IN TRACING THEM TO ROCKS OF HIGHER ANTIQUITY.

COLUMN 1: YEAR.

COLUMN 2: FORMATIONS.

COLUMN 3: GEOGRAPHICAL LOCALITIES.

MAMMALIA:

1798: Upper Eocene: Paris (Gypsum of Montmartre). (George Cuvier, Bulletin Soc. 
Philom. 20.)

1818: Lower Oolite: Stonesfield. (In 1818, Cuvier, visiting the Museum of 
Oxford, decided on the mammalian character of a jaw from Stonesfield. See also 
above Chapter 19.)

1847: Upper Trias: Stuttgart. (Professor Plieninger. See above Chapter 21.)

AVES:

1782: Upper Eocene: Paris (Gypsum of Montmartre). (Cuvier, Ossemens Foss. Art. 
"Oiseaux.")

1839: Lower Eocene: Isle of Sheppey (London Clay). (Professor Owen Geological 
Transactions second series volume 6 page 203 1839.)

1854: Lower Eocene: Woolwich Beds. (Upper part of the Woolwich beds. Prestwich 
Quarterly Geological Journal volume 10 page 157.)

1855: Lower Eocene: Meudon (Plastic Clay). (Gastornis Parisiensis. Owen 
Quarterly Geological Journal volume 12 page 204 1856.)

1858: Chloritic Series, or Upper Greensand: Cambridge. (Coprolitic bed, in the 
Upper Greensand. See above Chapter 17.)

1863: Upper Oolite: Solenhofen. (The Archaeopteryx macrura, Owen. See above 
Chapter 19.)

REPTILIA:

1710: Permian (or Zechstein): Thuringia. (The fossil monitor of Thuringia 
(Protosaurus Speneri, V. Meyer) was figured by Spener of Berlin in 1810. 
(Miscel. Berlin.))

1844: Carboniferous: Saarbruck, near Treves. (See Chapter 23.)

PISCES:

1709: Permian (or Kupferschiefer): Thuringia. (Memorabilia Saxoniae Subterr. 
Leipsic 1709.)

1793: Carboniferous (Mountain Limestone): Glasgow. (History of Rutherglen by 
David Ure, 1793.)

1828: Devonian: Caithness. (Sedgwick and Murchison Geological Transactions 
second series volume 3 page 141 1828.)

1840: Upper Ludlow: Ludlow. (Sir R. Murchison. See Chapter 26.)

1859: Lower Ludlow: Leintwardine. (See Chapter 26.)

Obs.-- The evidence derived from foot-prints, though often to be relied on, is 
omitted in the above table, as being less exact than that founded on bones and 
teeth.

In Table 26.2 a few dates are set before the reader of the discovery of 
different classes of animals in ancient rocks, to enable him to perceive at a 
glance how gradual has been our progress in tracing back the signs of vertebrata 
to formations of high antiquity. Such facts may be useful in warning us not to 
assume too hastily that the point which our retrospect may have reached at the 
present moment can be regarded as fixing the date of the first introduction of 
any one class of beings upon the earth.

2. WENLOCK FORMATION.

We next come to the Wenlock formation, which has been divided into Wenlock 
limestone, Wenlock shale, and Woolhope limestone and Denbighshire grits.

a. WENLOCK LIMESTONE.

This limestone, otherwise well known to collectors by the name of the Dudley 
Limestone, forms a continuous ridge in Shropshire, ranging for about 20 miles 
from S.W. to N.E., about a mile distant from the nearly parallel escarpment of 
the Aymestry limestone. This ridgy prominence is due to the solidity of the 
rock, and to the softness of the shales above and below it. Near Wenlock it 
consists of thick masses of grey subcrystalline limestone, replete with corals, 
encrinites, and trilobites. It is essentially of a concretionary nature; and the 
concretions, termed "ball-stones" in Shropshire, are often enormous, even 80 
feet in diameter. They are of pure carbonate of lime, the surrounding rock being 
more or less argillaceous (Murchison's Siluria chapter 6.) Sometimes in the 
Malvern Hills this limestone, according to Professor Phillips, is oolitic.

(FIGURE 536. Halysites catenularius, Linn. sp. Upper and Lower Silurian.)

(FIGURE 537. Favosites Gothlandica, Lam. Dudley.
a. Portion of a large mass; less than the natural size.
b. Magnified portion, to show the pores and the partitions in the tubes.)

(FIGURE 538. Omphyma turbinatum, Linn. Sp. (Cyathophyllum, Goldfuss) Wenlock 
Limestone, Shropshire.)

Among the corals, in which this formation is so rich, 53 species being known, 
the "chain-coral," Halysites catenularius (Figure 536), may be pointed out as 
one very easily recognised, and widely spread in Europe, ranging through all 
parts of the Silurian group, from the Aymestry limestone to near the bottom of 
the Llandeilo rocks. Another coral, the Favosites Gothlandica (Figure 537), is 
also met with in profusion in large hemispherical masses, which break up into 
columnar and prismatic fragments, like that here figured (Figure 537, b). 
Another common form in the Wenlock limestone is the Omphyma turbinatum (Figure 
538), which, like many of its modern companions, reminds us of some cup-corals; 
but all the Silurian genera belong to the palaeozoic type before mentioned 
(Chapter 24), exhibiting the quadripartite arrangement of the septalamellae 
within the cup.

(FIGURE 539. Pseudocrintes bifasciatus, Pearce. Wenlock Limestone, Dudley.)

Among the numerous Crinoids, several peculiar species of Cyathocrinus (for genus 
see Figures 478, 479) contribute their calcareous stems, arms, and cups towards 
the composition of the Wenlock limestone. Of Cystideans there are a few very 
remarkable forms, most of them peculiar to the Upper Silurian formation, as, for 
example, the Pseudocrinites, which was furnished with pinnated fixed arms, as 
represented in Figure 539. (E. Forbes Mem. Geological Survey volume 2 page 496.)

(FIGURE 540. Strophomena (Leptaena) depressa, Sowerby. Wenlock and Ludlow 
Rocks.)

The Brachiopoda are, many of them, of the same species as those of the Aymestry 
limestone; as, for example, Atrypa reticularis (Figure 532), and Strophomena 
depressa (Figure 540); but the latter species ranges also from the Ludlow rocks, 
through the Wenlock shale, to the Caradoc Sandstone.

(FIGURE 541. Calymene Blumenbachii, Brong. Ludlow, Wenlock, and Bala beds.)

(FIGURE 542. Phacops (Asaphus) caudatus, Brong. Wenlock and Ludlow Rocks.)

(FIGURE 543. Sphaerexochus mirus, Beyrich; coiled up. Wenlock Limestone, Dudley; 
also found in Ohio, North America.)

(FIGURE 544. Homalonotus delphinocephalus, Konig. Wenlock Limestone, Dudley 
Castle.)

The crustaceans are represented almost exclusively by Trilobites, which are very 
conspicuous, 22 being peculiar. The Calymene Blumenbachii (Figure 541), called 
the "Dudley Trilobite," was known to collectors long before its true place in 
the animal kingdom was ascertained. It is often found coiled up like the common 
Oniscus or wood-louse, and this is so usual a circumstance among certain genera 
of trilobites as to lead us to conclude that they must have habitually resorted 
to this mode of protecting themselves when alarmed. The other common species is 
the Phacops caudatus (Asaphus caudatus), Brong. (see Figure 542), and this is 
conspicuous for its large size and flattened form. Sphaerexochus mirus (Figure 
543) is almost a globe when rolled up, the forehead or glabellum of this species 
being extremely inflated. The Homalonotus, a form of Trilobite in which the 
tripartite division of the dorsal crust is almost lost (see Figure 544), is very 
characteristic of this division of the Silurian series.

WENLOCK SHALE.

(FIGURE 545. Graptolithus priodon, Bronn. Ludlow and Wenlock shales.)

The Wenlock Shale, observes Sir R. Murchison, is infinitely the largest and most 
persistent member of the Wenlock formation, for the limestone often thins out 
and disappears. The shale, like the Lower Ludlow, often contains elliptical 
concretions of impure earthy limestone. In the Malvern district it is a mass of 
finely levigated argillaceous matter, attaining, according to Professor 
Phillips, a thickness of 640 feet, but it is sometimes more than 1000 feet thick 
in Wales, and is worked for flag-stones and slates. The prevailing fossils, 
besides corals and trilobites, and some crinoids, are several small species of 
Orthis, Cardiola, and numerous thin-shelled species of Orthoceratites.

About six species of Graptolite, a peculiar group of sertularian fossils before 
alluded to as being confined to Silurian rocks, occur in this shale. Of fossils 
of this genus, which is very characteristic of the Lower Silurian, I shall again 
speak in the sequel.

b. WOOLHOPE BEDS.

Though not always recognised as a separate subdivision of the Wenlock, the 
Woolhope beds, which underlie the Wenlock shale, are of great importance. 
Usually they occur as massive or nodular limestones, underlaid by a fine shale 
or flag-stone; and in other cases, as in the noted Denbighshire sandstones, as a 
coarse grit of very great thickness. This grit forms mountain ranges through 
North and South Wales, and is generally marked by the great sterility of the 
soil where it occurs. It contains the usual Wenlock fossils, but with the 
addition of some common in the uppermost Ludlow rock, such as Chonetes lata and 
Bellerophon trilobatus. The chief fossils of the Woolhope limestone are Illaenus 
Barriensis, Homalonotus delphinocephalus (Figure 544), Strophomena imbrex, and 
Rhynchonella Wilsoni (Figure 531). The latter attains in the Woolhope beds an 
unusual size for the species, the specimens being sometimes twice as large as 
those found in the Wenlock limestone.

In some places below the Wenlock formation there are shales of a pale or purple 
colour, which near Tarannon attain a thickness of about 1000 feet; they can be 
traced through Radnor and Montgomery to North Wales, according to Messrs. Jukes 
and Aveline. By the latter geologist they have been identified with certain 
shales above the May-Hill Sandstone, near Llandovery, but, owing to the extreme 
scarcity of fossils, their exact position remains doubtful.

3. LLANDOVERY GROUP-- BEDS OF PASSAGE.

We now come to beds respecting the classification of which there has been much 
difference of opinion, and which in fact must be considered as beds of passage 
between Upper and Lower Silurian. I formerly adopted the plan of those who class 
them as Middle Silurian, but they are scarcely entitled to this distinction, 
since after about 1400 Silurian species have been compared the number peculiar 
to the group in question only gives them an importance equal to such minor 
subdivisions as the Ludlow or Bala groups. I therefore prefer to regard them as 
the base of the Upper Silurian, to which group they are linked by more than 
twice as many species as to the Lower Silurian. By this arrangement the line of 
demarkation between the two great divisions, though confessedly arbitrary, is 
less so than by any other. They are called Llandovery Rocks, from a town in 
South Wales, in the neighbourhood of which they are well developed, and where, 
especially at a hill called Noeth Grug, in spite of several faults, their 
relations to one another can be clearly seen.

a. UPPER LLANDOVERY OR MAY-HILL SANDSTONE.

(FIGURE 546. Pentamerus oblongus, Sowerby. Upper and Lower Llandovery beds.
a, b. Views of the shell itself, from figures in Murchison's Sil. Syst.
c. Cast with portion of shell remaining, and with the hollow of the central 
septum filled with spar.
d. Internal cast of a valve, the space once occupied by the septum being 
represented by a hollow in which is seen a cast of the chamber within the 
septum.)

(FIGURE 547. Stricklandinia (Pentamerus) lirata, Sowerby.)

The May-Hill group, which has also been named "Upper Llandovery," by Sir R. 
Murchison, ranges from the west of the Longmynd to Builth, Llandovery, and 
Llandeilo, and to the sea in Marlow's Bay, where it is seen in the cliffs. It 
consists of brownish and yellow sandstones with calcareous nodules, having 
sometimes a conglomerate at the base derived from the waste of the Lower 
Silurian rocks. These May-Hill beds were formerly supposed to be part of the 
Caradoc formation, but their true position was determined by Professor Sedgwick 
to be at the base of the Upper Silurian proper. (Quarterly Geological Journal 
volume 4 page 215 1853.) The more calcareous portions of the rock have been 
called the Pentamerus limestone, because Pentamerus oblongus (Figure 546) is 
very abundant in them. It is usually accompanied by P. (Stricklandinia) lirata 
(Figure 547); both forms have a wide geographical range, being also met with in 
the same part of the Silurian series in Russia and the United States.

About 228 species of fossils are known in the May-Hill division, more than half 
of which are Wenlock species. They consist of trilobites of the genera Illaenus 
and Calymene; Brachiopods of the genera Orthis, Atrypa, Leptaena, Pentamerus, 
Strophomena, and others; Gasteropods of the genera Turbo, Murchisonia (for 
genus, see Figure 567), and Bellerophon; and Pteropods of the genus Conularia. 
The Brachiopods, of which there are 66 species, are almost all Upper Silurian.

(FIGURE 548. Tentaculites annulatus, Schlot. Interior casts in sandstone. Upper 
Llandovery, Eastnor Park, near Malvern. Natural size and magnified.)

Among the fossils of the May-Hill shelly sandstone at Malvern, Tentaculites 
annulatus (Figure 548), an annelid, probably allied to Serpula, is found.

LOWER LLANDOVERY ROCKS.

Below the May-Hill Group are the Lower Llandovery Rocks, which consist chiefly 
of hard slaty rocks, and beds of conglomerate from 600 to 1000 feet in 
thickness. The fossils, which are somewhat rare in the lower beds, consist of 
128 known species, only eleven of which are peculiar, 83 being common to the 
May-Hill group above, and 93 common to the rocks below. Stricklandinia 
(Pentamerus) levis, which is common in the Lower Llandovery, becomes rare in the 
Upper, while Pentamerus oblongus (Figure 546), which is the characteristic shell 
of the Upper Llandovery, occurs but seldom in the Lower.

LOWER SILURIAN ROCKS.

The Lower Silurian has been divided into, first, the Bala Group; secondly, the 
Llandeilo flags; and, thirdly, the Arenig or Lower Llandeilo formation.

BALA AND CARADOC BEDS.

(FIGURE 549. Orthis tricenaria, Conrad. New York; Canada. 1/2 natural size.)

(FIGURE 550. Orthis vespertilio, Sowerby. Shropshire, N. and S. Wales. One-half 
natural size.)

(FIGURE 551. Orthis (Strophomena) grandis, Sowerby. Two-thirds natural size. 
Caradoc Beds, Horderley, Shropshire, and Coniston, Lancashire.)

The Caradoc sandstone was originally so named by Sir R.I. Murchison from the 
mountain called Caer Caradoc, in Shropshire; it consists of shelly sandstones of 
great thickness, and sometimes containing much calcareous matter. The rock is 
frequently laden with the beautiful trilobite called by Murchison Trinucleus 
Caractaci (see Figure 553), which ranges from the base to the summit of the 
formation, usually accompanied by Strophomena grandis (see Figure 551), and 
Orthis vespertilio (Figure 550), with many other fossils.

BRACHIOPODA.

Nothing is more remarkable in these beds, and in the Silurian strata generally 
of all countries, than the preponderance of brachiopoda over other forms of 
mollusca. Their proportional numbers can by no means be explained by supposing 
them to have inhabited seas of great depth, for the contrast between the 
palaeozoic and the present state of things has not been essentially altered by 
the late discoveries made in our deep-sea dredgings. We find the living 
brachiopoda so rare as to form about one forty-fourth of the whole bivalve 
fauna, whereas in the Lower Silurian rocks of which we are now about to treat, 
and where the brachiopoda reach their maximum, they are represented by more than 
twice as many species as the Lamellibranchiate bivalves.

There may, indeed, be said to be a continued decrease of the proportional number 
of this lower tribe of mollusca as we proceed from older to newer rocks. In the 
British Devonian, for example, the Brachiopoda number 99, the Lamellibranchiata 
58; while in the Carboniferous their proportions are more than reversed, the 
Lamellibranchiata numbering 334 species, and the Brachiopoda only 157. In the 
Secondary or Cainozoic formations the preponderance of the higher grade of 
bivalves becomes more and more marked, till in the tertiary strata it approaches 
that observed in the living creation.

While on this subject, it may be useful to the student to know that a Brachiopod 
differs from ordinary bivalves, mussels, cockles, etc., in being always equal-
sided and never quite equi-valved; the form of each valve being symmetrical, it 
may be divided into two equal parts by a line drawn from the apex to the centre 
of the margin.

TRILOBITES.

In the Bala and Caradoc beds the trilobites reach their maximum, being 
represented by 111 species referred to 23 genera.

(FIGURE 552. Young individuals of Trinucleus concentricus (T. ornatus, Barr.).
a. Youngest state. Natural size and magnified; the body rings not at all 
developed.
b. A little older. One thorax joint.
c. Still more advanced. Three thorax joints. The fourth, fifth, and sixth 
segments are successively produced, probably each time the animal moulted its 
crust.)

(FIGURE 553. Trinucleus concentricus, Eaton. Syn. T. Caractaci, Murch. Ireland; 
Wales; Shropshire; North America; Bohemia.)

Burmeister, in his work on the organisation of trilobites, supposes that they 
swam at the surface of the water in the open sea and near coasts, feeding on 
smaller marine animals, and to have had the power of rolling themselves into a 
ball as a defence against injury. He was also of opinion that they underwent 
various transformations analogous to those of living crustaceans. M. Barrande, 
author of an admirable work on the Silurian rocks of Bohemia, confirms the 
doctrine of their metamorphosis, having traced more than twenty species through 
different stages of growth from the young state just after its escape from the 
egg to the adult form. He has followed some of them from a point in which they 
show no eyes, no joints, or body rings, and no distinct tail, up to the complete 
form with the full number of segments. This change is brought about before the 
animal has attained a tenth part of its full dimensions, and hence such minute 
and delicate specimens are rarely met with. Some of his figures of the 
metamorphoses of the common Trinucleus are copied in Figures 552 and 553. It was 
not till 1870 that Mr. Billings was enabled, by means of a specimen found in 
Canada, to prove that the trilobite was provided with eight legs.

(FIGURE 554. Palaeaster asperimus, Salt. Caradoc, Welshpool.)

(FIGURE 555. Echinosphaeronites balticus, Eichwald. (Of the family Cystideae.)
a. Mouth.
b. Point of attachment of stem. Lower Silurian S. and N. Wales.)

It has been ascertained that a great thickness of slaty and crystalline rocks of 
South Wales, as well as those of Snowdon and Bala, in North Wales, which were 
first supposed to be of older date than the Silurian sandstones and mudstones of 
Shropshire, are in fact identical in age, and contain the same organic remains. 
At Bala, in Merionethshire, a limestone rich in fossils occurs, in which two 
genera of star-fish, Protaster and Palaeaster, are found; the fossil specimen of 
the latter (Figure 554) being almost as uncompressed as if found just washed up 
on the sea-beach. Besides the star-fish there occur abundance of those peculiar 
bodies called Cystideae. They are the Sphaeronites of old authors, and were 
considered by Professor E. Forbes as intermediate between the crinoids and 
echinoderms. The Echinosphaeronite here represented (Figure 555) is 
characteristic of the Caradoc beds in Wales, and of their equivalents in Sweden 
and Russia.

With it have been found several other genera of the same family, such as 
Sphaeronites, Hemicosmites, etc. Among the mollusca are Pteropods of the genus 
Conularia of large size (for genus, see Figure 518). About eleven species of 
Graptolite are reckoned as belonging to this formation; they are chiefly found 
in peculiar localities where black mud abounded. The formation, when traced into 
South Wales and Ireland, assumes a greatly altered mineral aspect, but still 
retains its characteristic fossils. The known fauna of the Bala group comprises 
565 species, 352 of which are peculiar, and 93, as before stated, are common to 
the overlying Llandovery rocks. It is worthy of remark that, when it occurs 
under the form of trappean tuff (volcanic ashes of De la Beche), as in the crest 
of Snowdon, the peculiar species which distinguish it from the Llandeilo beds 
are still observable. The formation generally appears to be of shallow-water 
origin, and in that respect is contrasted with the group next to be described. 
Professor Ramsay estimates the thickness of the Bala Beds, including the 
contemporaneous volcanic rocks, stratified and unstratified, as being from 
10,000 to 12,000 feet.

LLANDEILO FLAGS.

(FIGURE 556. Didymograpsus (Graptolites) Murchisonii, Beck. Llandeilo flags, 
Wales.)

The Lower Silurian strata were originally divided by Sir R. Murchison into the 
upper group already described, under the name of Caradoc Sandstone, and a lower 
one, called, from a town in Carmarthenshire, the Llandeilo flags. The last 
mentioned strata consist of dark-coloured micaceous flags, frequently 
calcareous, with a great thickness of shales, generally black, below them. The 
same beds are also seen at Builth, in Radnorshire, where they are 
interstratified with volcanic matter.

(FIGURE 557. Diplograpsus pristis, Hisinger. Llandeilo beds, Waterford.)

(FIGURE 558. Rastrites peregrinus, Barrande. Scotland; Bohemia; Saxony. 
Llandeilo flags.)

(FIGURE 559. Diplograpsus folium, Hisinger. Dumfriesshire; Sweden. Llandeilo 
flags.)

A still lower part of the Llandeilo rocks consists of a black carbonaceous slate 
of great thickness, frequently containing sulphate of alumina, and sometimes, as 
in Dumfriesshire, beds of anthracite. It has been conjectured that this 
carbonaceous matter may be due in great measure to large quantities of imbedded 
animal remains, for the number of Graptolites included in these slates was 
certainly very great. In Great Britain eleven genera and about 40 species of 
Graptolites occur in the Llandeilo flags and underlying Arenig beds. The double 
Graptolites, or those with two rows of cells, such as Diplograpsus (Figure 557), 
are conspicuous.

The brachiopoda of the Llandeilo flags, which number 47 species, are in the main 
the same as those of the Caradoc Sandstone, but the other mollusca are in great 
part of different species.

(FIGURE 560. Orthoceras duplex, Wahlenberg. Russia and Sweden. (From Murchison's 
Siluria.))

(FIGURE 561. Asaphus tyrannus, Murchison. Llandeilo; Bishop's Castle; etc.)

(FIGURE 562. Ogygia Buchii, Burm. Syn. Asaphus Buchii, Brongn. Builth, 
Radnorshire; Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire.)

In Europe generally, as, for example, in Sweden and Russia, no shells are so 
characteristic of this formation as Orthoceratites, usually of great size, and 
with a wide siphuncle placed on one side instead of being central (see Figure 
560). Among other Cephalopods in the Llandeilo flags is Cyrtoceras; in the same 
beds also are found Bellerophon (see Figure 488) and some Pteropod shells 
(Conularia, Theca, etc.), also in spots where sand abounded, lamellibranchiate 
bivalves of large size. The Crustaceans were plentifully represented by the 
Trilobites, which appear to have swarmed in the Silurian seas just as crabs and 
shrimps do in our own; no less than 263 species have been found in the British 
Silurian fauna. The genera Asaphus (Figure 561), Ogygia (Figure 562), and 
Trinucleus (Figures 552 and 553) form a marked feature of the rich and varied 
Trilobitic fauna of this age.

Beneath the black slates above described of the Llandeilo formation, Graptolites 
are still found in great variety and abundance, and the characteristic genera of 
shells and trilobites of the Lower Silurian rocks are still traceable downward, 
in Shropshire, Cumberland, and North and South Wales, through a vast depth of 
shaly beds, in some districts interstratified with trappean formations of 
contemporaneous origin; these consist of tuffs and lavas, the tuffs being formed 
of such materials as are ejected from craters and deposited immediately on the 
bed of the ocean, or washed into it from the land. According to Professor 
Ramsay, their thickness is about 3300 feet in North Wales, including those of 
the Lower Llandeilo. The lavas are feldspathic, and of porphyritic structure, 
and, according to the same authority, of an aggregate thickness of 2500 feet.

ARENIG OR STIPER-STONES GROUP (LOWER LLANDEILO OF MURCHISON). 

(FIGURE 563. Arenicolites linearis, Hall. Arenig beds, Stiper-Stones.
a. Parting between the beds, or planes of bedding.)

(FIGURE 564. Didymograpsus geminus, Hisinger, sp. Sweden.)

Next in the descending order are the shales and sandstones in which the 
quartzose rocks called Stiper-Stones in Shropshire occur. Originally these 
Stiper-Stones were only known as arenaceous quartzose strata in which no organic 
remains were conspicuous, except the tubular burrows of annelids (see Figure 
563, Arenicolites linearis), which are remarkably common in the Lowest Silurian 
in Shropshire, and in the State of New York, in America. They have already been 
alluded to as occurring by thousands in the Silurian strata unconformably 
overlying the Cambrian, in the mountain of Queenaig, in Sutherlandshire (Figure 
82). I have seen similar burrows now made on the retiring of the tides in the 
sands of the Bristol Channel, near Minehead, by lob-worms which are dug out by 
fishermen and used as bait. When the term Silurian was given by Sir R. 
Murchison, in 1835, to the whole series, he considered the Stiper-Stones as the 
base of the Silurian system, but no fossil fauna had then been obtained, such as 
could alone enable the geologist to draw a line between this member of the 
series and the Llandeilo flags above, or a vast thickness of rock below, which 
was seen to form the Longmynd hills, and was called "unfossiliferous graywacke." 
Professor Sedgwick had described, in 1843, strata now ascertained to be of the 
same age as largely developed in the Arenig mountain, in Merionethshire; and the 
Skiddaw slates in the Lake-District of Cumberland, studied by the same author, 
were of corresponding date, though the number of fossils was, in both cases, too 
few for the determination of their true chronological relations. The subsequent 
researches of Messrs. Sedgwick and Harkness, in Cumberland, and of Sir R.I. 
Murchison and the Government surveyors in Shropshire, have increased the species 
to more than sixty. These were examined by Mr. Salter, and shown in the third 
edition of "Siluria" (page 52, 1859) to be quite distinct from the fossils of 
the overlying Llandeilo flags. Among these the Obolella plumbea, Aeglina 
binodosa, Ogygia Selwynii, and Didymograpsus geminus (Figure 564), and D. 
Hirundo, are characteristic.

But, although the species are distinct, the genera are the same as those which 
characterise the Silurian rocks above, and none of the characteristic primordial 
or Cambrian forms, presently to be mentioned, are intermixed. The same may be 
said of a set of beds underlying the Arenig rocks at Ramsay Island and other 
places in the neighbourhood of St. David's. These beds, which have only lately 
become known to us through the labours of Dr. Hicks (Transactions of the British 
Association 1866. Proceedings of the Liverpool Geological Society 1869.), 
present already twenty new species, the greater part of them allied generically 
to the Arenig rocks. This Arenig group may therefore be conveniently regarded as 
the base of the great Silurian system, a system which, by the thickness of its 
strata and the changes in animal life of which it contains the record, is more 
than equal in value to the Devonian, or Carboniferous, or other principal 
divisions, whether of primary or secondary date.

It would be unsafe to rely on the mere thickness of the strata, considered apart 
from the great fluctuations in organic life which took place between the era of 
the Llandeilo and that of the Ludlow formation, especially as the enormous pile 
of Silurian rocks observed in Great Britain (in Wales more particularly) is 
derived in great part from igneous action, and is not confined to the ordinary 
deposition of sediment from rivers or the waste of cliffs.

In volcanic archipelagoes, such as the Canaries, we see the most active of all 
known causes, aqueous and igneous, simultaneously at work to produce great 
results in a comparatively moderate lapse of time. The outpouring of repeated 
streams of lava-- the showering down upon land and sea of volcanic ashes-- the 
sweeping seaward of loose sand and cinders, or of rocks ground down to pebbles 
and sand, by rivers and torrents descending steeply inclined channels-- the 
undermining and eating away of long lines of sea-cliff exposed to the swell of a 
deep and open ocean-- these operations combine to produce a considerable volume 
of superimposed matter, without there being time for any extensive change of 
species. Nevertheless, there would seem to be a limit to the thickness of stony 
masses formed even under such favourable circumstances, for the analogy of 
tertiary volcanic regions lends no countenance to the notion that sedimentary 
and igneous rocks 25,000, much less 45,000 feet thick, like those of Wales, 
could originate while one and the same fauna should continue to people the 
earth. If, then, we allow that about 25,000 feet of matter may be ascribed to 
one system, such as the Silurian, as above described, we may be prepared to 
discover in the next series of subjacent rocks a distinct assemblage of species, 
or even in great part of genera, of organic remains. Such appears to be the 
fact, and I shall therefore conclude with the Arenig beds my enumeration of the 
Silurian formations in Great Britain, and proceed to say something of their 
foreign equivalents, before treating of rocks older than the Silurian.

SILURIAN STRATA OF THE CONTINENT OF EUROPE.

When we turn to the continent of Europe, we discover the same ancient series 
occupying a wide area, but in no region as yet has it been observed to attain 
great thickness. Thus, in Norway and Sweden, the total thickness of strata of 
Silurian age is considerably less than 1000 feet, although the representatives 
both of the Upper and Lower Silurian of England are not wanting there. In Russia 
the Silurian strata, so far as they are yet known, seem to be even of smaller 
vertical dimensions than in Scandinavia, and they appear to consist chiefly of 
the Llandovery group, or of a limestone containing Pentamerus oblongus, below 
which are strata with fossils corresponding to those of the Llandeilo beds of 
England. The lowest rock with organic remains yet discovered is "the Ungulite or 
Obolus grit" of St. Petersburg, probably coeval with the Llandeilo flags of 
Wales.

(Figures 565 and 566. Shells of the lowest known Fossiliferous Beds in Russia.

(FIGURE 565. Siphonotreta unguiculata, Eichwald. From the Lowest Silurian 
Sandstone, "Obolus grits," of St. Petersburg.
a. Outside of perforated valve.
b. Interior of same, showing the termination of the foramen within. (Davidson.))

(FIGURE 566. Obolus Apollinis, Eichwald. From the same locality.
a. Interior of the larger or ventral valve.
b. Exterior of the upper (dorsal) valve. (Davidson, "Palaeontographic 
Monograph.")))

The shales and grits near St. Petersburg, above alluded to, contain green grains 
in their sandy layers, and are in a singularly unaltered state, taking into 
account their high antiquity. The prevailing Brachiopods consist of the Obolus 
or Ungulite of Pander, and a Siphonotreta (Figures 565, 566). Notwithstanding 
the antiquity of this Russian formation, it should be stated that both of these 
genera of brachiopods have been also found in the Upper Silurian of England, 
i.e. In the Wenlock limestone.

Among the green grains of the sandy strata above-mentioned, Professor Ehrenberg 
announced in 1854 his discovery of remains of foraminifera. These are casts of 
the cells; and among five or six forms three are considered by him as referable 
to existing genera (e.g., Textularia, Rotalia, and Guttulina).

SILURIAN STRATA OF THE UNITED STATES.

Table 26.3. SUBDIVISIONS OF THE SILURIAN STRATA OF NEW YORK. (Strata below the 
Oriskany sandstone or base of the Devonian.)

COLUMN 1: NEW YORK NAMES.

COLUMN 2: BRITISH EQUIVALENTS.

1. Upper Pentamerus Limestone: Upper Silurian (or Ludlow and Wenlock 
formations).

2. Encrinal Limestone: Upper Silurian (or Ludlow and Wenlock formations).

3. Delthyris Shaly Limestone: Upper Silurian (or Ludlow and Wenlock formations).

4. Pentamerus and Tentaculite Limestones: Upper Silurian (or Ludlow and Wenlock 
formations).

5. Water Lime Group: Upper Silurian (or Ludlow and Wenlock formations).

6. Onondaga Salt Group: Upper Silurian (or Ludlow and Wenlock formations).

7. Niagara Group: Upper Silurian (or Ludlow and Wenlock formations).

8. Clinton Group: Beds of Passage, Llandovery Group.

9. Medina Sandstone: Beds of Passage, Llandovery Group.

10. Oneida Conglomerate: Beds of Passage, Llandovery Group.

11. Gray Sandstone: Beds of Passage, Llandovery Group.

12. Hudson River Group: Lower Silurian (or Caradoc and Bala, Llandeilo and 
Arenig Formations).

13. Trenton Limestone: Lower Silurian (or Caradoc and Bala, Llandeilo and Arenig 
Formations).

14. Black-River Limestone: Lower Silurian (or Caradoc and Bala, Llandeilo and 
Arenig Formations).

15. Bird's-eye Limestone: Lower Silurian (or Caradoc and Bala, Llandeilo and 
Arenig Formations).

16. Chazy Limestone: Lower Silurian (or Caradoc and Bala, Llandeilo and Arenig 
Formations).

17. Calciferous Sandstone: Lower Silurian (or Caradoc and Bala, Llandeilo and 
Arenig Formations).

The Silurian formations can be advantageously studied in the States of New York, 
Ohio, and other regions north and south of the great Canadian lakes. Here they 
are often found, as in Russia, nearly in horizontal position, and are more rich 
in well-preserved fossils than in almost any spot in Europe. In the State of New 
York, where the succession of the beds and their fossils have been most 
carefully worked out by the Government surveyors, the subdivisions given in the 
first column of Table 26.3 have been adopted.

In the second column of the same table I have added the supposed British 
equivalents. All Palaeontologists, European and American, such as MM. De 
Verneuil, D. Sharpe, Professor Hall, E. Billings, and others, who have entered 
upon this comparison, admit that there is a marked general correspondence in the 
succession of fossil forms, and even species, as we trace the organic remains 
downward from the highest to the lowest beds; but it is impossible to parallel 
each minor subdivision.

That the Niagara Limestone, over which the river of that name is precipitated at 
the great cataract, together with its underlying shales, corresponds to the 
Wenlock limestone and shale of England there can be no doubt. Among the species 
common to this formation in America and Europe are Calymene Blumenbachii, 
Homalonotus delphinocephalus (Figure 544), with several other trilobites; 
Rhynchonella Wilsoni, Figure 531, and Retzia cuneata; Orthis elegantula, 
Pentamerus galeatus, with many more brachiopods; Orthoceras annulatum, among the 
cephalopodous shells; and Favosites gothlandica, with other large corals.

The Clinton Group, containing Pentamerus oblongus and Stricklandinia, and 
related more nearly by its fossil species with the beds above than with those 
below, is the equivalent of the Llandovery Group or beds of passage.

(FIGURE 567. Murchisonia gracilis, Hall. A fossil characteristic of the Trenton 
Limestone. The genus is common in Lower Silurian rocks.)

The Hudson River Group, and the Trenton Limestone, agree palaeontologically with 
the Caradoc or Bala group, containing in common with them several species of 
trilobites, such as Asaphus (Isotelus) gigas, Trinucleus concentricus (Figure 
553); and various shells, such as Orthis striatula, Orthis biforata (or O. 
lynx), O. porcata (O. occidentalis of Hall), and Bellerophon bilobatus. In the 
Trenton limestone occurs Murchisonia gracilis, Figure 567, a fossil also common 
to the Llandeilo beds in England.

Mr. D. Sharpe, in his report on the mollusca collected by me from these strata 
in North America (Quarterly Geological Journal volume 4.), has concluded that 
the number of species common to the Silurian rocks on both sides of the Atlantic 
is between 30 and 40 per cent; a result which, although no doubt liable to 
future modification, when a larger comparison shall have been made, proves, 
nevertheless, that many of the species had a wide geographical range. It seems 
that comparatively few of the gasteropods and lamellibranchiate bivalves of 
North America can be identified specifically with European fossils, while no 
less than two-fifths of the brachiopoda, of which my collection chiefly 
consisted, are the same. In explanation of these facts, it is suggested that 
most of the recent brachiopoda (especially the orthidiform ones) are inhabitants 
of deep water, and that they may have had a wider geographical range than shells 
living near shore. The predominance of bivalve mollusca of this peculiar class 
has caused the Silurian period to be sometimes styled "the age of brachiopods."

In Canada, as in the State of New York, the Potsdam Sandstone underlies the 
above-mentioned calcareous rocks, but contains a different suite of fossils, as 
will be hereafter explained. In parts of the globe still more remote from Europe 
the Silurian strata have also been recognised, as in South America, Australia, 
and India. In all these regions the facies of the fauna, or the types of organic 
life, enable us to recognise the contemporaneous origin of the rocks; but the 
fossil species are distinct, showing that the old notion of a universal 
diffusion throughout the "primaeval seas" of one uniform specific fauna was 
quite unfounded, geographical provinces having evidently existed in the oldest 
as in the most modern times.


CHAPTER XXVII.

CAMBRIAN AND LAURENTIAN GROUPS.

Classification of the Cambrian Group, and its Equivalent in Bohemia.
Upper Cambrian Rocks.
Tremadoc Slates and their Fossils.
Lingula Flags.
Lower Cambrian Rocks.
Menevian Beds.
Longmynd Group.
Harlech Grits with large Trilobites.
Llanberis Slates.
Cambrian Rocks of Bohemia.
Primordial Zone of Barrande.
Metamorphosis of Trilobites.
Cambrian Rocks of Sweden and Norway.
Cambrian Rocks of the United States and Canada.
Potsdam Sandstone.
Huronian Series.
Laurentian Group, upper and lower.
Eozoon Canadense, oldest known Fossil.
Fundamental Gneiss of Scotland.

CAMBRIAN GROUP.

The characters of the Upper and Lower Silurian rocks were established so fully, 
both on stratigraphical and palaeontological data, by Sir Roderick Murchison 
after five years' labour, in 1839, when his "Silurian System" was published, 
that these formations could from that period be recognised and identified in all 
other parts of Europe and in North America, even in countries where most of the 
fossils differed specifically from those of the classical region in Britain, 
where they were first studied.

TABLE 27.1. SHOWING THE SUCCESSION OF THE STRATA IN ENGLAND AND WALES WHICH 
BELONG TO THE CAMBRIAN GROUP OR THE FOSSILIFEROUS ROCKS OLDER THAN THE ARENIG OR 
LOWER LLANDEILO ROCKS:

UPPER CAMBRIAN.

TREMADOC SLATES. (Primordial of Barrande in part.)

LINGULA FLAGS. (Primordial of Barrande.)

LOWER CAMBRIAN.

MENEVIAN BEDS. (Primordial of Barrande.)

LONGMYND GROUP.
a. Harlech Grits.
b. Llanberis slates.

While Sir R.I. Murchison was exploring in 1833, in Shropshire and the borders of 
Wales, the strata which in 1835 he first called Silurian, Professor Sedgwick was 
surveying the rocks of North Wales, which both these geologists considered at 
that period as of older date, and for which in 1836 Sedgwick proposed the name 
of Cambrian. It was afterwards found that a large portion of the slaty rocks of 
North Wales, which had been considered as more ancient than the Llandeilo beds 
and Stiper-Stones before alluded to, were, in reality, not inferior in position 
to those Lower Silurian beds of Murchison, but merely extensive undulations of 
the same, bearing fossils identical in species, though these were generally 
rarer and less perfectly preserved, owing to the changes which the rocks had 
undergone from metamorphic action. To such rocks the term "Cambrian" was no 
longer applicable, although it continued to be appropriate to strata inferior to 
the Stiper-Stones, and which were older than those of the Lower Silurian group 
as originally defined. It was not till 1846 that fossils were found in Wales in 
the Lingula flags, the place of which will be seen in Table 27.1. By this time 
Barrande had already published an account of a rich collection of fossils which 
he had discovered in Bohemia, portions of which he recognised as of 
corresponding age with Murchison's Upper and Lower Silurian, while others were 
more ancient, to which he gave the name of "Primordial," for the fossils were 
sufficiently distinct to entitle the rocks to be referred to a new period. They 
consisted chiefly of trilobites of genera distinct from those occurring in the 
overlying Silurian formations. These peculiar genera were afterwards found in 
rocks holding a corresponding position in Wales, and I shall retain for them the 
term Cambrian, as recent discoveries in our own country seem to carry the first 
fauna of Barrande, or his primordial type, even into older strata than any which 
he found to be fossiliferous in Bohemia.

The term primordial was intended to express M. Barrande's own belief that the 
fossils of the rocks so-called afforded evidence of the first appearance of 
vital phenomena on this planet, and that consequently no fossiliferous strata of 
older date would or could ever be discovered. The acceptance of such a 
nomenclature would seem to imply that we despaired of extending our discoveries 
of new and more ancient fossil groups at some future day when vast portions of 
the globe, hitherto unexplored, should have been thoroughly surveyed. Already 
the discovery of the Laurentian Eozoon in Canada, presently to be mentioned, 
discountenances such views.

UPPER CAMBRIAN.

TREMADOC SLATES.

(FIGURE 568. Theca (Cleidotheca) operculata. Lower Tremadoc beds. Tremadoc.)

The Tremadoc slates of Sedgwick are more than 1000 feet in thickness, and 
consist of dark earthy slates occurring near the little town of Tremadoc, 
situated on the north side of Cardigan Bay, in Carnarvonshire. These slates were 
first examined by Sedgwick in 1831, and were re-examined by him and described in 
1846 (Quarterly Geological Journal volume 3 page 156.), after some fossils had 
been found in the underlying Lingula flags by Mr. Davis. The inferiority in 
position of these Lingula flags to the Tremadoc beds was at the same time 
established. The overlying Tremadoc beds were traced by their pisolitic ore from 
Tremadoc to Dolgelly. No fossils proper to the Tremadoc slates were then 
observed, but subsequently, thirty-six species of all classes have been found in 
them, thanks to the researches of Messrs. Salter, Homfray, and Ash. We have 
already seen that in the Arenig or Stiper-Stones group, where the species are 
distinct, the genera agree with Silurian types; but in these Tremadoc slates, 
where the species are also peculiar, there is about an equal admixture of 
Silurian types with those which Barrande has termed "primordial." Here, 
therefore, it may truly be said that we are entering upon a new domain of life 
in our retrospective survey of the past. The trilobites of new species, but of 
Lower Silurian genera, belong to Ogygia, Asaphus, and Cheirurus; whereas those 
belonging to primordial types, or Barrande's first fauna as well as to the 
Lingula flags of Wales, comprise Dikelocephalus, Conocoryphe (for genera see 
Figures 577 and 581 (This genus has been substituted for Barrande's 
Conocephalus, as the latter term had been preoccupied by the entomologists.)), 
Olenus, and Angelina. In the Tremadoc slates are found Bellerophon, Orthoceras, 
and Cyrtoceras, all specifically distinct from Lower Silurian fossils of the 
same genera: the Pteropods Theca (Figure 568) and Conularia range throughout 
these slates; there are no Graptolites. The Lingula (Lingulella) Davisii ranges 
from the top to the bottom of the formation, and links it with the zone next to 
be described. The Tremadoc slates are very local, and seem to be confined to a 
small part of North Wales; and Professor Ramsay supposes them to lie 
unconformably on the Lingula flags, and that a long interval of time elapsed 
between these formations. Cephalopoda have not yet been found lower than this 
group, but it will be observed that they occur here associated with genera of 
Trilobites considered by Barrande as characteristically Primordial, some of 
which belong to all the divisions of the British Cambrian about to be mentioned. 
This renders the absence of cephalopoda of less importance as bearing on the 
theory of development.

LINGULA FLAGS.

(FIGURES 569 to 571. "Lingula flags" of Dolgelly, and Ffestiniog; N. Wales.

(FIGURE 569. Hymenocaris vermicauda, Salter. A phyllopod crustacean. One-half 
natural size.)

(FIGURE 570. Lingulella Davisii, M'Coy.
a. One-half natural size.
b. Distorted by cleavage.)

(FIGURE 571. Olenus micrurus, Salter. One-half natural size.))

Next below the Tremadoc slates in North Wales lie micaceous flagstones and 
slates, in which, in 1846, Mr. E. Davis discovered the Lingula (Lingulella), 
Figure 570, named after him, and from which was derived the name of Lingula 
flags. These beds, which are palaeontologically the equivalents of Barrande's 
primordial zone, are represented by more than 5000 feet of strata, and have been 
studied chiefly in the neighbourhood of Dolgelly, Ffestiniog, and Portmadoc in 
North Wales, and at St. David's in South Wales. They have yielded about forty 
species of fossils, of which six only are common to the overlying Tremadoc 
rocks, but the two formations are closely allied by having several 
characteristic "primordial" genera in common. Dikelocephalus, Olenus (Figure 
571), and Conocoryphe are prominent forms, as is also Hymenocaris (Figure 569), 
a genus of phyllopod crustacean entirely confined to the Lingula Flags. 
According to Mr. Belt, who has devoted much attention to these beds, there are 
already palaeontological data for subdividing the Lingula Flags into three 
sections. (Geological Magazine volume 4.)

In Merionethshire, according to Professor Ramsay, the Lingula Flags attain their 
greatest development; in Carnarvonshire they thin out so as to have lost two-
thirds of their thickness in eleven miles, while in Anglesea and on the Menai 
Straits both they and the Tremadoc beds are entirely absent, and the Lower 
Silurian rests directly on Lower Cambrian strata.

LOWER CAMBRIAN.

MENEVIAN BEDS.

(FIGURE 572. Paradoxides Davidis, Salter. One-tenth natural size. Menevian beds. 
St. David's and Dolgelly.)

Immediately beneath the Lingula Flags there occurs a series of dark grey and 
black flags and slates alternating at the upper part with some beds of 
sandstone, the whole reaching a thickness of from 500 to 600 feet. These beds 
were formerly classed, on purely lithological grounds, as the base of the 
Lingula Flags, but Messrs. Hicks and Salter, to whose exertions we owe almost 
all our knowledge of the fossils, have pointed out that the most characteristic 
genera found in them are quite unknown in the Lingula Flags, while they possess 
many of the strictly Lower Cambrian genera, such as Microdiscus and Paradoxides. 
(British Association Report 1865, 1866, 1868 and Quarterly Geological Journal 
volumes 21, 25.) They therefore proposed to place them, and it seems to me with 
good reason, at the top of the Lower Cambrian under the term "Menevian," Menevia 
being the classical name of St. David's. The beds are well exhibited in the 
neighbourhood of St. David's in South Wales, and near Dolgelly and Maentwrog in 
North Wales. They are the equivalents of the lowest part of Barrande's 
Primordial Zone (Etage C). More than forty species have been found in them, and 
the group is altogether very rich in fossils for so early a period. The 
trilobites are of large size; Paradoxides Davidis (see Figure 572), the largest 
trilobite known in England, 22 inches or nearly two feet long, is peculiar to 
the Menevian Beds. By referring to the Bohemian trilobite of the same genus 
(Figure 576), the reader will at once see how these fossils (though of such 
different dimensions) resemble each other in Bohemia and Wales, and other 
closely allied species from the two regions might be added, besides some which 
are common to both countries. The Swedish fauna, presently to be mentioned, will 
be found to be still more nearly connected with the Welsh Menevian. In all these 
countries there is an equally marked difference between the Cambrian fossils and 
those of the Upper and Lower Silurian rocks. The trilobite with the largest 
number of rings, Erinnys venulosa, occurs here in conjunction with Agnostus and 
Microdiscus, the genera with the smallest number. Blind trilobites are also 
found as well as those which have the largest eyes, such as Microdiscus on the 
one hand, and Anoplenus on the other.

LONGMYND GROUP.

Older than the Menevian Beds are a thick series of olive green, purple, red and 
grey grits and conglomerates found in North and South Wales, Shropshire, and 
parts of Ireland and Scotland. They have been called by Professor Sedgwick the 
Longmynd or Bangor Group, comprising, first, the Harlech and Barmouth 
sandstones; and secondly, the Llanberis slates.

HARLECH GRITS.

(FIGURE 573. Histioderma Hibernica, Kinahan. Oldhamia beds. Bray Head, Ireland.
1. Showing opening of burrow, and tube with wrinklings or crossing ridges, 
probably produced by a tentacled sea worm or annelid.
2. Lower and curved extremity of tube with five transverse lines.)

The sandstones of this period attain in the Longmynd hills a thickness of no 
less than 6000 feet without any interposition of volcanic matter; in some places 
in Merionethshire they are still thicker. Until recently these rocks possessed 
but a very scanty fauna.

With the exception of five species of annelids (see Figure 460) brought to light 
by Mr. Salter in Shropshire, and Dr. Kinahan in Wicklow, and an obscure 
crustacean form, Palaeopyge Ramsayi, they were supposed to be barren of organic 
remains. Now, however, through the labours of Mr. Hicks, they have yielded at 
St. David's a rich fauna of trilobites, brachiopods, phyllopods, and pteropods, 
showing, together with other fossils, a by no means low state of organisation at 
this early period. (British Association Report 1868.) Already the fauna amounts 
to 20 species referred to 17 genera.

A new genus of trilobite called Plutonia Sedgwickii, not yet figured and 
described, has been met with in the Harlech grits. It is comparable in size to 
the large Paradoxides Davidis before mentioned, has well-developed eyes, and is 
covered all over with tubercles. In the same strata occur other genera of 
trilobites, namely, Conocoryphe, Paradoxides, Microdiscus, and the Pteropod 
Theca (Figure 568), all represented by species peculiar to the Harlech grits. 
The sands of this formation are often rippled, and were evidently left dry at 
low tides, so that the surface was dried by the sun and made to shrink and 
present sun-cracks. There are also distinct impressions of rain-drops on many 
surfaces, like those in Figures 444 and 445.

LANBERIS SLATES.

(FIGURE 574. Oldhamia radiata, Forbes. Wicklow, Ireland.)

(FIGURE 575. Oldhamia antiqua, Forbes. Wicklow, Ireland.)

The slates of Llanberis and Penrhyn in Carnarvonshire, with their associated 
sandy strata, attain a great thickness, sometimes about 3000 feet. They are 
perhaps not more ancient than the Harlech and Barmouth beds last mentioned, for 
they may represent the deposits of fine mud thrown down in the same sea, on the 
borders of which the sands above-mentioned were accumulating. In some of these 
slaty rocks in Ireland, immediately opposite Anglesea and Carnarvon, two species 
of fossils have been found, to which the late Professor E. Forbes gave the name 
of Oldhamia. The nature of these organisms is still a matter of discussion among 
naturalists.

CAMBRIAN ROCKS OF BOHEMIA (PRIMORDIAL ZONE OF BARRANDE).

In the year 1846, as before stated, M. Joachim Barrande, after ten years' 
exploration of Bohemia, and after collecting more than a thousand species of 
fossils, had ascertained the existence in that country of three distinct faunas 
below the Devonian. To his first fauna, which was older than any then known in 
this country, he gave the name of Etage C; his two first stages A and B 
consisting of crystalline and metamorphic rocks and unfossiliferous schists. 
This Etage C or primordial zone proved afterwards to be the equivalent of those 
subdivisions of the Cambrian groups which have been above described under the 
names of Menevian and Lingula Flags. The second fauna tallies with Murchison's 
Lower Silurian, as originally defined by him when no fossils had been discovered 
below the Stiper-Stones. The third fauna agrees with the Upper Silurian of the 
same author. Barrande, without government assistance, had undertaken single-
handed the geological survey of Bohemia, the fossils previously obtained from 
that country having scarcely exceeded 20 in number, whereas he had already 
acquired, in 1850, no less than 1100 species, namely, 250 crustaceans (chiefly 
Trilobites), 250 Cephalopods, 160 gasteropods and pteropods, 130 acephalous 
mollusks, 210 brachiopods, and 110 corals and other fossils. These numbers have 
since been almost doubled by subsequent investigations in the same country.

(Figures 576 to 580. Fossils of the lowest Fossiliferous Beds in Bohemia, or 
"Primordial Zone" of Barrande.

(FIGURE 576. Paradoxides Bohemicus, Barr. About one-half natural size.)

(FIGURE 577. Conocoryphe striata. Syn. Conocephalus striatus, Emmrich. One-half 
natural size. Ginetz and Skrey.)

(FIGURE 578. Agnostus integer, Beyrich. Natural size and magnified.)

(FIGURE 579. Agnostus Rex, Barr. Natural size, Skrey.)

(FIGURE 580. Sao hirsuta, Barrande, in its various stages of growth. The small 
lines beneath indicate the true size. In the youngest state,
a, no segments are visible; as the metamorphosis progresses,
b, c, the body segments begin to be developed: in the stage
d the eyes are introduced, but the facial sutures are not completed; at
e the full-grown animal, half its true size, is shown.))

In the primordial zone C, he discovered trilobites of the genera Paradoxides, 
Conocoryphe, Ellipsocephalus, Sao, Arionellus, Hydrocephalus, and Agnostus. M. 
Barrande pointed out that these primordial trilobites have a peculiar facies of 
their own dependent on the multiplication of their thoracic segments and the 
diminution of their caudal shield or pygidium.

One of the "primordial" or Upper Cambrian Trilobites of the genus Sao, a form 
not found as yet elsewhere in the world, afforded M. Barrande a fine 
illustration of the metamorphosis of these creatures, for he traced them through 
no less than twenty stages of their development. A few of these changes have 
been selected for representation in Figure 580, that the reader may learn the 
gradual manner in which different segments of the body and the eyes make their 
appearance.

In Bohemia the primordial fauna of Barrande derived its importance exclusively 
from its numerous and peculiar trilobites. Besides these, however, the same 
ancient schists have yielded two genera of brachiopods, Orthis and Orbicula, a 
Pteropod of the genus Theca, and four echinoderms of the cystidean family.

CAMBRIAN OF SWEDEN AND NORWAY.

The Cambrian beds of Wales are represented in Sweden by strata the fossils of 
which have been described by a most able naturalist, M. Angelin, in his 
"Palaeontologica Suecica" (1852-4). The "alum-schists," as they are called in 
Sweden, are horizontal argillaceous rocks which underlie conformably certain 
Lower Silurian strata in the mountain called Kinnekulle, south of the great 
Wener Lake in Sweden. These schists contain trilobites belonging to the genera 
Paradoxides, Olenus, Agnostus, and others, some of which present rudimentary 
forms, like the genus last mentioned, without eyes, and with the body segments 
scarcely developed, and others, again, have the number of segments excessively 
multiplied, as in Paradoxides. Such peculiarities agree with the characters of 
the crustaceans met with in the Cambrian strata of Wales; and Dr. Torell has 
recently found in Sweden the Paradoxides Hicksii, a well-known Lower Cambrian 
fossil.

At the base of the Cambrian strata in Sweden, which in the neighbourhood of Lake 
Wener are perfectly horizontal, lie ripple-marked quartzose sandstones with 
worm-tracks and annelid borings, like some of those found in the Harlech grits 
of the Longmynd. Among these are some which have been referred doubtfully to 
plants. These sandstones have been called in Sweden "fucoid sandstones." The 
whole thickness of the Cambrian rocks of Sweden does not exceed 300 feet from 
the equivalents of the Tremadoc beds to these sandstones, which last seem to 
correspond with the Longmynd, and are regarded by Torell as older than any 
fossiliferous primordial rocks in Bohemia.

CAMBRIAN OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA (POTSDAM SANDSTONE).

(FIGURE 581. Dikelocephalus Minnesotensis. Dale Owen. One-third diameter. A 
large crustacean of the Olenoid group. Potsdam sandstone. Falls of St. Croix, on 
the Upper Mississippi.)

This formation, as we learn from Sir W. Logan, is 700 feet thick in Canada; the 
upper part consists of sandstone containing fucoids, and perforated by small 
vertical holes, which are very characteristic of the rock, and appear to have 
been made by annelids (Scolithus linearis). The lower portion is a conglomerate 
with quartz pebbles. I have seen the Potsdam sandstone on the banks of the St. 
Lawrence, and on the borders of Lake Champlain, where, as at Keesville, it is a 
white quartzose fine-grained grit, almost passing into quartzite. It is divided 
into horizontal ripple-marked beds, very like those of the Lingula Flags of 
Britain, and replete with a small round-shaped Obolella, in such numbers as to 
divide the rock into parallel planes, in the same manner as do the scales of 
mica in some micaceous sandstones. Among the shells of this formation in 
Wisconsin are species of Lingula and Orthis, and several trilobites of the 
primordial genus Dikelocephalus (Figure 581). On the banks of the St. Lawrence, 
near Beauharnois and elsewhere, many fossil footprints have been observed on the 
surface of the rippled layers. They are supposed by Professor Owen to be the 
trails of more than one species of articulate animal, probably allied to the 
King Crab, or Limulus.

Recent investigations by the naturalists of the Canadian survey have rendered it 
certain that below the level of the Potsdam Sandstone there are slates and 
schists extending from New York to Newfoundland, occupied by a series of 
trilobitic forms similar in genera, though not in species, to those found in the 
European Upper Cambrian strata.

HURONIAN SERIES.

Next below the Upper Cambrian occur strata called the Huronian by Sir W. Logan, 
which are of vast thickness, consisting chiefly of quartzite, with great masses 
of greenish chloritic slate, which sometimes include pebbles of crystalline 
rocks derived from the Laurentian formation, next to be described. Limestones 
are rare in this series, but one band of 300 feet in thickness has been traced 
for considerable distances to the north of Lake Huron. Beds of greenstone are 
intercalated conformably with the quartzose and argillaceous members of this 
series. No organic remains have yet been found in any of the beds, which are 
about 18,000 feet thick, and rest unconformably on the Laurentian rocks.

LAURENTIAN GROUP.

In the course of the geological survey carried on under the direction of Sir 
W.E. Logan, it has been shown that, northward of the river St. Lawrence, there 
is a vast series of crystalline rocks of gneiss, mica-schist, quartzite, and 
limestone, more than 30,000 feet in thickness, which have been called 
Laurentian, and which are already known to occupy an area of about 200,000 
square miles. They are not only more ancient than the fossiliferous Cambrian 
formations above described, but are older than the Huronian last mentioned, and 
had undergone great disturbing movements before the Potsdam sandstone and the 
other "primordial" or Cambrian rocks were formed. The older half of this 
Laurentian series is unconformable to the newer portion of the same.

UPPER LAURENTIAN OR LABRADOR SERIES.

The Upper Group, more than 10,000 feet thick, consists of stratified crystalline 
rocks in which no organic remains have yet been found. They consist in great 
part of feldspars, which vary in composition from anorthite to andesine, or from 
those kinds in which there is less than one per cent of potash and soda to those 
in which there is more than seven per cent of these alkalies, the soda 
preponderating greatly. These feldsparites sometimes form mountain masses almost 
without any admixture of other minerals; but at other times they include augite, 
which passes into hypersthene. They are often granitoid in structure. One of the 
varieties is the same as the apolescent labradorite rock of Labrador. The 
Adirondack Mountains in the State of New York are referred to the same series, 
and it is conjectured that the hypersthene rocks of Skye, which resemble this 
formation in mineral character, may be of the same geological age.

LOWER LAURENTIAN.

This series, about 20,000 feet in thickness, is, as before stated, unconformable 
to that last mentioned; it consists in great part of gneiss of a reddish tint 
with orthoclase feldspar. Beds of nearly pure quartz, from 400 to 600 feet 
thick, occur in some places. Hornblendic and micaceous schists are often 
interstratified, and beds of limestone, usually crystalline. Beds of plumbago 
also occur. That this pure carbon may have been of organic origin before 
metamorphism has naturally been conjectured.

(FIGURES 582 and 583. Eozoon Canadense, Daw. (after Carpenter). Oldest known 
organic body.

(FIGURE 582. Eozoon Canadense, Daw. (after Carpenter). Oldest known organic 
body.
a. Chambers of lower tier communicating at +, and separated from adjoining 
chambers at o by an intervening septum, traversed by passages.
b. Chambers of an upper tier.
c. Walls of the chambers traversed by fine tubules. (These tubules pass with 
uniform parallelism from the inner to the outer surface, opening at regular 
distances from each other.)
d. Intermediate skeleton, composed of homogeneous shell substance, traversed by
f. Stoloniferous passages connecting the chambers of the two tiers.
e. Canal system in intermediate skeleton, showing the arborescent saceodic 
prolongations.
(Figure 583 shows these bodies in a decalcified state.))

(FIGURE 583. Eozoon Canadense, Daw. (after Carpenter). Oldest known organic 
body.
Decalcified portion of natural rock, showing CANAL SYSTEM and the several 
layers; the acuteness of the planes prevents more than one or two parallel tiers 
being observed. Natural size.))

There are several of these limestones which have been traced to great distances, 
and one of them is from 700 to 1500 feet thick. In the most massive of them Sir 
W. Logan observed, in 1859, what he considered to be an organic body much 
resembling the Silurian fossil called Stromatopora rugosa. It had been obtained 
the year before by Mr. J. MacMullen at the Grand Calumet, on the river Ottawa. 
This fossil was examined in 1864 by Dr. Dawson of Montreal, who detected in it, 
by aid of the microscope, the distinct structure of a Rhizopod or Foraminifer. 
Dr. Carpenter and Professor T. Rupert Jones have since confirmed this opinion, 
comparing the structure to that of the well-known nummulite. It appears to have 
grown one layer over another, and to have formed reefs of limestone as do the 
living coral-building polyp animals. Parts of the original skeleton, consisting 
of carbonate of lime, are still preserved; while certain inter-spaces in the 
calcareous fossil have been filled up with serpentine and white augite. On this 
oldest of known organic remains Dr. Dawson has conferred the name of Eozoon 
Canadense (see Figures 582, 583); its antiquity is such that the distance of 
time which separated it from the Upper Cambrian period, or that of the Potsdam 
sandstone, may, says Sir W. Logan, be equal to the time which elapsed between 
the Potsdam sandstone and the nummulitic limestones of the Tertiary period. The 
Laurentian and Huronian rocks united are about 50,000 feet in thickness, and the 
Lower Laurentian was disturbed before the newer series was deposited. We may 
naturally expect the other proofs of unconformability will hereafter be detected 
at more than one point in so vast a succession of strata.

The mineral character of the Upper Laurentian differs, as we have seen, from 
that of the Lower, and the pebbles of gneiss in the Huronian conglomerates are 
thought to prove that the Laurentian strata were already in a metamorphic state 
before they were broken up to supply materials for the Huronian. Even if we had 
not discovered the Eozoon, we might fairly have inferred from analogy that as 
the quartzites were once beds of sand, and the gneiss and mica-schist derived 
from shales and argillaceous sandstones, so the calcareous masses, from 400 to 
1000 feet and more in thickness, were originally of organic origin. This is now 
generally believed to have been the case with the Silurian, Devonian, 
Carboniferous, Oolitic, and Cretaceous limestones and those nummulitic rocks of 
tertiary date which bear the closest affinity to the Eozoon reefs of the Lower 
Laurentian. The oldest stratified rock in Scotland is that called by Sir R. 
Murchison "the fundamental gneiss," which is found in the north-west of Ross-
shire, and in Sutherlandshire (see Figure 82), and forms the whole of the 
adjoining island of Lewis, in the Hebrides. It has a strike from north-west to 
south-east, nearly at right angles to the metamorphic strata of the Grampians. 
On this Laurentian gneiss, in parts of the western Highlands, the Lower Cambrian 
and various metamorphic rocks rest unconformably. It seems highly probable that 
this ancient gneiss of Scotland may correspond in date with part of the great 
Laurentian group of North America.


CHAPTER XXVIII.

VOLCANIC ROCKS.

External Form, Structure, and Origin of Volcanic Mountains.
Cones and Craters.
Hypothesis of "Elevation Craters" considered.
Trap Rocks.
Name whence derived.
Minerals most abundant in Volcanic Rocks.
Table of the Analysis of Minerals in the Volcanic and Hypogene Rocks.
Similar Minerals in Meteorites.
Theory of Isomorphism.
Basaltic Rocks.
Trachytic Rocks.
Special Forms of Structure.
The columnar and globular Forms.
Trap Dikes and Veins.
Alteration of Rocks by volcanic Dikes.
Conversion of Chalk into Marble.
Intrusion of Trap between Strata.
Relation of trappean Rocks to the Products of active Volcanoes.

(FIGURE 584. Section through formations from a, low, to c, high.
a. Hypogene formations, stratified and unstratified.
b. Aqueous formations.
c. Volcanic rocks.)

The aqueous or fossiliferous rocks having now been described, we have next to 
examine those which may be called volcanic, in the most extended sense of that 
term. In the diagram (Figure 584) suppose a, a to represent the crystalline 
formations, such as the granitic and metamorphic; b, b the fossiliferous strata; 
and c, c the volcanic rocks. These last are sometimes found, as was explained in 
the first chapter, breaking through a and b, sometimes overlying both, and 
occasionally alternating with the strata b, b.

EXTERNAL FORM, STRUCTURE, AND ORIGIN OF VOLCANIC MOUNTAINS.

The origin of volcanic cones with crater-shaped summits has been explained in 
the "Principles of Geology" (Chapters 23 to 27), where Vesuvius, Etna, Santorin, 
and Barren Island are described. The more ancient portions of those mountains or 
islands, formed long before the times of history, exhibit the same external 
features and internal structure which belong to most of the extinct volcanoes of 
still higher antiquity; and these last have evidently been due to a complicated 
series of operations, varied in kind according to circumstances; as, for 
example, whether the accumulation took place above or below the level of the 
sea, whether the lava issued from one or several contiguous vents, and, lastly, 
whether the rocks reduced to fusion in the subterranean regions happened to have 
contained more or less silica, potash, soda, lime, iron, and other ingredients. 
We are best acquainted with the effects of eruptions above water, or those 
called subaerial or supramarine; yet the products even of these are arranged in 
so many ways that their interpretation has given rise to a variety of 
contradictory opinions, some of which will have to be considered in this 
chapter.

CONES AND CRATERS.

(FIGURE 585. Part of the chain of extinct volcanoes called the Monts Dome, 
Auvergne. (Scrope.))

In regions where the eruption of volcanic matter has taken place in the open 
air, and where the surface has never since been subjected to great aqueous 
denudation, cones and craters constitute the most striking peculiarity of this 
class of formations. Many hundreds of these cones are seen in central France, in 
the ancient provinces of Auvergne, Velay, and Vivarais, where they observe, for 
the most part, a linear arrangement, and form chains of hills. Although none of 
the eruptions have happened within the historical era, the streams of lava may 
still be traced distinctly descending from many of the craters, and following 
the lowest levels of the existing valleys. The origin of the cone and crater-
shaped hill is well understood, the growth of many having been watched during 
volcanic eruptions. A chasm or fissure first opens in the earth, from which 
great volumes of steam are evolved. The explosions are so violent as to hurl up 
into the air fragments of broken stone, parts of which are shivered into minute 
atoms. At the same time melted stone or LAVA usually ascends through the chimney 
or vent by which the gases make their escape. Although extremely heavy, this 
lava is forced up by the expansive power of entangled gaseous fluids, chiefly 
steam or aqueous vapour, exactly in the same manner as water is made to boil 
over the edge of a vessel when steam has been generated at the bottom by heat. 
Large quantities of the lava are also shot up into the air, where it separates 
into fragments, and acquires a spongy texture by the sudden enlargement of the 
included gases, and thus forms SCORIAE, other portions being reduced to an 
impalpable powder or dust. The showering down of the various ejected materials 
round the orifice of eruption gives rise to a conical mound, in which the 
successive envelopes of sand and scoriae form layers, dipping on all sides from 
a central axis. In the mean time a hollow, called a CRATER, has been kept open 
in the middle of the mound by the continued passage upward of steam and other 
gaseous fluids. The lava sometimes flows over the edge of the crater, and thus 
thickens and strengthens the sides of the cone; but sometimes it breaks down the 
cone on one side (see Figure 585), and often it flows out from a fissure at the 
base of the hill, or at some distance from its base.

Some geologists had erroneously supposed, from observations made on recent cones 
of eruption, that lava which consolidates on steep slopes is always of a 
scoriaceous or vesicular structure, and never of that compact texture which we 
find in those rocks which are usually termed "trappean." Misled by this theory, 
they have gone so far as to believe that if melted matter has originally 
descended a slope at an angle exceeding four or five degrees, it never, on 
cooling, acquires a stony compact texture. Consequently, whenever they found in 
a volcanic mountain sheets of stony materials inclined at angles of from 5 
degrees to 20 degrees or even more than 30 degrees, they thought themselves 
warranted in assuming that such rocks had been originally horizontal, or very 
slightly inclined, and had acquired their high inclination by subsequent 
upheaval. To such dome-shaped mountains with a cavity in the middle, and with 
the inclined beds having what was called a quaquaversal dip or a slope outward 
on all sides, they gave the name of "Elevation craters."

As the late Leopold Von Buch, the author of this theory, had selected the Isle 
of Palma, one of the Canaries, as a typical illustration of this form of 
volcanic mountain, I visited that island in 1854, in company with my friend Mr. 
Hartung, and I satisfied myself that it owes its origin to a series of eruptions 
of the same nature as those which formed the minor cones, already alluded to. In 
some of the more ancient or Miocene volcanic mountains, such as Mont Dor and 
Cantal in central France, the mode of origin by upheaval as above described is 
attributed to those dome-shaped masses, whether they possess or not a great 
central cavity, as in Palma. Where this cavity is present, it has probably been 
due to one or more great explosions similar to that which destroyed a great part 
of ancient Vesuvius in the time of Pliny. Similar paroxysmal catastrophes have 
caused in historical times the truncation on a grand scale of some large cones 
in Java and elsewhere. (Principles volume 2 pages 56 and 145.)

Among the objections which may be considered as fatal to Von Buch's doctrine of 
upheaval in these cases, I may state that a series of volcanic formations 
extending over an area six or seven miles in its shortest diameter, as in Palma, 
could not be accumulated in the form of lavas, tuffs, and volcanic breccias or 
agglomerates without producing a mountain as lofty as that which they now 
constitute. But assuming that they were first horizontal, and then lifted up by 
a force acting most powerfully in the centre and tilting the beds on all sides, 
a central crater having been formed by explosion or by a chasm opening in the 
middle, where the continuity of the rocks was interrupted, we should have a 
right to expect that the chief ravines or valleys would open towards the central 
cavity, instead of which the rim of the great crater in Palma and other similar 
ancient volcanoes is entire for more than three parts of the whole 
circumference.

If dikes are seen in the precipices surrounding such craters or central 
cavities, they certainly imply rents which were filled up with liquid matter. 
But none of the dislocations producing such rents can have belonged to the 
supposed period of terminal and paroxysmal upheaval, for had a great central 
crater been already formed before they originated, or at the time when they took 
place, the melted matter, instead of filling the narrow vents, would have flowed 
down into the bottom of the cavity, and would have obliterated it to a certain 
extent. Making due allowance for the quantity of matter removed by subaerial 
denudation in volcanic mountains of high antiquity, and for the grand explosions 
which are known to have caused truncation in active volcanoes, there is no 
reason for calling in the violent hypothesis of elevation craters to explain the 
structure of such mountains as Teneriffe, the Grand Canary, Palma, or those of 
central France, Etna, or Vesuvius, all of which I have examined. With regard to 
Etna, I have shown, from observations made by me in 1857, that modern lavas, 
several of them of known date, have formed continuous beds of compact stone even 
on slopes of 15, 36, and 38 degrees, and, in the case of the lava of 1852, more 
than 40 degrees. The thickness of these tabular layers varies from 1 1/2 foot to 
26 feet. And their planes of stratification are parallel to those of the 
overlying and underlying scoriae which form part of the same currents. (Memoir 
on Mount Etna Philosophical Transactions 1858.)

NOMENCLATURE OF TRAPPEAN ROCKS.

When geologists first began to examine attentively the structure of the northern 
and western parts of Europe, they were almost entirely ignorant of the phenomena 
of existing volcanoes. They found certain rocks, for the most part without 
stratification, and of a peculiar mineral composition, to which they gave 
different names, such as basalt, greenstone, porphyry, trap tuff, and 
amygdaloid. All these, which were recognised as belonging to one family, were 
called "trap" by Bergmann, from trappa, Swedish for a flight of steps-- a name 
since adopted very generally into the nomenclature of the science; for it was 
observed that many rocks of this class occurred in great tabular masses of 
unequal extent, so as to form a succession of terraces or steps. It was also 
felt that some general term was indispensable, because these rocks, although 
very diversified in form and composition, evidently belonged to one group, 
distinguishable from the Plutonic as well as from the non-volcanic fossiliferous 
rocks.

By degrees familiarity with the products of active volcanoes convinced 
geologists more and more that they were identical with the trappean rocks. In 
every stream of modern lava there is some variation in character and 
composition, and even where no important difference can be recognised in the 
proportions of silica, alumina, lime, potash, iron, and other elementary 
materials, the resulting materials are often not the same, for reasons which we 
are as yet unable to explain. The difference also of the lavas poured out from 
the same mountain at two distinct periods, especially in the quantity of silica 
which they contain, is often so great as to give rise to rocks which are 
regarded as forming distinct families, although there may be every intermediate 
gradation between the two extremes, and although some rocks, forming a 
transition from the one class to the other, may often be so abundant as to 
demand special names. These species might be multiplied indefinitely, and I can 
only afford space to name a few of the principal ones, about the composition and 
aspect of which there is the least discordance of opinion.

MINERALS MOST ABUNDANT IN VOLCANIC ROCKS.

TABLE 28.1. ANALYSIS OF MINERALS MOST ABUNDANT IN THE VOLCANIC AND HYPOGENE 
ROCKS.

COLUMN 1: SILICA.

COLUMN 2: ALUMINA.

COLUMN 3: SESQUIOXIDE OF IRON.

COLUMN 4: PROTOXIDES OF IRON AND MANGANESE.

COLUMN 5: LIME.

COLUMN 6: MAGNESIA.

COLUMN 7: POTASH.

COLUMN 8: SODA.

COLUMN 9: OTHER CONSTITUENTS.
In this column the following signs are used:
F. Fluorine;
Li. Lithia;
W. Loss on igniting the mineral, in most instances only Water.

COLUMN 10: SPECIFIC GRAVITY.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -

THE QUARTZ GROUP:

1       2       3       4       5       6       7       8       9      10.

Quartz:
100.0                                                                  2.6.

Tridymite:
100.0                                                                  2.3.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -

THE FELDSPAR GROUP:

1       2       3       4       5        6       7       8      9      10.

Orthoclase. Carlsbad, in granite (Bulk):

65.23   18.26   0.27    ....    trace    ....    14.66   1.45  ....   2.55.

Orthoclase. Sanadine, Drachenfels in trachyte (Rammelsberg).

65.87   18.53   ....    ....    0.95     0.30    10.32   3.42  W 0.44 2.55.

Albite. Arendal, in granite (G. Rose).

68.46   19.30   ....    0.28    0.68     ....     ....  11.27  ....   2.61.

Oligoclase. Ytterby, in granite (Berzelius).

61.55   23.80   ....    ....    3.18     0.80     0.38   9.67  ....   2.65.

Oligoclase. Teneriffe, in trachyte (Deville).

61.55   22.03   ....    ....    2.81     0.47     3.44   7.74  ....   2.59.

Labradorite. Hitteroe, in Labrador-Rock (Waage).

51.39   29.42   2.90    ....    9.44     0.37     1.10   5.03  W 0.71 2.72.

Labradorite. Iceland, in volcanic (Damour).

52.17   29.22   1.90    ....   13.11     ....     ....   3.40  ....   2.71.

Anorthite. Harzburg, in diorite (Streng).

45.37   34.81   0.59    ....   16.52     0.83     0.40   1.45  W 0.87 2.74.

Anorthite. Hecla, in volcanic (Waltershausen).

45.14   32.10   2.03    0.78   18.32     ....     0.22   1.06  ....   2.74.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -

Leucite. Vesuvius, 1811, in lava (Rammelsberg).

56.10   23.22   ....    ....   ....      ....    20.59   0.57  ....   2.48.

Nepheline. Miask, in Miascite (Scheerer).

44.30   33.25   0.82    ....   0.32      0.07     5.82  16.02  ....   2.59.

Nepheline. Vesuvius, in volcanic (Arfvedson).

44.11   33.73   ....    ....   ....      ....     ....  20.46 W 0.62  2.60.
 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -

THE MICA GROUP:

1       2       3       4      5         6       7       8      9      10.

Muscovite. Finland, in granite (Rose).

46.36   36.80   4.53    ....   ....      ....    9.22    ....  F 0.67  2.90.
                                                               W 1.84.

Lepidolite. Cornwall, in granite (Regnault).

52.40   26.80   ....    1.50   ....      ....    9.14    ....  F 4.18  2.90.
                                                               Li 4.85.

Biotite. Bodennais (V. Kobell).

40.86   15.13   13.00   ....   ....      22.00   8.83    ....  W 0.44  2.70.

Biotite. Vesuvius, in volcanic (Chodnef).

40.91   17.71   11.02   ....   0.30      19.04   9.96    ....  ....    2.75.

Phlogopite. New York, in metamorphic limestone (Rammelsberg).

41.96   13.47   ....    2.67   0.34      27.12   9.37    ....  F 2.93  2.81.
                                                               W 0.60.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 

Margarite. Nexos (Smith).

30.02   49.52   1.65    ....   10.82      0.48      1.25       W 5.55  2.99.

Chlorite. Dauphiny (Marignac).

26.88   17.52   29.76   ....   ....      13.84   ....    ....  W 11.33 2.87.

Rapidolite. Pyrenees (Delesse).

32.10   18.50   ....    0.06   ....      36.70   ....    ....  W 12.10 2.61.

Talc. Zillerthal (Delesse).

63.00   ....    ....    trace  ....      33.60   ....    ....  W 3.10  2.78.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 

THE AMPHIBOLE AND PYROXENE GROUP.

1       2       3       4       5         6       7       8      9      10.

Tremolite. St. Gothard (Rammelsberg)

58.55   ....    ....    ....  13.90     26.63   ....    ....  FW 0.34  2.93.

Actinolite. Arendal, in granite (Rammelsberg).

56.77   0.97    ....    5.88  13.56     21.48   ....    ....   W 2.20  3.02.

Hornblende. Faymont, in diorite (Deville).

41.99   11.66   ....   22.22   9.55     12.59   ....    1.02   W 1.47  3.20.    

Hornblende Etna, in volcanic (Waltershausen).

40.91   13.68   ....   17.49  13.44     13.19   ....    ....   W 0.85  3.01.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 

Uralite. Ural (Rammelsberg)

50.75   5.65    ....   17.27  11.59     12.28   ....    ....   W 1.80  3.14.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 

Augite. Bohemia, in dolerite (Rammelsberg).

51.12   3.38    0.95    8.08  23.54     12.82   ....    ....   ....    3.35.

Augite. Vesuvius, in lava of 1858 (Rammelsberg).

49.61   4.42    ....    9.08  22.83     14.22   ....    ....   ....    3.25.

Diallage. Harz, in Gabbro (Rammelsberg).

52.00   3.10    ....    9.36  16.29     18.51   ....    ....   W 1.10  3.23.

Hypersthene. Labrador, in Labrador-Rock (Damour).

51.36   0.37    ....   22.59   3.09     21.31   ....    ....   ....    3.39.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 

THE OLIVINE GROUP.

1       2       3      4       5        6       7       8       9      10

Bronzite. Greenland (V. Kobell).

58.00   1.33    11.14  ....    ....    29.66   ....    ....    ....    3.20.

Olivine. Carlsbad, in basalt (Rammelsberg).

39.34   ....    ....   14.85   ....    45.81   ....    ....    ....    3.40.

Olivine. Mount Somma, in volcanic (Walmstedt).

40.08   0.18    ....   15.74   ....    44.22   ....    ....    ....    3.33.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 

The minerals which form the chief constituents of these igneous rocks are few in 
number. Next to quartz, which is nearly pure silica or silicic acid, the most 
important are those silicates commonly classed under the several heads of 
feldspar, mica, hornblende or augite, and olivine. In Table 28.1, in drawing up 
which I have received the able assistance of Mr. David Forbes, the chemical 
analysis of these minerals and their varieties is shown, and he has added the 
specific gravity of the different mineral species, the geological application of 
which in determining the rocks formed by these minerals will be explained in the 
sequel.

From Table 28.1 it will be observed that many minerals are omitted which, even 
if they are of common occurrence, are more to be regarded as accessory than as 
essential components of the rocks in which they are found. (For analyses of 
these minerals see the Mineralogies of Dana and Bristow.) Such are, for example, 
Garnet, Epidote, Tourmaline, Idocrase, Andalusite, Scapolite, the various 
Zeolites, and several other silicates of somewhat rarer occurrence. Magnetite, 
Titanoferrite, and Iron-pyrites also occur as normal constituents of various 
igneous rocks, although in very small amount, as also Apatite, or phosphate of 
lime. The other salts of lime, including its carbonate or calcite, although 
often met with, are invariably products of secondary chemical action.

The Zeolites, above mentioned, so named from the manner in which they froth up 
under the blow-pipe and melt into a glass, differ in their chemical composition 
from all the other mineral constituents of volcanic rocks, since they are 
hydrated silicates containing from 10 to 25 per cent of water. They abound in 
some trappean rocks and ancient lavas, where they fill up vesicular cavities and 
interstices in the substance of the rocks, but are rarely found in any quantity 
in recent lavas; in most cases they are to be regarded as secondary products 
formed by the action of water on the other constituents of the rocks. Among them 
the species Analcime, Stilbite, Natrolite, and Chabazite may be mentioned as of 
most common occurrence.

QUARTZ GROUP.

The microscope has shown that pure quartz is oftener present in lavas than was 
formerly supposed. It had been argued that the quartz in granite having a 
specific gravity of 2.6, was not of purely igneous origin, because the silica 
resulting from fusion in the laboratory has only a specific gravity of 2.3. But 
Mr. David Forbes has ascertained that the free quartz in trachytes, which are 
known to have flowed as lava, has the same specific gravity as the ordinary 
quartz of granite; and the recent researches of Von Rath and others prove that 
the mineral Tridymite, which is crystallised silica of specific gravity 2.3 (see 
Table 28.1), is of common occurrence in the volcanic rocks of Mexico, Auvergne, 
the Rhine, and elsewhere, although hitherto entirely overlooked.

FELDSPAR GROUP.

In the Feldspar group (Table 28.1) the five mineral species most commonly met 
with as rock constituents are: 1. Orthoclase, often called common or potash-
feldspar. 2. Albite, or soda-feldspar, a mineral which plays a more subordinate 
part than was formerly supposed, this name having been given to much which has 
since been proved to be Oligoclase. 3. Oligoclase, or soda-lime feldspar, in 
which soda is present in much larger proportion than lime, and of which mineral 
andesite are andesine, is considered to be a variety. 4. Labradorite, or lime-
soda-feldspar, in which the proportions of lime and soda are the reverse to what 
they are in Oligoclase. 5. Anorthite or lime-feldspar. The two latter feldspars 
are rarely if ever found to enter into the composition of rocks containing 
quartz.

In employing such terms as potash-feldspar, etc., it must, however, always be 
borne in mind that it is only intended to direct attention to the predominant 
alkali or alkaline earth in the mineral, not to assert the absence of the 
others, which in most cases will be found to be present in minor quantity. Thus 
potash-feldspar (orthoclase) almost always contains a little soda, and often 
traces of lime or magnesia; and in like manner with the others. The terms 
"glassy" and "compact" feldspars only refer to structure, and not to species or 
composition; the student should be prepared to meet with any of the above 
feldspars in either of these conditions: the glassy state being apparently due 
to quick cooling, and the compact to conditions unfavourable to crystallisation; 
the so-called "compact feldspar" is also very commonly found to be an admixture 
of more than one feldspar species, and frequently also contains quartz and other 
extraneous mineral matter only to be detected by the microscope.

Feldspars when arranged according to their system of crystallisation are 
MONOCLINIC, having one axis obliquely inclined; or TRICLINIC, having the three 
axes all obliquely inclined to each other. If arranged with reference to their 
cleavage they are ORTHOCLASTIC, the fracture taking place always at a right 
angle; or PLAGIOCLASTIC, in which the cleavages are oblique to one another. 
Orthoclase is orthoclastic and monoclinic; all the other feldspars are 
plagioclastic and triclinic.

MINERALS IN METEORITES.

That variety of the Feldspar Group which is called Anorthite has been shown by 
Rammelsberg to occur in a meteoric stone, and his analysis proves it to be 
almost identical in its chemical proportions to the same mineral in the lavas of 
modern volcanoes. So also Bronzite (Enstatite) and Olivine have been met with in 
meteorites shown by analysis to come remarkably near to these minerals in 
ordinary rocks.

MICA GROUP.

With regard to the micas, the four principal species (Table 28.1) all contain 
potash in nearly the same proportion, but differ greatly in the proportion and 
nature of their other ingredients. Muscovite is often called common or potash 
mica; Lepidolite is characterised by containing lithia in addition; Biotite 
contains a large amount of magnesia and oxide of iron; whilst Phlogopite 
contains still more of the former substance. In rocks containing quartz, 
muscovite or lepidolite are most common. The mica in recent volcanic rocks, 
gabbros, and diorites is usually Biotite, while that so common in metamorphic 
limestones is usually, if not always, Phlogopite.

AMPHIBOLE AND PYROXENE GROUP.

The minerals included in Table 28.1 under the Amphibole and Pyroxene Group 
differ somewhat in their crystallisation form, though they all belong to the 
monoclinic system. Amphibole is a general name for all the different varieties 
of Hornblende, Actinolite, Tremolite, etc., while Pyroxene includes Augite, 
Diallage, Malacolite, Sahlite, etc. The two divisions are so much allied in 
chemical composition and crystallographic characters, and blend so completely 
one into the other in Uralite, that it is perhaps best to unite them in one 
group.

THEORY OF ISOMORPHISM.

The history of the changes of opinion on this point is curious and instructive. 
Werner first distinguished augite from hornblende; and his proposal to separate 
them obtained afterwards the sanction of Hauy, Mohs, and other celebrated 
mineralogists. It was agreed that the form of the crystals of the two species 
was different, and also their structure, as shown by CLEAVAGE-- that is to say, 
by breaking or cleaving the mineral with a chisel, or a blow of the hammer, in 
the direction in which it yields most readily. It was also found by analysis 
that augite usually contained more lime, less alumina, and no fluoric acid; 
which last, though not always found in hornblende, often enters into its 
composition in minute quantity. In addition to these characters, it was remarked 
as a geological fact, that augite and hornblende are very rarely associated 
together in the same rock. It was also remarked that in the crystalline slags of 
furnaces augitic forms were frequent, the hornblendic entirely absent; hence it 
was conjectured that hornblende might be the result of slow, and augite of rapid 
cooling. This view was confirmed by the fact that Mitscherlich and Berthier were 
able to make augite artificially, but could never succeed in forming hornblende. 
Lastly, Gustavus Rose fused a mass of hornblende in a porcelain furnace, and 
found that it did not, on cooling, assume its previous shape, but invariably 
took that of augite. The same mineralogist observed certain crystals called 
Uralite (see Table 28.1) in rocks from Siberia, which possessed the cleavage and 
chemical composition of hornblende, while they had the external form of augite.

If, from these data, it is inferred that the same substance may assume the 
crystalline forms of hornblende or augite indifferently, according to the more 
or less rapid cooling of the melted mass, it is nevertheless certain that the 
variety commonly called augite, and recognised by a peculiar crystalline form, 
has usually more lime in it, and less alumina, than that called hornblende, 
although the quantities of these elements do not seem to be always the same. 
Unquestionably the facts and experiments above mentioned show the very near 
affinity of hornblende and augite; but even the convertibility of one into the 
other, by melting and recrystallising, does not perhaps demonstrate their 
absolute identity. For there is often some portion of the materials in a crystal 
which are not in perfect chemical combination with the rest. Carbonate of lime, 
for example, sometimes carries with it a considerable quantity of silex into its 
own form of crystal, the silex being mechanically mixed as sand, and yet not 
preventing the carbonate of lime from assuming the form proper to it. This is an 
extreme case, but in many others some one or more of the ingredients in a 
crystal may be excluded from perfect chemical union; and after fusion, when the 
mass recrystallises, the same elements may combine perfectly or in new 
proportions, and thus a new mineral may be produced. Or some one of the gaseous 
elements of the atmosphere, the oxygen for example, may, when the melted matter 
reconsolidates, combine with some one of the component elements.

The different quantity of the impurities or the refuse above alluded to, which 
may occur in all but the most transparent and perfect crystals, may partly 
explain the discordant results at which experienced chemists have arrived in 
their analysis of the same mineral. For the reader will often find that crystals 
of a mineral determined to be the same by physical characters, crystalline form, 
and optical properties, have been declared by skilful analysers to be composed 
of distinct elements. This disagreement seemed at first subversive of the atomic 
theory, or the doctrine that there is a fixed and constant relation between the 
crystalline form and structure of a mineral and its chemical composition. The 
apparent anomaly, however, which threatened to throw the whole science of 
mineralogy into confusion, was reconciled to fixed principles by the discoveries 
of Professor Mitscherlich at Berlin, who ascertained that the composition of the 
minerals which had appeared so variable was governed by a general law, to which 
he gave the name of ISOMORPHISM (from isos, equal, and morphe, form). According 
to this law, the ingredients of a given species of mineral are not absolutely 
fixed as to their kind and quality; but one ingredient may be replaced by an 
equivalent portion of some analogous ingredient. Thus, in augite, the lime may 
be in part replaced by portions of protoxide of iron, or of manganese, while the 
form of the crystal, and the angle of its cleavage planes, remain the same. 
These vicarious substitutions, however, of particular elements can not exceed 
certain defined limits.

BASALTIC ROCKS.

The two principal families of trappean or volcanic rocks are the basalts and the 
trachytes, which differ chiefly from each other in the quantity of silica which 
they contain. The basaltic rocks are comparatively poor in silica, containing 
less than 50 per cent of that mineral, and none in a pure state or as free 
quartz, apart from the rest of the matrix. They contain a larger proportion of 
lime and magnesia than the trachytes, so that they are heavier, independently of 
the frequent presence of the oxides of iron which in some cases forms more than 
a fourth part of the whole mass. Abich has, therefore, proposed that we should 
weigh these rocks, in order to appreciate their composition in cases where it is 
impossible to separate their component minerals. Thus, basalt from Staffa, 
containing 47.80 per cent of silica, has a specific gravity of 2.95; whereas 
trachyte, which has 66 per cent of silica, has a specific gravity of only 2.68; 
trachytic porphyry, containing 69 per cent of silica, a specific gravity of only 
2.58. If we then take a rock of intermediate composition, such as that 
prevailing in the Peak of Teneriffe, which Abich calls Trachyte-dolerite, its 
proportion of silica being intermediate, or 58 per cent, it weighs 2.78, or more 
than trachyte, and less than basalt. (Dr. Daubeny on Volcanoes second edition 
pages 14, 15.)

BASALT.

The different varieties of this rock are distinguished by the names of basalts, 
anamezites, and dolerites, names which, however, only denote differences in 
texture without implying any difference in mineral or chemical composition: the 
term BASALT being used only when the rock is compact, amorphous, and often semi-
vitreous in texture, and when it breaks with a perfect conchoidal fracture; 
when, however, it is uniformly crystalline in appearance, yet very close-
grained, the name ANAMESITE (from anamesos, intermediate) is employed, but if 
the rock be so coarsely crystallised that its different mineral constituents can 
be easily recognised by the eye, it is called DOLERITE (from doleros, 
deceitful), in allusion to the difficulty of distinguishing it from some of the 
rocks known as Plutonic.

MELAPHYRE is often quite undistinguishable in external appearance from basalt, 
for although rarely so heavy, dark-coloured, or compact, it may present at times 
all these varieties of texture. Both these rocks are composed of triclinic 
feldspar and augite with more or less olivine, magnetic or titaniferous oxide of 
iron, and usually a little nepheline, leucite, and apatite; basalt usually 
contains considerably more olivine than melaphyre, but chemically they are 
closely allied, although the melaphyres usually contain more silica and alumina, 
with less oxides of iron, lime, and magnesia, than the basalts. The Rowley Hills 
in Staffordshire, commonly known as Rowley Ragstone, are melaphyre.

GREENSTONE.

This name has usually been extended to all granular mixtures, whether of 
hornblende and feldspar, or of augite and feldspar. The term DIORITE has been 
applied exclusively to compounds of hornblende and triclinic feldspar. LABRADOR-
ROCK is a term used for a compound of labradorite or labrador-feldspar and 
hypersthene; when the hypersthene predominates it is sometimes known under the 
name of HYPERSTHENE-ROCK. GABBRO and DIABASE are rocks mainly composed of 
triclinic feldspars and diallage. All these rocks become sometimes very 
crystalline, and help to connect the volcanic with the Plutonic formations, 
which will be treated of in Chapter 31.

The name trachyte (from trachus, rough) was originally given to a coarse 
granular feldspathic rock which was rough and gritty to the touch. The term was 
subsequently made to include other rocks, such as clinkstone and obsidian, which 
have the same mineral composition, but to which, owing to their different 
texture, the word in its original meaning would not apply. The feldspars which 
occur in Trachytic rocks are invariably those which contain the largest 
proportion of silica, or from 60 to 70 per cent of that mineral. Through the 
base are usually disseminated crystals of glassy feldspar, mica, and sometimes 
hornblende. Although quartz is not a necessary ingredient in the composition of 
this rock, it is very frequently present, and the quartz trachytes are very 
largely developed in many volcanic districts. In this respect the trachytes 
differ entirely from the members of the Basaltic family, and are more nearly 
allied to the granites.

OBSIDIAN.

Obsidian, Pitchstone, and Pearlstone are only different forms of a volcanic 
glass produced by the fusion of trachytic rocks. The distinction between them is 
caused by different rates of cooling from the melted state, as has been proved 
by experiment. Obsidian is of a black or ash-grey colour, and though opaque in 
mass is transparent in thin edges.

CLINKSTONE OR PHONOLITE.

Among the rocks of the trachytic family, or those in which the feldspars are 
rich in silica, that termed Clinkstone or Phonolite is conspicuous by its 
fissile structure, and its tendency to lamination, which is such as sometimes to 
render it useful as roofing-slate. It rings when struck with the hammer, whence 
its name; is compact, and usually of a greyish blue or brownish colour; is 
variable in composition, but almost entirely composed of feldspar. When it 
contains disseminated crystals of feldspar, it is called CLINKSTONE PORPHYRY.

VOLCANIC ROCKS DISTINGUISHED BY SPECIAL FORMS OF STRUCTURE.

Many volcanic rocks are commonly spoken of under names denoting structure alone, 
which must not be taken to imply that they are distinct rocks, i.e., that they 
differ from one another either in mineral or chemical composition. Thus the 
terms Trachytic porphyry, Trachytic tuff, etc., merely refer to the same rock 
under different conditions of mechanical aggregation or crystalline development 
which would be more correctly expressed by the use of the adjective, as 
porphyritic trachyte, etc., but as these terms are so commonly employed it is 
considered advisable to direct the student's attention to them.

PORPHYRY.

(FIGURE 586. Porphyry. White crystals of feldspar in a dark base of hornblende 
and feldspar.)

PORPHYRY is one of this class, and very characteristic of the volcanic 
formations. When distinct crystals of one or more minerals are scattered through 
an earthy or compact base, the rock is termed a porphyry (see Figure 586). Thus 
trachyte is usually porphyritic; for in it, as in many modern lavas, there are 
crystals of feldspar; but in some porphyries the crystals are of augite, 
olivine, or other minerals. If the base be greenstone, basalt, or pitchstone, 
the rock may be denominated greenstone-porphyry, pitchstone-porphyry, and so 
forth. The old classical type of this form of rock is the red porphyry of Egypt, 
or the well-known "Rosso antico." It consists, according to Delesse, of a red 
feldspathic base in which are disseminated rose-coloured crystals of the 
feldspar called oligoclase, with some plates of blackish hornblende and grains 
of oxide of iron (iron-glance). RED QUARTZIFEROUS PORPHYRY is a much more 
siliceous rock, containing about 70 or 80 per cent of silex, while that of Egypt 
has only 62 per cent.

AMYGDALOID.

This is also another form of igneous rock, admitting of every variety of 
composition. It comprehends any rock in which round or almond-shaped nodules of 
some mineral, such as agate, chalcedony, calcareous spar, or zeolite, are 
scattered through a base of wacke, basalt, greenstone, or other kind of trap. It 
derives its name from the Greek word amygdalon, an almond. The origin of this 
structure can not be doubted, for we may trace the process of its formation in 
modern lavas. Small pores or cells are caused by bubbles of steam and gas 
confined in the melted matter. After or during consolidation, these empty spaces 
are gradually filled up by matter separating from the mass, or infiltered by 
water permeating the rock. As these bubbles have been sometimes lengthened by 
the flow of the lava before it finally cooled, the contents of such cavities 
have the form of almonds. In some of the amygdaloidal traps of Scotland, where 
the nodules have decomposed, the empty cells are seen to have a glazed or 
vitreous coating, and in this respect exactly resemble scoriaceous lavas, or the 
slags of furnaces.

(FIGURE 587. Scoriaceous lava in part converted into an amygdaloid. Montagne de 
la Veille, Department of Puy de Dome, France.)

Figure 587 represents a fragment of stone taken from the upper part of a sheet 
of basaltic lava in Auvergne. One-half is scoriaceous, the pores being perfectly 
empty; the other part is amygdaloidal, the pores or cells being mostly filled up 
with carbonate of lime, forming white kernels.

LAVA.

This term has a somewhat vague signification, having been applied to all melted 
matter observed to flow in streams from volcanic vents. When this matter 
consolidates in the open air, the upper part is usually scoriaceous, and the 
mass becomes more and more stony as we descend, or in proportion as it has 
consolidated more slowly and under greater pressure. At the bottom, however, of 
a stream of lava, a small portion of scoriaceous rock very frequently occurs, 
formed by the first thin sheet of liquid matter, which often precedes the main 
current, and solidifies under slight pressure.

The more compact lavas are often porphyritic, but even the scoriaceous part 
sometimes contains imperfect crystals, which have been derived from some older 
rocks, in which the crystals pre-existed, but were not melted, as being more 
infusible in their nature. Although melted matter rising in a crater, and even 
that which enters a rent on the side of a crater, is called lava, yet this term 
belongs more properly to that which has flowed either in the open air or on the 
bed of a lake or sea. If the same fluid has not reached the surface, but has 
been merely injected into fissures below ground, it is called trap. There is 
every variety of composition in lavas; some are trachytic, as in the Peak of 
Teneriffe; a great number are basaltic, as in Vesuvius and Auvergne; others are 
andesitic, as those of Chili; some of the most modern in Vesuvius consist of 
green augite, and many of those of Etna of augite and labrador-feldspar. (G. 
Hose, Ann. des Mines tome 8 page 32.)

SCORIAE and PUMICE may next be mentioned, as porous rocks produced by the action 
of gases on materials melted by volcanic heat. SCORIAE are usually of a reddish-
brown and black colour, and are the cinders and slags of basaltic or augitic 
lavas. PUMICE is a light, spongy, fibrous substance, produced by the action of 
gases on trachytic and other lavas; the relation, however, of its origin to the 
composition of lava is not yet well understood. Von Buch says that it never 
occurs where only labrador-feldspar is present.

VOLCANIC ASH OR TUFF, TRAP TUFF.

Small angular fragments of the scoriae and pumice, above-mentioned, and the dust 
of the same, produced by volcanic explosions, form the tuffs which abound in all 
regions of active volcanoes, where showers of these materials, together with 
small pieces of other rocks ejected from the crater, and more or less burnt, 
fall down upon the land or into the sea. Here they often become mingled with 
shells, and are stratified. Such tuffs are sometimes bound together by a 
calcareous cement, and form a stone susceptible of a beautiful polish. But even 
when little or no lime is present, there is a great tendency in the materials of 
ordinary tuffs to cohere together. The term VOLCANIC ASH has been much used for 
rocks of all ages supposed to have been derived from matter ejected in a melted 
state from volcanic orifices. We meet occasionally with extremely compact beds 
of volcanic materials, interstratified with fossiliferous rocks. These may 
sometimes be tuffs, although their density or compactness is such as the cause 
them to resemble many of those kinds of trap which are found in ordinary dikes.

WACKE is a name given to a decomposed state of various trap rocks of the 
basaltic family, or those which are poor in silica. It resembles clay of a 
yellowish or brown colour, and passes gradually from the soft state to the hard 
dolerite, greenstone, or other trap rock from which it has been derived.

AGGLOMERATE.

In the neighbourhood of volcanic vents, we frequently observe accumulations of 
angular fragments of rocks formed during eruptions by the explosive action of 
steam, which shatters the subjacent stony formations, and hurls them up into the 
air. They then fall in showers around the cone or crater, or may be spread for 
some distance over the surrounding country. The fragments consist usually of 
different varieties of scoriaceous and compact lavas; but other kinds of rock, 
such as granite or even fossiliferous limestones, may be intermixed; in short, 
any substance through which the expansive gases have forced their way. The 
dispersion of such materials may be aided by the wind, as it varies in direction 
or intensity, and by the slope of the cone down which they roll, or by floods of 
rain, which often accompany eruptions. But if the power of running water, or of 
the waves and currents of the sea, be sufficient to carry the fragments to a 
distance, it can scarcely fail to wear off their angles, and the formation then 
becomes a CONGLOMERATE. If occasionally globular pieces of scoriae abound in an 
agglomerate, they may not owe their round form to attrition. When all the 
angular fragments are of volcanic rocks the mass is usually termed a volcanic 
breccia.

Laterite is a red or brick-like rock composed of silicate of alumina and oxide 
of iron. The red layers called "ochre beds," dividing the lavas of the Giant's 
Causeway, are laterites. These were found by Delesse to be trap impregnated with 
the red oxide of iron, and in part reduced to kaolin. When still more 
decomposed, they were found to be clay coloured by red ochre. As two of the 
lavas of the Giant's Causeway are parted by a bed of lignite, it is not 
improbable that the layers of laterite seen in the Antrim cliffs resulted from 
atmospheric decomposition. In Madeira and the Canary Islands streams of lava of 
subaerial origin are often divided by red bands of laterite, probably ancient 
soils formed by the decomposition of the surfaces of lava-currents, many of 
these soils having been coloured red in the atmosphere by oxide of iron, others 
burnt into a red brick by the overflowing of heated lavas. These red bands are 
sometimes prismatic, the small prisms being at right angles to the sheets of 
lava. Red clay or red marl, formed as above stated by the disintegration of 
lava, scoriae, or tuff, has often accumulated to a great thickness in the 
valleys of Madeira, being washed into them by alluvial action; and some of the 
thick beds of laterite in India may have had a similar origin. In India, 
however, especially in the Deccan, the term "laterite" seems to have been used 
too vaguely to answer the above definition. The vegetable soil in the gardens of 
the suburbs of Catania which was overflowed by the lava of 1669 was turned or 
burnt into a layer of red brick-coloured stone, or in other words, into 
laterite, which may now be seen supporting the old lava-current.

COLUMNAR AND GLOBULAR STRUCTURE.

One of the characteristic forms of volcanic rocks, especially of basalt, is the 
columnar, where large masses are divided into regular prisms, sometimes easily 
separable, but in other cases adhering firmly together. The columns vary, in the 
number of angles, from three to twelve; but they have most commonly from five to 
seven sides. They are often divided transversely, at nearly equal distances, 
like the joints in a vertebral column, as in the Giant's Causeway, in Ireland. 
They vary exceedingly in respect to length and diameter. Dr. MacCulloch mentions 
some in Skye which are about 400 feet long; others, in Morven, not exceeding an 
inch. In regard to diameter, those of Ailsa measure nine feet, and those of 
Morven an inch or less. (MacCulloch System of Geology volume 2 page 137.) They 
are usually straight, but sometimes curved; and examples of both these occur in 
the island of Staffa. In a horizontal bed or sheet of trap the columns are 
vertical; in a vertical dike they are horizontal.

(FIGURE 588. Lava of La Coupe d'Ayzac, near Antraigue, in the Department of 
Ardeche.)

It being assumed that columnar trap has consolidated from a fluid state, the 
prisms are said to be always at right angles to the COOLING SURFACES. If these 
surfaces, therefore, instead of being either perpendicular or horizontal, are 
curved, the columns ought to be inclined at every angle to the horizon; and 
there is a beautiful exemplification of this phenomenon in one of the valleys of 
the Vivarais, a mountainous district in the South of France, where, in the midst 
of a region of gneiss, a geologist encounters unexpectedly several volcanic 
cones of loose sand and scoriae. From the crater of one of these cones, called 
La Coupe d'Ayzac, a stream of lava has descended and occupied the bottom of a 
narrow valley, except at those points where the river Volant, or the torrents 
which join it, have cut away portions of the solid lava. Figure 588 represents 
the remnant of the lava at one of these points. It is clear that the lava once 
filled the whole valley up to the dotted line d-a; but the river has gradually 
swept away all below that line, while the tributary torrent has laid open a 
transverse section; by which we perceive, in the first place, that the lava is 
composed, as usual in this country, of three parts: the uppermost, at a, being 
scoriaceous, the second b, presenting irregular prisms; and the third, c, with 
regular columns, which are vertical on the banks of the Volant, where they rest 
on a horizontal base of gneiss, but which are inclined at an angle of 45 
degrees, at g, and are nearly horizontal at f, their position having been 
everywhere determined, according to the law before mentioned, by the form of the 
original valley.

(FIGURE 589. Columnar basalt in the Vincentin. (Fortis.)

In Figure 589, a view is given of some of the inclined and curved columns which 
present themselves on the sides of the valleys in the hilly region north of 
Vicenza, in Italy, and at the foot of the higher Alps. (Fortis Mem. sur l'Hist. 
Nat. de l'Italie tome 1 page 233 plate 7.) Unlike those of the Vivarais, last 
mentioned, the basalt of this country was evidently submarine, and the present 
valleys have since been hollowed out by denudation.

(FIGURE 590. Basaltic pillars of the Kasegrotte, Bertrich-Baden, half-way 
between Treves and Coblentz. Height of grotto, from 7 to 8 feet.)

The columnar structure is by no means peculiar to the trap rocks in which augite 
abounds; it is also observed in trachyte, and other feldspathic rocks of the 
igneous class, although in these it is rarely exhibited in such regular 
polygonal forms. It has been already stated that basaltic columns are often 
divided by cross-joints. Sometimes each segment, instead of an angular, assumes 
a spheroidal form, so that a pillar is made up of a pile of balls, usually 
flattened, as in the Cheese-grotto at Bertrich-Baden, in the Eifel, near the 
Moselle (Figure 590). The basalt there is part of a small stream of lava, from 
30 to 40 feet thick, which has proceeded from one of several volcanic craters, 
still extant, on the neighbouring heights.

In some masses of decomposing greenstone, basalt, and other trap rocks, the 
globular structure is so conspicuous that the rock has the appearance of a heap 
of large cannon balls. According to M. Delesse, the centre of each spheroid has 
been a centre of crystallisation, around which the different minerals of the 
rock arranged themselves symmetrically during the process of cooling. But it was 
also, he says, a centre of contraction, produced by the same cooling, the 
globular form, therefore, of such spheroids being the combined result of 
crystallisation and contraction. (Delesse sur les Roches Globuleuses Mem. de la 
Soc. Geol. de France 2 ser. tome 4.)

(FIGURE 591. Globiform pitchstone. Chiaja di Luna, Isle of Ponza. (Scrope.))

Mr. Scrope gives as an illustration of this structure a resinous trachyte or 
pitchstone-porphyry in one of the Ponza islands, which rise from the 
Mediterranean, off the coast of Terracina and Gaeta. The globes vary from a few 
inches to three feet in diameter, and are of an ellipsoidal form (see Figure 
591). The whole rock is in a state of decomposition, "and when the balls," says 
Mr. Scrope, "have been exposed a short time to the weather, they scale off at a 
touch into numerous concentric coats, like those of a bulbous root, inclosing a 
compact nucleus. The laminae of this nucleus have not been so much loosened by 
decomposition; but the application of a ruder blow will produce a still further 
exfoliation." (Scrope Geological Transactions second series volume 2 page 205.)

VOLCANIC OR TRAP DIKES.

(FIGURE 592. Dike in valley, near Brazen Head, Madeira. (From a drawing of 
Captain Basil Hall, R.N.))

The leading varieties of the trappean rocks-- basalt, greenstone, trachyte, and 
the rest-- are found sometimes in dikes penetrating stratified and unstratified 
formations, sometimes in shapeless masses protruding through or overlying them, 
or in horizontal sheets intercalated between strata. Fissures have already been 
spoken of as occurring in all kinds of rocks, some a few feet, others many yards 
in width, and often filled up with earth or angular pieces of stone, or with 
sand and pebbles. Instead of such materials, suppose a quantity of melted stone 
to be driven or injected into an open rent, and there consolidated, we have then 
a tabular mass resembling a wall, and called a trap dike. It is not uncommon to 
find such dikes passing through strata of soft materials, such as tuff, scoriae, 
or shale, which, being more perishable than the trap, are often washed away by 
the sea, rivers, or rain, in which case the dike stands prominently out in the 
face of precipices, or on the level surface of a country (see Figure 592).

(FIGURE 593. Ground-plan of greenstone dikes traversing sandstone. Arran.)

In the islands of Arran and Skye, and in other parts of Scotland, where 
sandstone, conglomerate, and other hard rocks are traversed by dikes of trap, 
the converse of the above phenomenon is seen. The dike, having decomposed more 
rapidly than the containing rock, has once more left open the original fissure, 
often for a distance of many yards inland from the sea-coast. There is yet 
another case, by no means uncommon in Arran and other parts of Scotland, where 
the strata in contact with the dike, and for a certain distance from it, have 
been hardened, so as to resist the action of the weather more than the dike 
itself, or the surrounding rocks. When this happens, two parallel walls of 
indurated strata are seen protruding above the general level of the country and 
following the course of the dike. In Figure 593 a ground plan is given of a 
ramifying dike of greenstone, which I observed cutting through sandstone on the 
beach near Kildonan Castle, in Arran. The larger branch varies from five to 
seven feet in width, which will afford a scale of measurement for the whole.

(FIGURE 594. Trap dividing and covering sandstone near Suishnish, in Skye. 
(MacCulloch.))

In the Hebrides and other countries, the same masses of trap which occupy the 
surface of the country far and wide, concealing the subjacent stratified rocks, 
are seen also in the sea-cliffs, prolonged downward in veins or dikes, which 
probably unite with other masses of igneous rock at a greater depth. The largest 
of the dikes represented in Figure 594, and which are seen in part of the coast 
of Skye, is no less than 100 feet in width.

Every variety of trap-rock is sometimes found in dikes, as basalt, greenstone, 
feldspar-porphyry, and trachyte. The amygdaloidal traps also occur, though more 
rarely, and even tuff and breccia, for the materials of these last may be washed 
down into open fissures at the bottom of the sea, or during eruption on the land 
may be showered into them from the air. Some dikes of trap may be followed for 
leagues uninterruptedly in nearly a straight direction, as in the north of 
England, showing that the fissures which they fill must have been of 
extraordinary length.

ROCKS ALTERED BY VOLCANIC DIKES.

After these remarks on the form and composition of dikes themselves, I shall 
describe the alterations which they sometimes produce in the rocks in contact 
with them. The changes are usually such as the heat of melted matter and of the 
entangled steam and gases might be expected to cause.

PLAS-NEWYDD: DIKE CUTTING THROUGH SHALE.

A striking example, near Plas-Newydd, in Anglesea, has been described by 
Professor Henslow. (Cambridge Transactions volume 1 page 402.) The dike is 134 
feet wide, and consists of a rock which is a compound of feldspar and augite 
(dolerite of some authors). Strata of shale and argillaceous limestone, through 
which it cuts perpendicularly, are altered to a distance of 30, or even, in some 
places, of 35 feet from the edge of the dike. The shale, as it approaches the 
trap, becomes gradually more compact, and is most indurated where nearest the 
junction. Here it loses part of its schistose structure, but the separation into 
parallel layers is still discernible. In several places the shale is converted 
into hard porcelanous jasper. In the most hardened part of the mass the fossil 
shells, principally Producti, are nearly obliterated; yet even here their 
impressions may frequently be traced. The argillaceous limestone undergoes 
analogous mutations, losing its earthy texture as it approaches the dike, and 
becoming granular and crystalline. But the most extraordinary phenomenon is the 
appearance in the shale of numerous crystals of analcime and garnet, which are 
distinctly confined to those portions of the rock affected by the dike. (Ibid. 
volume 1 page 410.) Some garnets contain as much as 20 per cent of lime, which 
they may have derived from the decomposition of the fossil shells or Producti. 
The same mineral has been observed, under very analogous circumstances, in High 
Teesdale, by Professor Sedgwick, where it also occurs in shale and limestone, 
altered by basalt. (Ibid. volume 2 page 175.)

ANTRIM: DIKE CUTTING THROUGH CHALK.

In several parts of the county of Antrim, in the north of Ireland, chalk with 
flints is traversed by basaltic dikes. The chalk is there converted into 
granular marble near the basalt, the change sometimes extending eight or ten 
feet from the wall of the dike, being greatest near the point of contact, and 
thence gradually decreasing till it becomes evanescent. "The extreme effect," 
says Dr. Berger, "presents a dark brown crystalline limestone, the crystals 
running in flakes as large as those of coarse primitive (METAMORPHIC) limestone; 
the next state is saccharine, then fine grained and arenaceous; a compact 
variety, having a porcelanous aspect and a bluish-grey colour, succeeds: this, 
towards the outer edge, becomes yellowish-white, and insensibly graduates into 
the unaltered chalk. The flints in the altered chalk usually assume a grey 
yellowish colour." (Dr. Berger Geological Transactions 1st series volume 3 page 
172.) All traces of organic remains are effaced in that part of the limestone 
which is most crystalline.

(FIGURE 595. Basaltic dikes in chalk in Island of Rathlin, Antrim. Ground-plan 
as seen on the beach. (Conybeare and Buckland. (Geological Transactions 1st 
series volume 3 page 210 and plate 10.
From left to right: chalk: dike 35 ft.: dike 1 ft.: dike 20 ft.: chalk.)

Figure 595 represents three basaltic dikes traversing the chalk, all within the 
distance of 90 feet. The chalk contiguous to the two outer dikes is converted 
into a finely granular marble, m, m, as are the whole of the masses between the 
outer dikes and the central one. The entire contrast in the composition and 
colour of the intrusive and invaded rocks, in these cases, renders the phenomena 
peculiarly clear and interesting. Another of the dikes of the north-east of 
Ireland has converted a mass of red sandstone into hornstone. By another, the 
shale of the coal-measures has been indurated, assuming the character of flinty 
slate; and in another place the slate-clay of the lias has been changed into 
flinty slate, which still retains numerous impressions of ammonites. (Ibid. 
volume 3 page 213; and Playfair Illustration of Huttonian Theory s. 253.)

It might have been anticipated that beds of coal would, from their combustible 
nature, be affected in an extraordinary degree by the contact of melted rock. 
Accordingly, one of the greenstone dikes of Antrim, on passing through a bed of 
coal, reduces it to a cinder for the space of nine feet on each side. At 
Cockfield Fell, in the north of England, a similar change is observed. Specimens 
taken at the distance of about thirty yards from the trap are not 
distinguishable from ordinary pit-coal; those nearer the dike are like cinders, 
and have all the character of coke; while those close to it are converted into a 
substance resembling soot. (Sedgwick Cambridge Transactions volume 2 page 37.)

It is by no means uncommon to meet with the same rocks, even in the same 
districts, absolutely unchanged in the proximity of volcanic dikes. This great 
inequality in the effects of the igneous rocks may often arise from an original 
difference in their temperature, and in that of the entangled gases, such as is 
ascertained to prevail in different lavas, or in the same lava near its source 
and at a distance from it. The power also of the invaded rocks to conduct heat 
may vary, according to their composition, structure, and the fractures which 
they may have experienced, and perhaps, also, according to the quantity of water 
(so capable of being heated) which they contain. It must happen in some cases 
that the component materials are mixed in such proportions as to prepare them 
readily to enter into chemical union, and form new minerals; while in other 
cases the mass may be more homogeneous, or the proportions less adapted for such 
union.

We must also take into consideration, that one fissure may be simply filled with 
lava, which may begin to cool from the first; whereas in other cases the fissure 
may give passage to a current of melted matter, which may ascend for days or 
months, feeding streams which are overflowing the country above, or being 
ejected in the shape of scoriae from some crater. If the walls of a rent, 
moreover, are heated by hot vapour before the lava rises, as we know may happen 
on the flanks of a volcano, the additional heat supplied by the dike and its 
gases will act more powerfully.

INTRUSION OF TRAP BETWEEN STRATA.

Masses of trap are not unfrequently met with intercalated between strata, and 
maintaining their parallelism to the planes of stratification throughout large 
areas. They must in some places have forced their way laterally between the 
divisions of the strata, a direction in which there would be the least 
resistance to an advancing fluid, if no vertical rents communicated with the 
surface, and a powerful hydrostatic pressure were caused by gases propelling the 
lava upward.

RELATION OF TRAPPEAN ROCKS TO THE PRODUCTS OF ACTIVE VOLCANOES.

When we reflect on the changes above described in the strata near their contact 
with trap dikes, and consider how complete is the analogy or often identity in 
composition and structure of the rocks called trappean and the lavas of active 
volcanoes, it seems difficult at first to understand how so much doubt could 
have prevailed for half a century as to whether trap was of igneous or aqueous 
origin. To a certain extent, however, there was a real distinction between the 
trappean formations and those to which the term volcanic was almost exclusively 
confined. A large portion of the trappean rocks first studied in the north of 
Germany, and in Norway, France, Scotland, and other countries, were such as had 
been formed entirely under water, or had been injected into fissures and 
intruded between strata, and which had never flowed out in the air, or over the 
bottom of a shallow sea. When these products, therefore, of submarine or 
subterranean igneous action were contrasted with loose cones of scoriae, tuff, 
and lava, or with narrow streams of lava in great part scoriaceous and porous, 
such as were observed to have proceeded from Vesuvius and Etna, the resemblance 
seemed remote and equivocal. It was, in truth, like comparing the roots of a 
tree with its leaves and branches, which, although the belong to the same plant, 
differ in form, texture, colour, mode of growth, and position. The external 
cone, with its loose ashes and porous lava, may be likened to the light foliage 
and branches, and the rocks concealed far below, to the roots. But it is not 
enough to say of the volcano,

"Quantum vertice in auras
Aetherias, tantum radice in Tartara tendit,"

for its roots do literally reach downward to Tartarus, or to the regions of 
subterranean fire; and what is concealed far below is probably always more 
important in volume and extent than what is visible above ground.

(FIGURE 596. Strata intercepted by a trap dike, and covered with alluvium.)

We have already stated how frequently dense masses of strata have been removed 
by denudation from wide areas (see Chapter 6); and this fact prepares us to 
expect a similar destruction of whatever may once have formed the uppermost part 
of ancient submarine or subaerial volcanoes, more especially as those 
superficial parts are always of the lightest and most perishable materials. The 
abrupt manner in which dikes of trap usually terminate at the surface (see 
Figure 596), and the water-worn pebbles of trap in the alluvium which covers the 
dike, prove incontestably that whatever was uppermost in these formations has 
been swept away. It is easy, therefore, to conceive that what is gone in regions 
of trap may have corresponded to what is now visible in active volcanoes.

As to the absence of porosity in the trappean formations, the appearances are in 
a great degree deceptive, for all amygdaloids are, as already explained, porous 
rocks, into the cells of which mineral matter such as silex, carbonate of lime, 
and other ingredients, have been subsequently introduced (see above); sometimes, 
perhaps, by secretion during the cooling and consolidation of lavas. In the 
Little Cumbray, one of the Western Islands, near Arran, the amygdaloid sometimes 
contains elongated cavities filled with brown spar; and when the nodules have 
been washed out, the interior of the cavities is glazed with the vitreous 
varnish so characteristic of the pores of slaggy lavas. Even in some parts of 
this rock which are excluded from air and water, the cells are empty, and seem 
to have always remained in this state, and are therefore undistinguishable from 
some modern lavas. (MacCulloch Western Islands volume 2 page 487.)

Dr. MacCulloch, after examining with great attention these and the other igneous 
rocks of Scotland, observes, "that it is a mere dispute about terms, to refuse 
to the ancient eruptions of trap the name of submarine volcanoes; for they are 
such in every essential point, although they no longer eject fire and smoke." 
The same author also considers it not improbable that some of the volcanic rocks 
of the same country may have been poured out in the open air. (System of Geology 
volume 2 page 114.)

It will be seen in the following chapters that in the earth's crust there are 
volcanic tuffs of all ages, containing marine shells, which bear witness to 
eruptions at many successive geological periods. These tuffs, and the associated 
trappean rocks, must not be compared to lava and scoriae which had cooled in the 
open air. Their counterparts must be sought in the products of modern submarine 
volcanic eruptions. If it be objected that we have no opportunity of studying 
these last, it may be answered, that subterranean movements have caused, almost 
everywhere in regions of active volcanoes, great changes in the relative level 
of land and sea, in times comparatively modern, so as to expose to view the 
effects of volcanic operations at the bottom of the sea.


CHAPTER XXIX.

ON THE AGES OF VOLCANIC ROCKS.

Tests of relative Age of Volcanic Rocks.
Why ancient and modern Rocks can not be identical.
Tests by Superposition and intrusion.
Test by Alteration of Rocks in Contact.
Test by Organic Remains.
Test of Age by Mineral Character.
Test by Included Fragments.
Recent and Post-pliocene volcanic Rocks.
Vesuvius, Auvergne, Puy de Come, and Puy de Pariou.
Newer Pliocene volcanic Rocks.
Cyclopean Isles, Etna, Dikes of Palagonia, Madeira.
Older Pliocene volcanic Rocks.
Italy.
Pliocene Volcanoes of the Eifel.
Trass.

Having in the former part of this work referred the sedimentary strata to a long 
succession of geological periods, we have now to consider how far the volcanic 
formations can be classed in a similar chronological order. The tests of 
relative age in this class of rocks are four: first, superposition and 
intrusion, with or without alteration of the rocks in contact; second, organic 
remains; third, mineral characters; fourth, included fragments of older rocks.

Besides these four tests it may be said, in a general way, that volcanic rocks 
of Primary or Palaeozoic antiquity differ from those of the Secondary or 
Mesozoic age, and these again from the Tertiary and Recent. Not, perhaps, that 
they differed originally in a greater degree than the modern volcanic rocks of 
one region, such as that of the Andes, differ from those of another, such as 
Iceland, but because all rocks permeated by water, especially if its temperature 
be high, are liable to undergo a slow transmutation, even when they do not 
assume a new crystalline form like that of the hypogene rocks.

Although subaerial and submarine denudation, as before stated, remove, in the 
course of ages, large portions of the upper or more superficial products of 
volcanoes, yet these are sometimes preserved by subsidence, becoming covered by 
the sea or by superimposed marine deposits. In this way they may be protected 
for ages from the waves of the sea, or the destroying action of rivers, while, 
at the same time, they may not sink so deep as to be exposed to that Plutonic 
action (to be spoken of in Chapter 31) which would convert them into crystalline 
rocks. But even in this case they will not remain unaltered, because they will 
be percolated by water often of high temperature, and charged with carbonate of 
lime, silex, iron, and other mineral ingredients, whereby gradual changes in the 
constitution of the rocks may be superinduced. Every geologist is aware how 
often silicified trees occur in volcanic tuffs, the perfect preservation of 
their internal structure showing that they have not decayed before the 
petrifying material was supplied.

The porous and vesicular nature of a large part, both of the basaltic and 
trachytic lavas, affords cavities in which silex and carbonate of lime are 
readily deposited. Minerals of the zeolite family, the composition of which has 
already been alluded to in Chapter 28, occur in amygdaloids and other trap-rocks 
in great abundance, and Daubree's observations have proved that they are not 
always simple deposits of substances held in solution by the percolating waters, 
being occasionally products of the chemical action of that water on the rock 
through which they are filtered, and portions of which are decomposed. From 
these considerations it follows that the perfect identity of very ancient and 
very modern volcanic formations is scarcely possible.

TESTS BY SUPERPOSITION.

(FIGURE 597. Section through sedimentary mass with melted matter.)

If a volcanic rock rest upon an aqueous deposit, the volcanic must be the newest 
of the two; but the like rule does not hold good where the aqueous formation 
rests upon the volcanic, for melted matter, rising from below, may penetrate a 
sedimentary mass without reaching the surface, or may be forced in conformably 
between two strata, as b below D in Figure 597, after which it may cool down and 
consolidate. Superposition, therefore, is not of the same value as a test of age 
in the unstratified volcanic rocks as in fossiliferous formations. We can only 
rely implicitly on this test where the volcanic rocks are contemporaneous, not 
where they are intrusive. Now, they are said to be contemporaneous if produced 
by volcanic action which was going on simultaneously with the deposition of the 
strata with which they are associated. Thus in the section at D (Figure 597), we 
may perhaps ascertain that the trap b flowed over the fossiliferous bed c, and 
that, after its consolidation, a was deposited upon it, a and c both belonging 
to the same geological period. But, on the other hand, we must conclude the trap 
to be intrusive, if the stratum a be altered by b at the point of contact, or 
if, in pursuing b for some distance, we find at length that it cuts through the 
stratum a, and then overlies it as at E.

(FIGURE 598. Section through sedimentary mass with melted matter.)

We may, however, be easily deceived in supposing the volcanic rock to be 
intrusive, when in reality it is contemporaneous; for a sheet of lava, as it 
spreads over the bottom of the sea, can not rest everywhere upon the same 
stratum, either because these have been denuded, or because, if newly thrown 
down, they thin out in certain places, thus allowing the lava to cross their 
edges. Besides, the heavy igneous fluid will often, as it moves along, cut a 
channel into beds of soft mud and sand. Suppose the submarine lava F (Figure 
598) to have come in contact in this manner with the strata a, b, c, and that 
after its consolidation the strata d, e are thrown down in a nearly horizontal 
position, yet so as to lie unconformably to F, the appearance of subsequent 
intrusion will here be complete, although the trap is in fact contemporaneous. 
We must not, therefore, hastily infer that the rock F is intrusive, unless we 
find the overlying strata, d, e, to have been altered at their junction, as if 
by heat.

The test of age by superposition is strictly applicable to all stratified 
volcanic tuffs, according to the rules already explained in the case of 
sedimentary deposits (see Chapter 8).

TEST OF AGE BY ORGANIC REMAINS.

We have seen how, in the vicinity of active volcanoes, scoriae, pumice, fine 
sand, and fragments of rock are thrown up into the air, and then showered down 
upon the land, or into neighbouring lakes or seas. In the tuffs so formed 
shells, corals, or any other durable organic bodies which may happen to be 
strewed over the bottom of a lake or sea will be imbedded, and thus continue as 
permanent memorials of the geological period when the volcanic eruption 
occurred. Tufaceous strata thus formed in the neighbourhood of Vesuvius, Etna, 
Stromboli, and other volcanoes now in islands or near the sea, may give 
information of the relative age of these tuffs at some remote future period when 
the fires of these mountains are extinguished. By evidence of this kind we can 
establish a coincidence in age between volcanic rocks and the different primary, 
secondary, and tertiary fossiliferous strata.

The tuffs alluded to may not always be marine, but may include, in some places, 
fresh-water shells; in others, the bones of terrestrial quadrupeds. The 
diversity of organic remains in formations of this nature is perfectly 
intelligible, if we reflect on the wide dispersion of ejected matter during late 
eruptions, such as that of the volcano of Coseguina, in the province of 
Nicaragua, January 19, 1835. Hot cinders and fine scoriae were then cast up to a 
vast height, and covered the ground as they fell to the depth of more than ten 
feet, for a distance of eight leagues from the crater, in a southerly direction. 
Birds, cattle, and wild animals were scorched to death in great numbers, and 
buried in ashes. Some volcanic dust fell at Chiapa, upward of 1200 miles, not to 
leeward of the volcano, as might have been anticipated, but to windward, a 
striking proof of a counter-current in the upper region of the atmosphere; and 
some on Jamaica, about 700 miles distant to the north-east. In the sea, also, at 
the distance of 1100 miles from the point of eruption, Captain Eden of the 
"Conway" sailed 40 miles through floating pumice, among which were some pieces 
of considerable size. (Caldcleugh Philosophical Transactions 1836 page 27.)

TEST OF AGE BY MINERAL COMPOSITION.

As sediment of homogeneous composition, when discharged from the mouth of a 
large river, is often deposited simultaneously over a wide space, so a 
particular kind of lava flowing from a crater during one eruption may spread 
over an extensive area; thus in Iceland, in 1783, the melted matter, pouring 
from Skaptar Jokul, flowed in streams in opposite directions, and caused a 
continuous mass the extreme points of which were 90 miles distant from each 
other. This enormous current of lava varied in thickness from 100 feet to 600 
feet, and in breadth from that of a narrow river gorge to 15 miles. (See 
Principles Index "Skaptar Jokul.") Now, if such a mass should afterwards be 
divided into separate fragments by denudation, we might still, perhaps, identify 
the detached portions by their similarity in mineral composition. Nevertheless, 
this test will not always avail the geologist; for, although there is usually a 
prevailing character in lava emitted during the same eruption, and even in the 
successive currents flowing from the same volcano, still, in many cases, the 
different parts even of one lava-stream, or, as before stated, of one continuous 
mass of trap, vary much in mineral composition and texture.

In Auvergne, the Eifel, and other countries where trachyte and basalt are both 
present, the trachytic rocks are for the most part older than the basaltic. 
These rocks do, indeed, sometimes alternate partially, as in the volcano of Mont 
Dor, in Auvergne; and in Madeira trachytic rocks overlie an older basaltic 
series; but the trachyte occupies more generally an inferior position, and is 
cut through and overflowed by basalt. It can by no means be inferred that 
trachyte predominated at one period of the earth's history and basalt at 
another, for we know that trachytic lavas have been formed at many successive 
periods, and are still emitted from many active craters; but it seems that in 
each region, where a long series of eruptions have occurred, the lavas 
containing feldspar more rich in silica have been first emitted, and the escape 
of the more augitic kinds has followed. The hypothesis suggested by Mr. Scrope 
may, perhaps, afford a solution of this problem. The minerals, he observes, 
which abound in basalt are of greater specific gravity than those composing the 
feldspathic lavas; thus, for example, hornblende, augite, and olivine are each 
more than three times the weight of water; whereas common feldspar and albite 
have each scarcely more than 2 1/2 times the specific gravity of water; and the 
difference is increased in consequence of there being much more iron in a 
metallic state in basalt and greenstone than in trachyte and other allied 
feldspathic lavas. If, therefore, a large quantity of rock be melted up in the 
bowels of the earth by volcanic heat, the denser ingredients of the boiling 
fluid may sink to the bottom, and the lighter remaining above would in that case 
be first propelled upward to the surface by the expansive power of gases. Those 
materials, therefore, which occupy the lowest place in the subterranean 
reservoir will always be emitted last, and take the uppermost place on the 
exterior of the earth's crust.

TEST BY INCLUDED FRAGMENTS.

We may sometimes discover the relative age of two trap-rocks, or of an aqueous 
deposit and the trap on which it rests, by finding fragments of one included in 
the other in cases such as those before alluded to, where the evidence of 
superposition alone would be insufficient. It is also not uncommon to find a 
conglomerate almost exclusively composed of rolled pebbles of trap, associated 
with some fossiliferous stratified formation in the neighbourhood of massive 
trap. If the pebbles agree generally in mineral character with the latter, we 
are then enabled to determine its relative age by knowing that of the 
fossiliferous strata associated with the conglomerate. The origin of such 
conglomerates is explained by observing the shingle beaches composed of trap-
pebbles in modern volcanoes, as at the base of Etna.

RECENT AND POST-PLIOCENE VOLCANIC ROCKS.

I shall now select examples of contemporaneous volcanic rocks of successive 
geological periods, to show that igneous causes have been in activity in all 
past ages of the world. They have been perpetually shifting the places where 
they have broken out at the earth's surface, and we can sometimes prove that 
those areas which are now the great theatres of volcanic action were in a state 
of perfect tranquillity at remote geological epochs, and that, on the other 
hand, in places where at former periods the most violent eruptions took place at 
the surface and continued for a great length of time, there has been an entire 
suspension of igneous action in historical times, and even, as in the British 
Isles, throughout a large part of the antecedent Tertiary Period.

In the absence of British examples of volcanic rocks newer than the Upper 
Miocene, I may state that in other parts of the world, especially in those where 
volcanic eruptions are now taking place from time to time, there are tuffs and 
lavas belonging to that part of the Tertiary era the antiquity of which is 
proved by the presence of the bones of extinct quadrupeds which co-existed with 
terrestrial, fresh-water, and marine mollusca of species still living. One 
portion of the lavas, tuffs, and trap-dikes of Etna, Vesuvius, and the island of 
Ischia has been produced within the historical era; another and a far more 
considerable part originated at times immediately antecedent, when the waters of 
the Mediterranean were already inhabited by the existing testacea, but when 
certain species of elephant, rhinoceros, and other quadrupeds now extinct, 
inhabited Europe.

VESUVIUS.

I have traced in the "Principles of Geology" the history of the changes which 
the volcanic region of Campania is known to have undergone during the last 2000 
years. The aggregate effect of igneous operations during that period is far from 
insignificant, comprising as it does the formation of the modern cone of 
Vesuvius since the year 79, and the production of several minor cones in Ischia, 
together with that of Monte Nuovo in the year 1538. Lava-currents have also 
flowed upon the land and along the bottom of the sea-- volcanic sand, pumice, 
and scoriae have been showered down so abundantly that whole cities were buried-
- tracts of the sea have been filled up or converted into shoals-- and tufaceous 
sediment has been transported by rivers and land-floods to the sea. There are 
also proofs, during the same recent period, of a permanent alteration of the 
relative levels of the land and sea in several places, and of the same tract 
having, near Puzzuoli, been alternately upheaved and depressed to the amount of 
more than twenty feet. In connection with these convulsions, there are found, on 
the shores of the Bay of Baiae, recent tufaceous strata, filled with articles 
fabricated by the hands of man, and mingled with marine shells.

It has also been stated (Chapter 13), that when we examine this same region, it 
is found to consist largely of tufaceous strata, of a date anterior to human 
history or tradition, which are of such thickness as to constitute hills from 
500 to more than 2000 feet in height. Some of these strata contain marine shells 
which are exclusively of living species, others contain a slight mixture, one or 
two per cent of species not known as living.

The ancient part of Vesuvius is called Somma, and consists of the remains of an 
older cone which appears to have been partly destroyed by explosion. In the 
great escarpment which this remnant of the ancient mountain presents towards the 
modern cone of Vesuvius, there are many dikes which are for the most part 
vertical, and traverse the inclined beds of lava and scoriae which were 
successively superimposed during those eruptions by which the old cone was 
formed. They project in relief several inches, or sometimes feet, from the face 
of the cliff, being extremely compact, and less destructible than the 
intersected tuffs and porous lavas. In vertical extent they vary from a few 
yards to 500 feet, and in breadth from one to twelve feet. Many of them cut all 
the inclined beds in the escarpment of Somma from top to bottom, others stop 
short before they ascend above halfway. In mineral composition they scarcely 
differ from the lavas of Somma, the rock consisting of a base of leucite and 
augite, through which large crystals of augite and some of leucite are 
scattered.

Nothing is more remarkable than the usual parallelism of the opposite sides of 
the dikes, which correspond almost as regularly as the two opposite faces of a 
wall of masonry. This character appears at first the more inexplicable, when we 
consider how jagged and uneven are the rents caused by earthquakes in masses of 
heterogeneous composition, like those composing the cone of Somma. In 
explanation of this phenomenon, M. Necker refers us to Sir W. Hamilton's account 
of an eruption of Vesuvius in the year 1779, who records the following fact: 
"The lavas, when they either boiled over the crater, or broke out from the 
conical parts of the volcano, constantly formed channels as regular as if they 
had been cut by art down the steep part of the mountain; and whilst in a state 
of perfect fusion, continued their course in those channels, which were 
sometimes full to the brim, and at other times more or less so, according to the 
quantity of matter in motion.

"These channels (says the same observer), I have found, upon examination after 
an eruption, to be in general from two to five or six feet wide, and seven or 
eight feet deep. They were often hid from the sight by a quantity of scoriae 
that had formed a crust over them; and the lava, having been conveyed in a 
covered way for some yards, came out fresh again into an open channel. After an 
eruption, I have walked in some of those subterraneous or covered galleries, 
which were exceedingly curious, the sides, top, and bottom BEING WORN PERFECTLY 
SMOOTH AND EVEN in most parts by the violence of the currents of the red-hot 
lavas which they had conveyed for many weeks successively." I was able to verify 
this phenomenon in 1858, when a stream of lava issued from a lateral cone. 
(Principles of Geology volume 1 page 626.) Now, the walls of a vertical fissure, 
through which lava has ascended in its way to a volcanic vent, must have been 
exposed to the same erosion as the sides of the channels before adverted to. The 
prolonged and uniform friction of the heavy fluid, as it is forced and made to 
flow upward, can not fail to wear and smooth down the surfaces on which it rubs, 
and the intense heat must melt all such masses as project and obstruct the 
passage of the incandescent fluid.

The rock composing the dikes both in the modern and ancient part of Vesuvius is 
far more compact than that of ordinary lava, for the pressure of a column of 
melted matter in a fissure greatly exceeds that in an ordinary stream of lava; 
and pressure checks the expansion of those gases which give rise to vesicles in 
lava. There is a tendency in almost all the Vesuvian dikes to divide into 
horizontal prisms, a phenomenon in accordance with the formation of vertical 
columns in horizontal beds of lava; for in both cases the divisions which give 
rise to the prismatic structure are at right angles to the cooling surfaces. 
(See Chapter 28.)

AUVERGNE.

Although the latest eruptions in central France seem to have long preceded the 
historical era, they are so modern as to have a very intimate connection with 
the present superficial outline of the country and with the existing valleys and 
river-courses. Among a great number of cones with perfect craters, one called 
the Puy de Tartaret sent forth a lava-current which can be traced up to its 
crater, and which flowed for a distance of thirteen miles along the bottom of 
the present valley to the village of Nechers, covering the alluvium of the old 
valley in which were preserved the bones of an extinct species of horse, and of 
a lagomys and other quadrupeds all closely allied to recent animals, while the 
associated land-shells were of species now living, such as Cyclostoma elegans, 
Helix hortensis, H. nemoralis, H. lapicida, and Clausilia rugosa. That the 
current which has issued from the Puy de Tartaret may, nevertheless, be very 
ancient in reference to the events of human history, we may conclude, not only 
from the divergence of the mammiferous fauna from that of our day, but from the 
fact that a Roman bridge of such form and construction as continued in use only 
down to the fifth century, but which may be older, is now seen at a place about 
a mile and a half from St. Nectaire. This ancient bridge spans the river Couze 
with two arches, each about fourteen feet wide. These arches spring from the 
lava of Tartaret, on both banks, showing that a ravine precisely like that now 
existing had already been excavated by the river through that lava thirteen or 
fourteen centuries ago.

While the river Couze has in most cases, as at the site of this ancient bridge, 
been simply able to cut a deep channel through the lava, the lower portion of 
which is shown to be columnar, the same torrent has in other places, where the 
valley was contracted to a narrow gorge, had power to remove the entire mass of 
basaltic rock, causing for a short space a complete breach of continuity in the 
volcanic current. The work of erosion has been very slow, as the basalt is tough 
and hard, and one column after another must have been undermined and reduced to 
pebbles, and then to sand. During the time required for this operation, the 
perishable cone of Tartaret, occupying the lowest part of the great valley 
descending from Mont Dor (see Chapter 30), and damming up the river so as to 
cause the Lake of Chambon, has stood uninjured, proving that no great flood or 
deluge can have passed over this region in the interval between the eruption of 
Tartaret and our own times.

PUY DE COME.

The Puy de Come and its lava-current, near Clermont, may be mentioned as another 
minor volcano of about the same age. This conical hill rises from the granitic 
platform, at an angle of between 30 and 40 degrees, to the height of more than 
900 feet. Its summit presents two distinct craters, one of them with a vertical 
depth of 250 feet. A stream of lava takes its rise at the western base of the 
hill instead of issuing from either crater, and descends the granitic slope 
towards the present site of the town of Pont Gibaud. Thence it pours in a broad 
sheet down a steep declivity into the valley of the Sioule, filling the ancient 
river-channel for the distance of more than a mile. The Sioule, thus 
dispossessed of its bed, has worked out a fresh one between the lava and the 
granite of its western bank; and the excavation has disclosed, in one spot, a 
wall of columnar basalt about fifty feet high. (Scrope's Central France page 60 
and plate.)

The excavation of the ravine is still in progress, every winter some columns of 
basalt being undermined and carried down the channel of the river, and in the 
course of a few miles rolled to sand and pebbles. Meanwhile the cone of Come 
remains unimpaired, its loose materials being protected by a dense vegetation, 
and the hill standing on a ridge not commanded by any higher ground, so that no 
floods of rain-water can descend upon it. There is no end to the waste which the 
hard basalt may undergo in future, if the physical geography of the country 
continue unchanged-- no limit to the number of years during which the heap of 
incoherent and transportable materials called the Puy de Come may remain in an 
almost stationary condition.

PUY DE PARIOU.

The brim of the crater of the Puy de Pariou, near Clermont, is so sharp, and has 
been so little blunted by time, that it scarcely affords room to stand upon. 
This and other cones in an equally remarkable state of integrity have stood, I 
conceive, uninjured, not IN SPITE of their loose porous nature, as might at 
first be naturally supposed, but in consequence of it. No rills can collect 
where all the rain is instantly absorbed by the sand and scoriae, as is 
remarkably the case on Etna; and nothing but a water-spout breaking directly 
upon the Puy de Pariou could carry away a portion of the hill, so long as it is 
not rent or ingulfed by earthquakes.

NEWER PLIOCENE VOLCANIC ROCKS.

The more ancient portion of Vesuvius and Etna originated at the close of the 
Newer Pliocene period, when less than ten, sometimes only one, in a hundred of 
the shells differed from those now living. In the case of Etna, it was before 
stated (Chapter 13) that Post-pliocene formations occur in the neighbourhood of 
Catania, while the oldest lavas of the great volcano are Pliocene. These last 
are seen associated with sedimentary deposits at Trezza and other places on the 
southern and eastern flanks of the great cone (see Chapter 13).

CYCLOPEAN ISLANDS.

The Cyclopean Islands, called by the Sicilians Dei Faraglioni, in the sea-cliffs 
of which these beds of clay, tuff, and associated lava are laid open to view, 
are situated in the Bay of Trezza, and may be regarded as the extremity of a 
promontory severed from the main land. Here numerous proofs are seen of 
submarine eruptions, by which the argillaceous and sandy strata were invaded and 
cut through, and tufaceous breccias formed. Inclosed in these breccias are many 
angular and hardened fragments of laminated clay in different states of 
alteration by heat, and intermixed with volcanic sands.

(FIGURE 599. View of the Isle of Cyclops, in the Bay of Trezza. (Drawn by 
Captain Basil Hall, R.N.))

The loftiest of the Cyclopean islets, or rather rocks, is about 200 feet in 
height, the summit being formed of a mass of stratified clay, the laminae of 
which are occasionally subdivided by thin arenaceous layers. These strata dip to 
the N.W., and rest on a mass of columnar lava (see Figure 599) in which the tops 
of the pillars are weathered, and so rounded as to be often hemispherical. In 
some places in the adjoining and largest islet of the group, which lies to the 
north-eastward of that represented in Figure 599), the overlying clay has been 
greatly altered and hardened by the igneous rock, and occasionally contorted in 
the most extraordinary manner; yet the lamination has not been obliterated, but, 
on the contrary, rendered much more conspicuous, by the indurating process.

(FIGURE 600. Contortions of strata in the largest of the Cyclopean Islands.)

(FIGURE 601. Newer Pliocene strata invaded by lava. Isle of Cyclops (horizontal 
section).
a. Lava.
b. Laminated clay and sand.
c. The same altered.)

In Figure 600 I have represented a portion of the altered rock, a few feet 
square, where the alternating thin laminae of sand and clay are contorted in a 
manner often observed in ancient metamorphic schists. A great fissure, running 
from east to west, nearly divides this larger island into two parts, and lays 
open its internal structure. In the section thus exhibited, a dike of lava is 
seen, first cutting through an older mass of lava, and then penetrating the 
superincumbent tertiary strata. In one place the lava ramifies and terminates in 
thin veins, from a few feet to a few inches in thickness (see Figure 601). The 
arenaceous laminae are much hardened at the point of contact, and the clays are 
converted into siliceous schist. In this island the altered rocks assume a 
honey-comb structure on their weathered surface, singularly contrasted with the 
smooth and even outline which the same beds present in their usual soft and 
yielding state. The pores of the lava are sometimes coated, or entirely filled 
with carbonate of lime, and with a zeolite resembling analcime, which has been 
called cyclopite. The latter mineral has also been found in small fissures 
traversing the altered marl, showing that the same cause which introduced the 
minerals into the cavities of the lava, whether we suppose sublimation or 
aqueous infiltration, conveyed it also into the open rents of the contiguous 
sedimentary strata.

DIKES OF PALAGONIA.

(FIGURES 602 and 603. Ground-plan of dikes near Palagonia.)

(FIGURE 602. Ground-plan of dikes near Palagonia.
a. Lava.
b. Peperino, consisting of volcanic sand, mixed with fragments of lava and 
limestone.)

(FIGURE 603. Ground-plan of dikes near Palagonia.
a. Lava.
b. Peperino, consisting of volcanic sand, mixed with fragments of lava and 
limestone.))

Dikes of vesicular and amygdaloidal lava are also seen traversing marine tuff or 
peperino, west of Palagonia, some of the pores of the lava being empty, while 
others are filled with carbonate of lime. In such cases we may suppose the tuff 
to have resulted from showers of volcanic sand and scoriae, together with 
fragments of limestone, thrown out by a submarine explosion, similar to that 
which gave rise to Graham Island in 1831. When the mass was, to a certain 
degree, consolidated, it may have been rent open, so that the lava ascended 
through fissures, the walls of which were perfectly even and parallel. In one 
case, after the melted matter that filled the rent (Figure 602) had cooled down, 
it must have been fractured and shifted horizontally by a lateral movement.

In Figure 603, the lava has more the appearance of a vein, which forced its way 
through the peperino. It is highly probable that similar appearances would be 
seen, if we could examine the floor of the sea in that part of the Mediterranean 
where the waves have recently washed away the new volcanic island; for when a 
superincumbent mass of ejected fragments has been removed by denudation, we may 
expect to see sections of dikes traversing tuff, or, in other words, sections of 
the channels of communication by which the subterranean lavas reached the 
surface.

MADEIRA.

Although the more ancient portion of the volcanic eruptions by which the island 
of Madeira and the neighbouring one of Porto Santo were built up occurred, as we 
shall presently see, in the Upper Miocene Period, a still larger part of the 
island is of Pliocene date. That the latest outbreaks belonged to the Newer 
Pliocene Period, I infer from the close affinity to the present flora of Madeira 
of the fossil plants preserved in a leaf-bed in the north-eastern part of the 
island. These fossils, associated with some lignite in the ravine of the river 
San Jorge, can none of them be proved to be of extinct species, but their 
antiquity may be inferred from the following considerations: Firstly-- The leaf-
bed, discovered by Mr. Hartung and myself in 1853, at the height of 1000 feet 
above the level of the sea, crops out at the base of a cliff formed by the 
erosion of a gorge cut through alternating layers of basalt and scoriae, the 
product of a vast succession of eruptions of unknown date, piled up to a 
thickness of 1000 feet, and which were all poured out after the plants, of which 
about twenty species have been recognised, flourished in Madeira. These lavas 
are inclined at an angle of about 15 degrees to the north, and came down from 
the great central region of eruption. Their accumulation implies a long period 
of intermittent volcanic action, subsequently to which the ravine of San Jorge 
was hollowed out. Secondly-- Some few of the plants, though perhaps all of 
living species, are supposed to be of genera not now existing in the island. 
They have been described by Sir Charles Bunbury and Professor Heer, and the 
former first pointed out that many of the leaves are of the laurel type, and 
analogous to those now flourishing in the modern forests of Madeira. He also 
recognised among them the leaves of Woodwardia radicans, and Davallia 
Canariensis, ferns now abundant in Madeira. Thirdly-- the great age of this 
leaf-bed of San Jorge, which was perhaps originally formed in the crater of some 
ancient volcanic cone afterwards buried under lava, is proved by its belonging 
to a part of the eastern extremity of Madeira, which, after the close of the 
igneous eruptions, became covered in the adjoining district of Canical with 
blown sand in which a vast number of land-shells were buried. These fossil 
shells belonged to no less than 36 species, among which are many now extremely 
rare in the island, and others, about five per cent, extinct or unknown in any 
part of the world. Several of these of the genus Helix are conspicuous from the 
peculiarity of their forms, others from their large dimensions. The geographical 
configuration of the country shows that this shell-bed is considerably more 
modern than the leaf-bed; it must therefore be referred to the Newer Pliocene, 
according to the definition of this period given in Chapter 9.

OLDER PLIOCENE PERIOD.-- ITALY.

In Tuscany, as at Radicofani, Viterbo, and Aquapendente, and in the Campagna di 
Roma, submarine volcanic tuffs are interstratified with the Older Pliocene 
strata of the Sub-apennine hills in such a manner as to leave no doubt that they 
were the products of eruptions which occurred when the shelly marls and sands of 
the Sub-appenine hills were in the course of deposition. This opinion I 
expressed after my visit to Italy in 1828 (See 1st edition of Principles of 
Geology volume 3 chapters 8 and 14 1833 and former editions of this work chapter 
31.), and it has recently (1850) been confirmed by the argument adduced by Sir 
R. Murchison in favour of the submarine origin of the tertiary volcanic rocks of 
Italy. (Quarterly Geological Journal volume 6 page 281.) These rocks are well-
known to rest conformably on the Sub-apennine marls, even as far south as Monte 
Mario, in the suburbs of Rome. On the exact age of the deposits of Monte Mario 
new light has recently been thrown by a careful study of their marine fossil 
shells, undertaken by MM. Rayneval, Van den Hecke, and Ponzi. They have compared 
no less than 160 species with the shells of the Coralline Crag of Suffolk, so 
well described by Mr. Searles Wood; and the specific agreement between the 
British and Italian fossils is so great, if we make due allowance for 
geographical distance and the difference of latitude, that we can have little 
hesitation in referring both to the same period, or to the Older Pliocene of 
this work. It is highly probable that, between the oldest trachytes of Tuscany 
and the newest rocks in the neighbourhood of Naples, a series of volcanic 
products might be detected of every age from the Older Pliocene to the 
historical epoch.

PLIOCENE VOLCANOES OF THE EIFEL.

Some of the most perfect cones and craters in Europe, not even excepting those 
of the district round Vesuvius, may be seen on the left or west bank of the 
Rhine, near Bonn and Andernach. They exhibit characters distinct from any which 
I have observed elsewhere, owing to the large part which the escape of aqueous 
vapour has played in the eruptions and the small quantities of lava emitted. The 
fundamental rocks of the district are grey and red sandstones and shales, with 
some associated limestones, replete with fossils of the Devonian or Old Red 
Sandstone group. The volcanoes broke out in the midst of these inclined strata, 
and when the present systems of hills and valleys had already been formed. The 
eruptions occurred sometimes at the bottom of deep valleys, sometimes on the 
summit of hills, and frequently on intervening platforms. In travelling through 
this district we often come upon them most unexpectedly, and may find ourselves 
on the very edge of a crater before we had been led to suspect that we were 
approaching the site of any igneous outburst. Thus, for example, on arriving at 
the village of Gemund, immediately south of Daun, we leave the stream, which 
flows at the bottom of a deep valley in which strata of sandstone and shale crop 
out. We then climb a steep hill, on the surface of which we see the edges of the 
same strata dipping inward towards the mountain. When we have ascended to a 
considerable height, we see fragments of scoriae sparingly scattered over the 
surface; until at length, on reaching the summit, we find ourselves suddenly on 
the edge of a tarn, or deep circular lake-basin called the Gemunder Maar. In it 
we recognise the ordinary form of a crater, for which we have been prepared by 
the occurrence of scoriae scattered over the surface of the soil. But on 
examining the walls of the crater we find precipices of sandstone and shale 
which exhibit no signs of the action of heat; and we look in vain for those beds 
of lava and scoriae, dipping outward on every side, which we have been 
accustomed to consider as characteristic of volcanic vents. As we proceed, 
however, to the opposite side of the lake, we find a considerable quantity of 
scoriae and some lava, and see the whole surface of the soil sparkling with 
volcanic sand, and strewed with ejected fragments of half-fused shale, which 
preserves its laminated texture in the interior, while it has a vitrified or 
scoriform coating.

Other crater lakes of circular or oval form, and hollowed out of similar ancient 
strata, occur in the Upper Eifel, where copious aeriform discharges have taken 
place, throwing out vast heaps of pulverized shale into the air. I know of no 
other extinct volcanoes where gaseous explosions of such magnitude have been 
attended by the emission of so small a quantity of lava. Yet I looked in vain in 
the Eifel for any appearances which could lend support to the hypothesis that 
the sudden rushing out of such enormous volumes of gas had ever lifted up the 
stratified rocks immediately around the vent so as to form conical masses, 
having their strata dipping outward on all sides from a central axis, as is 
assumed in the theory of elevation craters, alluded to in the last chapter.

I have already given (Figure 590) an example in the Eifel of a small stream of 
lava which issued from one of the craters of that district at Bertrich-Baden. It 
shows that when some of these volcanoes were in action the valleys had already 
been eroded to their present depth.

TRASS.

The tufaceous alluvium called trass, which has covered large areas in the Eifel, 
and choked up some valleys now partially re-excavated, is unstratified. Its base 
consists almost entirely of pumice, in which are included fragments of basalt 
and other lavas, pieces of burnt shale, slate, and sandstone, and numerous 
trunks and branches of trees. If, as is probable, this trass was formed during 
the period of volcanic eruptions, it may have originated in the manner of the 
moya of the Andes.

We may easily conceive that a similar mass might now be produced, if a copious 
evolution of gases should occur in one of the lake-basins. If a breach should be 
made in the side of the cone, the flood would sweep away great heaps of ejected 
fragments of shale and sandstone, which would be borne down into the adjoining 
valleys. Forests might be torn up by such a flood, and thus the occurrence of 
the numerous trunks of trees dispersed irregularly through the trass can be 
explained. The manner in which this trass conforms to the shape of the present 
valleys implies its comparatively modern origin, probably not dating farther 
back than the Pliocene Period.


CHAPTER XXX.

AGE OF VOLCANIC ROCKS
CONTINUED.

Volcanic Rocks of the Upper Miocene Period.
Madeira.
Grand Canary.
Azores.
Lower Miocene Volcanic Rocks.
Isle of Mull.
Staffa and Antrim.
The Eifel.
Upper and Lower Miocene Volcanic Rocks of Auvergne.
Hill of Gergovia.
Eocene Volcanic Rocks of Monte Bolca.
Trap of Cretaceous Period.
Oolitic Period.
Triassic Period.
Permian Period.
Carboniferous Period.
Erect Trees buried in Volcanic Ash in the Island of Arran.
Old Red Sandstone Period.
Silurian Period.
Cambrian Period.
Laurentian Volcanic Rocks.

VOLCANIC ROCKS OF THE UPPER MIOCENE PERIOD.

MADEIRA.

The greater part of the volcanic eruptions of Madeira, as we have already seen 
(Chapter 29), belong to the Pliocene Period, but the most ancient of them are of 
Upper Miocene date, as shown by the fossil shells included in the marine tuffs 
which have been upraised at San Vicente, in the northern part of the island, to 
the height of 1300 feet above the level of the sea. A similar marine and 
volcanic formation constitutes the fundamental portion of the neighbouring 
island of Porto Santo, forty miles distant from Madeira, and is there elevated 
to an equal height, and covered, as in Madeira, with lavas of supra-marine 
origin.

The largest number of fossils have been collected from the tuffs and 
conglomerates and some beds of limestone in the island of Baixo, off the 
southern extremity of Porto Santo. They amount in this single locality to more 
than sixty in number, of which about fifty are mollusca, but many of these are 
only casts. Some of the shells probably lived on the spot during the intervals 
between eruptions, and some may have been cast up into the water or air together 
with muddy ejections, and, falling down again, have been deposited on the bottom 
of the sea. The hollows in some of the fragments of vesicular lava of which the 
breccias and conglomerates are composed are partially filled with calc-sinter, 
being thus half converted into amygdaloids. Among the fossil shells common to 
Madeira and Porto Santo, large cones, strombs, and cowries are conspicuous among 
the univalves, and Cardium, Spondylus, and Lithodomus among the 
lamellibranchiate bivalves, and among the Echinoderms the large Clypeaster 
called C. altus, an extinct European Miocene fossil.

The largest list of fossils has been published by Mr. Karl Meyer, in Hartung's 
"Madeira;" but in the collection made by myself, and in a still larger one 
formed by Mr. J. Yate Johnson, several remarkable forms not in Meyer's list 
occur, as, for example, Pholadomya, and a large Terebra. Mr. Johnson also found 
a fine specimen of Nautilus (Atruria) ziczac (Figure 211), a well-known Falunian 
fossil of Europe; and in the same volcanic tuff of Baixo, the Echinoderm Brisus 
Scillae, a living Mediterranean species, found fossil in the Miocene strata of 
Malta. Mr. Meyer identifies one-third of the Madeira shells with known European 
Miocene (or Falunian) forms. The huge Strombus of San Vicente and Porto Santo, 
S. Italicus, is an extinct shell of the Sub-apennine or Older Pliocene 
formations. The mollusca already obtained from various localities of Madeira and 
Porto Santo are not less than one hundred in number, and, according to the late 
Dr. S.P. Woodward, rather more than a third are of species still living, but 
many of these are not now inhabitants of the neighbouring sea.

It has been remarked (Chapter 16), that in the Older Pliocene and Upper Miocene 
deposits of Europe many forms occur of a more southern aspect than those now 
inhabiting the nearest sea. In like manner the fossil corals, or Zoantharia, six 
in number, which I obtained from Madeira, of the genera Astraea, Sarcinula, 
Hydnophora, were pronounced by Mr. Lonsdale to be forms foreign to the adjacent 
coasts, and agreeing with the fauna of a sea warmer than that now separating 
Madeira from the nearest part of the African coast. We learn, indeed, from the 
observations made in 1859, by the Reverend R.T. Lowe, that more than one-half, 
or fifty-three in ninety, of the marine mollusks collected by him from the sandy 
beach of Mogador are common British species, although Mogador is 18 1/2 degrees 
south of the nearest shores of England. The living shells of Madeira and Porto 
Santo are in like manner those of a temperate climate, although in great part 
differing specifically from those of Mogador. (Linnean Proceedings Zoology 
1860.)

GRAND CANARY.

In the Canaries, especially in the Grand Canary, the same marine Upper Miocene 
formation is found. Stratified tuffs, with intercalated conglomerates and lavas, 
are there seen in nearly horizontal layers in sea-cliffs about 300 feet high, 
near Las Palmas. Mr. Hartung and I were unable to find marine shells in these 
tuffs at a greater elevation than 400 feet above the sea; but as the deposit to 
which they belong reaches to the height of 1100 feet or more in the interior, we 
conceive that an upheaval of at least that amount has taken place. The 
Clypeaster altus, Spondylus gaederopus, Pectunculus pilosus, Cardita calyculata, 
and several other shells, serve to identify this formation with that of the 
Madeiras, and Ancillaria glandiformis, which is not rare, and some other 
fossils, remind us of the faluns of Touraine.

The sixty-two Miocene species which I collected in the Grand Canary were 
referred by the late Dr. S.P. Woodward to forty-seven genera, ten of which are 
no longer represented in the neighbouring sea, namely Corbis, an African form, 
Hinnites, now living in Oregon, Thecidium (T. Mediterranean, identical with the 
Miocene fossil of St. Juvat, in Brittany), Calyptraea, Hipponyx, Nerita, Erato, 
Oliva, Ancillaria, and Fasciolaria.

These tuffs of the southern shores of the Grand Canary, containing the Upper 
Miocene shells, appear to be about the same age as the most ancient volcanic 
rocks of the island, composed of slaty diabase, phonolite, and trachyte. Over 
the marine lavas and tuffs trachytic and basaltic products of subaerial volcanic 
origin, between 4000 and 5000 feet in thickness, have been piled, the central 
parts of the Grand Canary reaching the height of about 6000 feet above the level 
of the sea. A large portion of this mass is of Pliocene date, and some of the 
latest lavas have been poured out since the time when the valleys were already 
excavated to within a few feet of their present depth.

On the whole, the rocks of the Grand Canary, an island of a nearly circular 
shape, and 6 1/2 geographical miles diameter, exhibit proofs of a long series of 
eruptions beginning like those of Madeira, Porto Santo, and the Azores, in the 
Upper Miocene period, and continued to the Post-Pliocene. The building up of the 
Grand Canary by subaerial eruptions, several thousand feet thick, went on 
simultaneously with the gradual upheaval of the earliest products of submarine 
eruptions, in the same manner as the Pliocene marine strata of the oldest parts 
of Vesuvius and Etna have been upraised during eruptions of Post-tertiary date.

In proof that movements of elevation have actually continued down to Post-
tertiary times, I may remark that I found raised beaches containing shells of 
the Recent Period in the Grand Canary, Teneriffe, and Porto Santo. The most 
remarkable raised beach which I observed in the Grand Canary, in the study of 
which I was assisted by Don Pedro Maffiotte, is situated in the north-eastern 
part of the island at San Catalina, about a quarter of a mile north of Las 
Palmas. It intervenes between the base of the high cliff formed of the tuffs 
with Miocene shells and the sea-shore. From this beach, at an elevation of 
twenty-five feet above high-water mark, and at a distance of about 150 feet from 
the present shore, I obtained more than fifty species of living marine shells. 
Many of them, according to Dr. S.P. Woodward, are no longer inhabitants of the 
contiguous sea, as, for example, Strombus bubonius, which is still living on the 
West Coast of Africa, and Cerithium procerum, found at Mozambique; others are 
Mediterranean species, as Pecten Jacobaeus and P. polymorphus. Some of these 
testacea, such as Cardita squamosa, are inhabitants of deep water, and the 
deposit on the whole seems to indicate a depth of water exceeding a hundred 
feet.

AZORES.

In the island of St. Mary's, one of the Azores, marine fossil shells have long 
been known. They are found on the north-east coast on a small projecting 
promontory called Ponta do Papagaio (or Point-Parrot), chiefly in a limestone 
about twenty feet thick, which rests upon, and is again covered by, basaltic 
lavas, scoriae, and conglomerates. The pebbles in the conglomerate are cemented 
together with carbonate of lime.

Mr. Hartung, in his account of the Azores, published in 1860, describes twenty-
three shells from St. Mary's (Hartung Die Azoren 1860 also Insel Gran Canaria, 
Madeira und Porto Santo 1864 Leipsig.), of which eight perhaps are identical 
with living species, and twelve are with more or less certainty referred to 
European Tertiary forms, chiefly Upper Miocene. One of the most characteristic 
and abundant of the new species, Cardium Hartungi, not known as fossil in 
Europe, is very common in Porto Santo and Baixo, and serves to connect the 
Miocene fauna of the Azores and the Madeiras. In some of the Azores, as well as 
in the Canary islands, the volcanic fires are not yet extinct, as the recorded 
eruptions of Lanzerote, Teneriffe, Palma, St. Michael's, and others, attest.

LOWER MIOCENE VOLCANIC ROCKS.

ISLE OF MULL AND ANTRIM.

I may refer the reader to the account already given (Chapter 15) of leaf-beds at 
Ardtun, in the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides, which bear a relation to the 
associated volcanic rocks of Lower Miocene date analogous to that which the 
Madeira leaf-bed, above described (Chapter 29), bears to the Pliocene lavas of 
that island. Mr. Geikie has shown that the volcanic rocks in Mull are above 3000 
feet in thickness. There seems little doubt that the well-known columnar basalt 
of Staffa, as well as that of Antrim in Ireland, are of the same age, and not of 
higher antiquity, as once suspected.

THE EIFEL.

A large portion of the volcanic rocks of the Lower Rhine and the Eifel are 
coeval with the Lower Miocene deposits to which most of the "Brown-Coal" of 
Germany belongs. The Tertiary strata of that age are seen on both sides of the 
Rhine, in the neighbourhood of Bonn, resting unconformably on highly inclined 
and vertical strata of Silurian and Devonian rocks. The Brown-Coal formation of 
that region consists of beds of loose sand, sandstone, and conglomerate, clay 
with nodules of clay-iron-stone, and occasionally silex. Layers of light brown 
and sometimes black lignite are interstratified with the clays and sands, and 
often irregularly diffused through them. They contain numerous impressions of 
leaves and stems of trees, and are extensively worked for fuel, whence the name 
of the formation. In several places layers of trachytic tuff are 
interstratified, and in these tuffs are leaves of plants identical with those 
found in the brown-coal, showing that, during the period of the accumulation of 
the latter, some volcanic products were ejected. The igneous rocks of the 
Westerwald, and of the mountains called the Siebengebirge, consist partly of 
basaltic and partly of trachytic lavas, the latter being in general the more 
ancient of the two. There are many varieties of trachyte, some of which are 
highly crystalline, resembling a coarse-grained granite, with large separate 
crystals of feldspar. Trachytic tuff is also very abundant.

M. Von Dechen, in his work on the Siebengebirge, has given a copious list of the 
animal and vegetable remains of the fresh-water strata associated with the 
brown-coal of that part of Germany. (Geognost. Beschreib. des Siebengebirges am 
Rhein Bonn 1852.) Plants of the genera Flabellaria, Ceanothus, and Daphnogene, 
including D. cinnamomifolia (Figure 155), occur in these beds, with nearly 150 
other plants. The fishes of the brown-coal near Bonn are found in a bituminous 
shale, called paper-coal, from being divisible into extremely thin leaves. The 
individuals are very numerous; but they appear to belong to a small number of 
species, some of which were referred by Agassiz to the genera Leuciscus, Aspius, 
and Perca. The remains of frogs also, of extinct species, have been discovered 
in the paper-coal; and a complete series may be seen in the museum at Bonn, from 
the most imperfect state of the tadpole to that of the full-grown animal. With 
these a salamander, scarcely distinguishable from the recent species, has been 
found, and the remains of many insects.

UPPER AND LOWER MIOCENE VOLCANIC ROCKS OF AUVERGNE.

The extinct volcanoes of Auvergne and Cantal, in central France, seem to have 
commenced their eruptions in the Lower Miocene period, but to have been most 
active during the Upper Miocene and Pliocene eras. I have already alluded to the 
grand succession of events of which there is evidence in Auvergne since the last 
retreat of the sea (see Chapter 29).

The earliest monuments of the Tertiary Period in that region are lacustrine 
deposits of great thickness, in the lowest conglomerates of which are rounded 
pebbles of quartz, mica-schist, granite, and other non-volcanic rocks, without 
the slightest intermixture of igneous products. To these conglomerates succeed 
argillaceous and calcareous marls and limestones, containing Lower Miocene 
shells and bones of mammalia, the higher beds of which sometimes alternate with 
volcanic tuff of contemporaneous origin. After the filling up or drainage of the 
ancient lakes, huge piles of trachytic and basaltic rocks, with volcanic 
breccias, accumulated to a thickness of several thousand feet, and were 
superimposed upon granite, or the contiguous lacustrine strata. The greater 
portion of these igneous rocks appear to have originated during the Upper 
Miocene and Pliocene periods; and extinct quadrupeds of those eras, belonging to 
the genera Mastodon, Rhinoceros, and others, were buried in ashes and beds of 
alluvial sand and gravel, which owe their preservation to overspreading sheets 
of lava.

In Auvergne, the most ancient and conspicuous of the volcanic masses is Mont 
Dor, which rests immediately on the granitic rocks standing apart from the 
fresh-water strata. This great mountain rises suddenly to the height of several 
thousand feet above the surrounding platform, and retains the shape of a 
flattened and somewhat irregular cone, the slope of which is gradually lost in 
the high plain around. This cone is composed of layers of scoriae, pumice-
stones, and their fine detritus, with interposed beds of trachyte and basalt, 
which descend often in uninterrupted sheets until they reach and spread 
themselves round the base of the mountain. (Scrope Central France page 98.) 
Conglomerates, also, composed of angular and rounded fragments of igneous rocks, 
are observed to alternate with the above; and the various masses are seen to dip 
off from the central axis, and to lie parallel to the sloping flanks of the 
mountain. The summit of Mont Dor terminates in seven or eight rocky peaks, where 
no regular crater can now be traced, but where we may easily imagine one to have 
existed, which may have been shattered by earthquakes, and have suffered 
degradation by aqueous agents. Originally, perhaps, like the highest crater of 
Etna, it may have formed an insignificant feature in the great pile, and, like 
it, may frequently have been destroyed and renovated.

Respecting the age of the great mass of Mont Dor, we can not come at present to 
any positive decision, because no organic remains have yet been found in the 
tuffs, except impressions of the leaves of trees of species not yet determined. 
It has already been stated (Chapter 15) that the earliest eruptions must have 
been posterior in origin to those grits and conglomerates of the fresh-water 
formation of the Limagne which contain no pebbles of volcanic rocks. But there 
is evidence at a few points, as in the hill of Gergovia, presently to be 
mentioned, that some eruptions took place before the great lakes were drained, 
while others occurred after the desiccation of those lakes, and when deep 
valleys had already been excavated through fresh-water strata.

The valley in which the cone of Tartaret, above-mentioned (Chapter 29), is 
situated affords an impressive monument of the very different dates at which the 
igneous eruptions of Auvergne have happened; for while the cone itself is of 
Post-Pliocene date, the valley is bounded by lofty precipices composed of sheets 
of ancient columnar trachyte and basalt, which once flowed from the summit of 
Mont Dor in some part of the Miocene period. These Miocene lavas had accumulated 
to a thickness of nearly 1000 feet before the ravine was cut down to the level 
of the river Couze, a river which was at length dammed up by the modern cone and 
the upper part of its course transformed into a lake.

GERGOVIA.

(FIGURE 604. Hill of Gergovia.
Section through (bottom to top) White and green marls: Altered Marl: Dike: 
Altered Marl: Limestone and peperino: Tuffs: Blue marls: White and yellow marl: 
Basaltic capping.)

It has been supposed by some observers that there is an alternation of a 
contemporaneous sheet of lava with fresh-water strata in the hill of Gergovia, 
near Clermont. But this idea has arisen from the intrusion of the dike 
represented in Figure 604, which has altered the green and white marls both 
above and below. Nevertheless, there is a real alternation of volcanic tuff with 
strata containing Lower Miocene fresh-water shells, among others a Melania 
allied to M. inquinata (Figure 217), with a Melanopsis and a Unio; there can, 
therefore, be no doubt that in Auvergne some volcanic explosions took place 
before the drainage of the lakes, and at a time when the Lower Miocene species 
of animals and plants still flourished.

EOCENE VOLCANIC ROCKS.

MONTE BOLCA.

The fissile limestone of Monte Bolca, near Verona, has for many centuries been 
celebrated in Italy for the number of perfect Ichthyolites which it contains. 
Agassiz has described no less than 133 species of fossil fish from this single 
deposit, and the multitude of individuals by which many of the species are 
represented is attested by the variety of specimens treasured up in the 
principal museums of Europe. They have been all obtained from quarries worked 
exclusively by lovers of natural history, for the sake of the fossils. Had the 
lithographic stone of Solenhofen, now regarded as so rich in fossils, been in 
like manner quarried solely for scientific objects, it would have remained 
almost a sealed book to palaeontologists, so sparsely are the organic remains 
scattered through it. When I visited Monte Bolca, in company with Sir Roderick 
Murchison, in 1828, we ascertained that the fish-bearing beds were of Eocene 
date, containing well-known species of Nummulites, and that a long series of 
submarine volcanic eruptions, evidently contemporaneous, had produced beds of 
tuff, which are cut through by dikes of basalt. There is evidence here of a long 
series of submarine volcanic eruptions of Eocene date, and during some of them, 
as Sir R. Murchison has suggested, shoals of fish were probably destroyed by the 
evolution of heat, noxious gases, and tufaceous mud, just as happened when 
Graham's Island was thrown up between Sicily and Africa in 1831, at which time 
the waters of the Mediterranean were seen to be charged with red mud, and 
covered with dead fish over a wide area. (Principles of Geology chapter 26 9th 
edition page 432.)

Associated with the marls and limestones of Monte Bolca are beds containing 
lignite and shale with numerous plants, which have been described by Unger and 
Massalongo, and referred by them to the Eocene period. I have already cited 
(Chapter 16) Professor Heer's remark, that several of the species are common to 
Monte Bolca and the white clay of Alum Bay, a Middle Eocene deposit; and the 
same botanist dwells on the tropical character of the flora of Monte Bolca and 
its distinctness from the sub-tropical flora of the Lower Miocene of Switzerland 
and Italy, in which last there is a far more considerable mixture of forms of a 
temperate climate, such as the willow, poplar, birch, elm, and others. That 
scarcely any one of the Monte Bolca fish should have been found in any other 
locality in Europe, is a striking illustration of the extreme imperfection of 
the palaeontological record. We are in the habit of imagining that our insight 
into the geology of the Eocene period is more than usually perfect, and we are 
certainly acquainted with an almost unbroken succession of assemblages of shells 
passing one into the other from the era of the Thanet sands to that of the 
Bembridge beds or Paris gypsum. The general dearth, therefore, of fish in the 
different members of the Eocene series, Upper, Middle, and Lower, might induce a 
hasty reasoner to conclude that there was a poverty of ichthyic forms during 
this period; but when a local accident, like the volcanic eruptions of Monte 
Bolca, occurs, proofs are suddenly revealed to us of the richness and variety of 
this great class of vertebrata in the Eocene sea. The number of genera of Monte 
Bolca fish is, according to Agassiz, no less than seventy-five, twenty of them 
peculiar to that locality, and only eight common to the antecedent Cretaceous 
period. No less than forty-seven out of the seventy-five genera make their 
appearance for the first time in the Monte Bolca rocks, none of them having been 
met with as yet in the antecedent formations. They form a great contrast to the 
fish of the secondary strata, as, with the exception of the Placoids, they are 
all Teleosteans, only one genus, Pycnodus, belonging to the order of Ganoids, 
which form, as before stated, the vast majority of the ichthyolites entombed in 
the secondary are Mesozoic rocks.

CRETACEOUS PERIOD.

M. Virlet, in his account of the geology of the Morea, page 205, has clearly 
shown that certain traps in Greece are of Cretaceous date; as those, for 
example, which alternate conformably with cretaceous limestone and greensand 
between Kastri and Damala, in the Morea. They consist in great part of diallage 
rocks and serpentine, and of an amygdaloid with calcareous kernels, and a base 
of serpentine. In certain parts of the Morea, the age of these volcanic rocks is 
established by the following proofs: first, the lithographic limestones of the 
Cretaceous era are cut through by trap, and then a conglomerate occurs, at 
Nauplia and other places, containing in its calcareous cement many well-known 
fossils of the chalk and greensand, together with pebbles formed of rolled 
pieces of the same serpentinous trap, which appear in the dikes above alluded 
to.

PERIOD OF OOLITE AND LIAS.

Although the green and serpentinous trap-rocks of the Morea belong chiefly to 
the Cretaceous era, as before mentioned, yet it seems that some eruptions of 
similar rocks began during the Oolitic period (Boblaye and Virlet Morea page 
23.); and it is probable that a large part of the trappean masses, called 
ophiolites in the Apennines, and associated with the limestone of that chain, 
are of corresponding age.

TRAP OF THE NEW RED SANDSTONE PERIOD.

In the southern part of Devonshire, trappean rocks are associated with New Red 
Sandstone, and, according to Sir H. De la Beche, have not been intruded 
subsequently into the sandstone, but were produced by contemporaneous volcanic 
action. Some beds of grit, mingled with ordinary red marl, resemble sands 
ejected from a crater; and in the stratified conglomerates occurring near 
Tiverton are many angular fragments of trap porphyry, some of them one or two 
tons in weight, intermingled with pebbles of other rocks. These angular 
fragments were probably thrown out from volcanic vents, and fell upon 
sedimentary matter then in the course of deposition. (De la Beche Geological 
Proceedings volume 2 page 198.)

TRAP OF THE PERMIAN PERIOD.

The recent investigations of Mr. Archibald Geikie in Ayrshire have shown that 
some of the volcanic rocks in that county are of Permian age, and it appears 
highly probable that the uppermost portion of Arthur's Seat in the suburbs of 
Edinburgh marks the site of an eruption of the same era.

TRAP OF THE CARBONIFEROUS PERIOD.

Two classes of contemporaneous trap-rocks occur in the coal-field of the Forth, 
in Scotland. The newest of these, connected with the higher series of coal-
measures, is well exhibited along the shores of the Forth, in Fifeshire, where 
they consist of basalt with olivine, amygdaloid, greenstone, wacke, and tuff. 
They appear to have been erupted while the sedimentary strata were in a 
horizontal position, and to have suffered the same dislocations which those 
strata have subsequently undergone. In the volcanic tuffs of this age are found 
not only fragments of limestone, shale, flinty slate, and sandstone, but also 
pieces of coal. The other or older class of carboniferous traps are traced along 
the south margin of Stratheden, and constitute a ridge parallel with the Ochils, 
and extending from Stirling to near St. Andrews. They consist almost exclusively 
of greenstone, becoming, in a few instances, earthy and amygdaloidal. They are 
regularly interstratified with the sandstone, shale, and iron-stone of the lower 
coal-measures, and, on the East Lomond, with Mountain Limestone. I examined 
these trap-rocks in 1838, in the cliffs south of St. Andrews, where they consist 
in great part of stratified tuffs, which are curved, vertical, and contorted, 
like the associated coal-measures. In the tuff I found fragments of 
carboniferous shale and limestone, and intersecting veins of greenstone.

FIFE-- FLISK DIKE.

A trap dike was pointed out to me by Dr. Fleming, in the parish of Flisk, in the 
northern part of the county of Fife, which cuts through the grey sandstone and 
shale, forming the lowest part of the Old Red Sandstone, but which may probably 
be of carboniferous date. It may be traced for many miles, passing through the 
amygdaloidal and other traps of the hill called Norman's Law in that parish. In 
its course it affords a good exemplification of the passage from the trappean 
into the Plutonic, or highly crystalline texture. Professor Gustavus Rose, to 
whom I submitted specimens of this dike, found it to be dolerite, and composed 
of greenish black augite and Labrador feldspar, the latter being the most 
abundant ingredient. A small quantity of magnetic iron, perhaps titaniferous, is 
also present. The result of this analysis is interesting, because both the 
ancient and modern lavas of Etna consist in like manner of augite, Labradorite, 
and titaniferous iron.

ERECT TREES BURIED IN VOLCANIC ASH AT ARRAN.

An interesting discovery was made in 1867 by Mr. E.A. Wunsch in the 
carboniferous strata of the north-eastern part of the island of Arran. In the 
sea-cliff about five miles north of Corrie, near the village of Laggan, strata 
of volcanic ash occur, forming a solid rock cemented by carbonate of lime and 
enveloping trunks of trees, determined by Mr. Binney to belong to the genera 
Sigillaria and Lepidodendron. Some of these trees are at right angles to the 
planes of stratification, while others are prostrate and accompanied by leaves 
and fruits of the same genera. I visited the spot in company with Mr. Wunsch in 
1870, and saw that the trees with their roots, of which about fourteen had been 
observed, occur at two distinct levels in volcanic tuffs parallel to each other, 
and inclined at an angle of about 40 degrees, having between them beds of shale 
and coaly matter seven feet thick. It is evident that the trees were overwhelmed 
by a shower of ashes from some neighbouring volcanic vent, as Pompeii was buried 
by matter ejected from Vesuvius. The trunks, several of them from three to five 
feet in circumference, remained with their Stigmarian roots spreading through 
the stratum below, which had served as a soil. The trees must have continued for 
years in an upright position after they were killed by the shower of burning 
ashes, giving time for a partial decay of the interior, so as to afford hollow 
cylinders into which the spores of plants were wafted. These spores germinated 
and grew, until finally their stems were petrified by carbonate of lime like 
some of the remaining portions of the wood of the containing Sigillaria. Mr. 
Carruthers has discovered that sometimes the plants which had thus grown and 
become fossil in the inside of a single trunk belonged to several distinct 
genera. The fact that the tree-bearing deposits now dip at an angle of 40 
degrees is the more striking, as they must clearly have remained horizontal and 
undisturbed during a long period of intermittent and contemporaneous volcanic 
action.

In some of the associated carboniferous shales, ferns and calamites occur, and 
all the phenomena of the successive buried forests remind us of the sections in 
Figures 439 and 440 of the Nova Scotia coal-measures, with this difference only, 
that in the case of the South Joggins the fossilisation of the trees was 
effected without the eruption of volcanic matter.

TRAP OF THE OLD RED SANDSTONE PERIOD.

By referring to the section explanatory of the structure of Forfarshire, already 
given (Chapter 5), the reader will perceive that beds of conglomerate, No. 3, 
occur in the middle of the Old Red Sandstone system, 1, 2, 3, 4. The pebbles in 
these conglomerates are sometimes composed of granitic and quartzose rocks, 
sometimes exclusively of different varieties of trap, which last, although 
purposely omitted in the section referred to, is often found either intruding 
itself in amorphous masses and dikes into the old fossiliferous tilestones, No. 
4, or alternating with them in conformable beds. All the different divisions of 
the red sandstone, 1, 2, 3, 4, are occasionally intersected by dikes, but they 
are very rare in Nos. 1 and 2, the upper members of the group consisting of red 
shale and red sandstone. These phenomena, which occur at the foot of the 
Grampians, are repeated in the Sidlaw Hills; and it appears that in this part of 
Scotland volcanic eruptions were most frequent in the earlier part of the Old 
Red Sandstone period. The trap-rocks alluded to consist chiefly of feldspathic 
porphyry and amygdaloid, the kernels of the latter being sometimes calcareous, 
often chalcedonic, and forming beautiful agates. We meet also with claystone, 
greenstone, compact feldspar, and tuff. Some of these rocks look as if they had 
flowed as lavas over the bottom of the sea, and enveloped quartz pebbles which 
were lying there, so as to form conglomerates with a base of greenstone, as is 
seen in Lumley Den, in the Sidlaw Hills. On either side of the axis of this 
chain of hills (see Figure 55), the beds of massive trap, and the tuffs composed 
of volcanic sand and ashes, dip regularly to the south-east or north-west, 
conformably with the shales and sandstones.

But the geological structure of the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, shows that 
igneous rocks were there formed during the newer part of the Devonian or "Old 
Red" period. These hills are 1900 feet high above the sea, and consist of 
conglomerates and sandstones of Upper Devonian age, resting on the inclined 
edges of grits and slates of Lower Devonian and Upper Silurian date. The 
contemporaneous volcanic rocks intercalated in this Upper Old Red consist of 
feldspathic lavas, or feldstones, with associated tuffs or ashy beds. The lavas 
were some of them originally compact, others vesicular, and these last have been 
converted into amygdaloids. They consist chiefly of feldstone or compact 
feldspar. The Pentland Hills, say Messrs. Maclaren and Geikie, afford evidence 
that at the time of the Upper Old Red Sandstone, the district to the south-west 
of Edinburgh was for a long while the seat of a powerful volcano, which sent out 
massive streams of lava and showers of ash, and continued active until well-nigh 
the dawn of the Carboniferous period. (Maclaren Geology of Fife and Lothians. 
Geikie Transactions of the Royal Society Edinburgh 1860-1861.)

SILURIAN VOLCANIC ROCKS.

It appears from the investigations of Sir R. Murchison in Shropshire, that when 
the Lower Silurian strata of that country were accumulating, there were frequent 
volcanic eruptions beneath the sea; and the ashes and scoriae then ejected gave 
rise to a peculiar kind of tufaceous sandstone or grit, dissimilar to the other 
rocks of the Silurian series, and only observable in places where syenitic and 
other trap-rocks protrude. These tuffs occur on the flanks of the Wrekin and 
Caer Caradoc, and contain Silurian fossils, such as casts of encrinites, 
trilobites, and mollusca. Although fossiliferous, the stone resembles a sandy 
claystone of the trap family. (Murchison Silurian System etc. page 230.)

Thin layers of trap, only a few inches thick, alternate in some parts of 
Shropshire and Montgomeryshire with sedimentary strata of the Lower Silurian 
system. This trap consists of slaty porphyry and granular feldspar rock, the 
beds being traversed by joints like those in the associated sandstone, 
limestone, and shale, and having the same strike and dip. (Ibid. page 212.)

In Radnorshire there is an example of twelve bands of stratified trap, 
alternating with Silurian schists and flagstones, in a thickness of 350 feet. 
The bedded traps consist of feldspar porphyry, and other varieties; and the 
interposed Llandeilo flags are of sandstone and shale, with trilobites and 
graptolites. (Murchison Silurian System etc. page 325.)

The Snowdonian hills in Carnarvonshire consist in great part of volcanic tuffs, 
the oldest of which are interstratified with the Bala and Llandeilo beds. There 
are some contemporaneous feldspathic lavas of this era, which, says Professor 
Ramsay, alter the slates on which they repose, having doubtless been poured out 
over them, in a melted state, whereas the slates which overlie them having been 
subsequently deposited after the lava had cooled and consolidated, have entirely 
escaped alteration. But there are greenstones associated with the same 
formation, which, although they are often conformable to the slates, are in 
reality intrusive rocks. They alter the stratified deposits both above and below 
them, and when traced to great distances are sometimes seen to cut through the 
slates, and to send off branches. Nevertheless, these greenstones appear to 
belong, like the lavas, to the Lower Silurian period.

CAMBRIAN VOLCANIC ROCKS.

The Lingula beds in North Wales have been described as 5000 feet in thickness. 
In the upper portion of these deposits volcanic tuffs or ashy materials are 
interstratified with ordinary muddy sediment, and here and there associated with 
thick beds of feldspathic lava. These rocks form the mountains called the Arans 
and the Arenigs; numerous greenstones are associated with them, which are 
intrusive, although they often run in the lines of bedding for a space. "Much of 
the ash," says Professor Ramsay, "seems to have been subaerial. Islands, like 
Graham's Island, may have sometimes raised their craters for various periods 
above the water, and by the waste of such islands some of the ashy matter became 
waterworn, whence the ashy conglomerate. Viscous matter seems also to have been 
shot into the air as volcanic bombs, which fell among the dust and broken 
crystals (that often form the ashes) before perfect cooling and consolidation 
had taken place." (Quarterly Geological Journal volume 9 page 170 1852.)

LAURENTIAN VOLCANIC ROCKS.

The Laurentian rocks in Canada, especially in Ottawa and Argenteuil, are the 
oldest intrusive masses yet known. They form a set of dikes of a fine-grained 
dark greenstone or dolerite, composed of feldspar and pyroxene, with occasional 
scales of mica and grains of pyrites. Their width varies from a few feet to a 
hundred yards, and they have a columnar structure, the columns being truly at 
right angles to the plane of the dike. Some of the dikes send off branches. 
These dolerites are cut through by intrusive syenite, and this syenite, in its 
turn, is again cut and penetrated by feldspar porphyry, the base of which 
consists of petrosilex, or a mixture of orthoclase and quartz. All these trap-
rocks appear to be of Laurentian date, as the Cambrian and Huronian rocks rest 
unconformably upon them. (Logan Geology of Canada 1863.) Whether some of the 
various conformable crystalline rocks of the Laurentian series, such as the 
coarse-grained granitoid and porphyritic varieties of gneiss, exhibiting 
scarcely any signs of stratification, and some of the serpentines, may not also 
be of volcanic origin, is a point very difficult to determine in a region which 
has undergone so much metamorphic action.


CHAPTER XXXI.

PLUTONIC ROCKS.

General Aspect of Plutonic Rocks.
Granite and its Varieties.
Decomposing into Spherical Masses.
Rude columnar Structure.
Graphic Granite.
Mutual Penetration of Crystals of Quartz and Feldspar.
Glass Cavities in Quartz of Granite.
Porphyritic, talcose, and syenitic Granite.
Schorlrock and Eurite.
Syenite.
Connection of the Granites and Syenites with the Volcanic Rocks.
Analogy in Composition of Trachyte and Granite.
Granite Veins in Glen Tilt, Cape of Good Hope, and Cornwall.
Metalliferous Veins in Strata near their Junction with Granite.
Quartz Veins.
Exposure of Plutonic Rocks at the surface due to Denudation.

The Plutonic rocks may be treated of next in order, as they are most nearly 
allied to the volcanic class already considered. I have described, in the first 
chapter, these Plutonic rocks as the unstratified division of the crystalline or 
hypogene formations, and have stated that they differ from the volcanic rocks, 
not only by their more crystalline texture, but also by the absence of tuffs and 
breccias, which are the products of eruptions at the earth's surface, whether 
thrown up into the air or the sea. They differ also by the absence of pores or 
cellular cavities, to which the expansion of the entangled gases gives rise in 
ordinary lava, never being scoriaceous or amygdaloidal, and never forming a 
porphyry with an uncrystalline base, nor alternating with tuffs.

From these and other peculiarities it has been inferred that the granites have 
been formed at considerable depths in the earth, and have cooled and 
crystallised slowly under great pressure, where the contained gases could not 
expand. The volcanic rocks, on the contrary, although they also have risen up 
from below, have cooled from a melted state more rapidly upon or near the 
surface. From this hypothesis of the great depth at which the granites 
originated, has been derived the name of "Plutonic rocks." The beginner will 
easily conceive that the influence of subterranean heat may extend downward from 
the crater of every active volcano to a great depth below, perhaps several miles 
or leagues, and the effects which are produced deep in the bowels of the earth 
may, or rather must, be distinct; so that volcanic and Plutonic rocks, each 
different in texture, and sometimes even in composition, may originate 
simultaneously, the one at the surface, the other far beneath it. The Plutonic 
formations also agree with the volcanic in having veins or ramifications 
proceeding from central masses into the adjoining rocks, and causing alterations 
in these last, which will be presently described. They also resemble trap in 
containing no organic remains; but they differ in being more uniform in texture, 
whole mountain masses of indefinite extent appearing to have originated under 
conditions precisely similar.

The two principal members of the Plutonic family of rocks are Granite and 
Syenite, each of which, with their varieties, bear very much the same relation 
to each other as the trachytes bear to the basalts. Granite is a compound of 
feldspar, quartz, and mica, the feldspars being rich in silica, which forms from 
60 to 70 per cent of the whole aggregate. In Syenite quartz is rare or wanting, 
hornblende taking the place of mica, and the proportion of silica not exceeding 
50 to 60 per cent.

(FIGURE 605. Mass of granite near the Sharp Tor, Cornwall.)

(FIGURE 606. Granite having a cuboidal and rude columnar structure, Land's End, 
Cornwall.)

Granite often preserves a very uniform character throughout a wide range of 
territory, forming hills of a peculiar rounded form, usually clad with a scanty 
vegetation. The surface of the rock is for the most part in a crumbling state, 
and the hills are often surmounted by piles of stones like the remains of a 
stratified mass, as in Figure 605, and sometimes like heaps of boulders, for 
which they have been mistaken. The exterior of these stones, originally 
quadrangular, acquires a rounded form by the action of air and water, for the 
edges and angles waste away more rapidly than the sides. A similar spherical 
structure has already been described as characteristic of basalt and other 
volcanic formations, and it must be referred to analogous causes, as yet but 
imperfectly understood. Although it is the general peculiarity of granite to 
assume no definite shapes, it is nevertheless occasionally subdivided by 
fissures, so as to assume a cuboidal, and even a columnar, structure. Examples 
of these appearances may be seen near the Land's End, in Cornwall. (See Figure 
606.)

(FIGURES 607 and 608. Graphic granite.

(FIGURE 607. Graphic granite. Section parallel to the laminae.)

(FIGURE 608. Graphic granite. Section transverse to the laminae.))

Feldspar, quartz, and mica are usually considered as the minerals essential to 
granite, the feldspar being most abundant in quantity, and the proportion of 
quartz exceeding that of mica. These minerals are united in what is termed a 
confused crystallisation; that is to say, there is no regular arrangement of the 
crystals in granite, as in gneiss (see Figure 622), except in the variety termed 
graphic granite, which occurs mostly in granitic veins. This variety is a 
compound of feldspar and quartz, so arranged as to produce an imperfect laminar 
structure. The crystals of feldspar appear to have been first formed, leaving 
between them the space now occupied by the darker-coloured quartz. This mineral, 
when a section is made at right angles to the alternate plates of feldspar and 
quartz, presents broken lines, which have been compared to Hebrew characters. 
(See Figure 608.) The variety of granite called by the French Pegmatite, which 
is a mixture of quartz and common feldspar, usually with some small admixture of 
white silvery mica, often passes into graphic granite.

Ordinary granite, as well as syenite and eurite, usually contains two kinds of 
feldspar: First, the common, or orthoclase, in which potash is the prevailing 
alkali, and this generally occurs in large crystals of a white or flesh colour; 
and secondly, feldspar in smaller crystals, in which soda predominates, usually 
of a dead white or spotted, and striated like albite, but not the same in 
composition. (Delesse Ann. des Mines 1852 tome 3 page 409 and 1848 tome 13 page 
675.)

As a general rule, quartz, in a compact or amorphous state, forms a vitreous 
mass, serving as the base in which feldspar and mica have crystallised; for 
although these minerals are much more fusible than silex, they have often 
imprinted their shapes upon the quartz. This fact, apparently so paradoxical, 
has given rise to much ingenious speculation. We should naturally have 
anticipated that, during the cooling of the mass, the flinty portion would be 
the first to consolidate; and that the different varieties of feldspar, as well 
as garnets and tourmalines, being more easily liquefied by heat, would be the 
last. Precisely the reverse has taken place in the passage of most granite 
aggregates from a fluid to a solid state, crystals of the more fusible minerals 
being found enveloped in hard, transparent, glassy quartz, which has often taken 
very faithful casts of each, so as to preserve even the microscopically minute 
striations on the surface of prisms of tourmaline. Various explanations of this 
phenomenon have been proposed by MM. de Beaumont, Fournet, and Durocher. They 
refer to M. Gaudin's experiments on the fusion of quartz, which show that silex, 
as it cools, has the property of remaining in a viscous state, whereas alumina 
never does. This "gelatinous flint" is supposed to retain a considerable degree 
of plasticity long after the granitic mixture has acquired a low temperature. 
Occasionally we find the quartz and feldspar mutually imprinting their forms on 
each other, affording evidence of the simultaneous crystallisation of both. 
(Bulletin 2e serie 4 1304; and d'Archiac Hist. des Progres de la Geol. 1 38.)

According to the experiments and observations of Gustavus Rose, the quartz of 
granite has the specific gravity of 2.6, which characterises silica when it is 
precipitated from a liquid solvent, and not that inferior density, namely, 2.3, 
which belongs to it when it cools in the laboratory from a state of fusion in 
what is called the dry way. By some it had been rashly inferred that the manner 
in which the consolidation of granite takes place is exceedingly different from 
the cooling of lavas, and that the intense heat supposed to be necessary for the 
production of mountain masses of Plutonic rocks might be dispensed with. But Mr. 
David Forbes informs me that silica can crystallise in the dry way, and he has 
found in quartz forming a constituent part of some trachytes, both from 
Guadeloupe and Iceland, glass cavities quite similar to those met with in 
genuine volcanic minerals.

These "glass cavities," which with many other kindred phenomena have been 
carefully studied by Mr. Sorby, are those in which a liquid, on cooling, has 
become first viscous and then solid without crystallising or undergoing a 
definite change in its physical structure. Other cavities which, like those just 
mentioned, are frequently discernible under the microscope in the minerals 
composing granitic rocks, are filled, some of them with gas or vapour, others 
with liquid, and by the movements of the bubbles thus included the distinctness 
of such cavities from those filled with a glassy substance can be tested. Mr. 
Sorby admits that the frequent occurrence of fluid cavities in the quartz of 
granite implies that water was almost always present in the formation of this 
rock; but the same may be said of almost all lavas, and it is now more than 
forty years since Mr. Scrope insisted on the important part which water plays in 
volcanic eruptions, being so intimately mixed up with the materials of the lava 
that he supposed it to aid in giving mobility to the fluid mass. It is well 
known that steam escapes for months, sometimes for years, from the cavities of 
lava when it is cooling and consolidating. As to the result of Mr. Sorby's 
experiments and speculations on this difficult subject, they may be stated in a 
few words. He concludes that the physical conditions under which the volcanic 
and granitic rocks originate are so far similar that in both cases they combine 
igneous fusion, aqueous solution, and gaseous sublimation-- the proof, he says, 
of the operation of water in the formation of granite being quite as strong as 
of that of heat. (See Quarterly Geological Journal volume 14 pages 465, 488.)

When rocks are melted at great depths water must be present, for two reasons-- 
First, because rainwater and seawater are always descending through fissured and 
porous rocks, and must at length find their way into the regions of subterranean 
heat; and secondly, because in a state of combination water enters largely into 
the composition of some of the most common minerals, especially those of the 
aluminous class. But the existence of water under great pressure affords no 
argument against our attributing an excessively high temperature to the mass 
with which it is mixed up. Bunsen, indeed, imagines that in Iceland water 
attains a white heat at a very moderate depth. To what extent some of the 
metamorphic rocks containing the same minerals as the granites may have been 
formed by hydrothermal action without the intervention of intense heat 
comparable to that brought into play in a volcanic eruption, will be considered 
when we treat of the metamorphic rocks in the thirty-third chapter.

PORPHYRITIC GRANITE.

(FIGURE 609. Porphyritic granite. Land's End, Cornwall.)

This name has been sometimes given to that variety in which large crystals of 
common feldspar, sometimes more than three inches in length, are scattered 
through an ordinary base of granite. An example of this texture may be seen in 
the granite of the Land's End, in Cornwall (Figure 609). The two larger 
prismatic crystals in this drawing represent feldspar, smaller crystals of which 
are also seen, similar in form, scattered through the base. In this base also 
appear black specks of mica, the crystals of which have a more or less perfect 
hexagonal outline. The remainder of the mass is quartz, the translucency of 
which is strongly contrasted to the opaqueness of the white feldspar and black 
mica. But neither the transparency of the quartz nor the silvery lustre of the 
mica can be expressed in the engraving.

The uniform mineral character of large masses of granite seems to indicate that 
large quantities of the component elements were thoroughly mixed up together, 
and then crystallised under precisely similar conditions. There are, however, 
many accidental, or "occasional," minerals, as they are termed, which belong to 
granite. Among these black schorl or tourmaline, actinolite, zircon, garnet, and 
fluor spar are not uncommon; but they are too sparingly dispersed to modify the 
general aspect of the rock. They show, nevertheless, that the ingredients were 
not everywhere exactly the same; and a still greater difference may be traced in 
the ever-varying proportions of the feldspar, quartz, and mica.

TALCOSE GRANITE

Talcose Granite, or Protogine of the French, is a mixture of feldspar, quartz, 
and talc. It abounds in the Alps, and in some parts of Cornwall, producing by 
its decomposition the kaolin or china clay, more than 12,000 tons of which are 
annually exported from that country for the potteries.

SCHORL-ROCK, AND SCHORLY GRANITE.

The former of these is an aggregate of schorl, or tourmaline, and quartz. When 
feldspar and mica are also present, it may be called schorly granite. This kind 
of granite is comparatively rare.

EURITE, FELDSTONE.

Eurite is a rock in which the ingredients of granite are blended into a finely 
granular mass, mica being usually absent, and, when present, in such minute 
flakes as to be invisible to the naked eye. It is sometimes called FELDSTONE, 
and when the crystals of feldspar are conspicuous it becomes FELDSPAR PORPHYRY. 
All these and other varieties of granite pass into certain kinds of trap-- a 
circumstance which affords one of many arguments in favour of what is now the 
prevailing opinion, that the granites are also of igneous origin. The contrast 
of the most crystalline form of granite to that of the most common and earthy 
trap is undoubtedly great; but each member of the volcanic class is capable of 
becoming porphyritic, and the base of the porphyry may be more and more 
crystalline, until the mass passes to the kind of granite most nearly allied in 
mineral composition.

SYENITIC GRANITE.

The quadruple compound of quartz, feldspar, mica, and hornblende, may be termed 
Syenitic Granite, and forms a passage between the granites and the syenites. 
This rock occurs in Scotland and in Guernsey.

SYENITE.

We now come to the second division of the Plutonic rocks, or those having less 
than 60 per cent of silica, and which, as before stated, are usually called 
syenitic. Syenite originally received its name from the celebrated ancient 
quarries of Syene, in Egypt. It differs from granite in having hornblende as a 
substitute for mica, and being without quartz. Werner at least considered 
syenite as a binary compound of feldspar and hornblende, and regarded quartz as 
merely one of its occasional minerals.

MIASCITE.

Miascite is one of the varieties of syenite most frequently spoken of; it is 
composed chiefly of orthoclase and nepheline, with hornblende and quartz as 
occasional accessory minerals. It derives its name from Miask, in the Ural 
Mountains, where it was first discovered by Gustavus Rose. ZIRCON-SYENITE is 
another variety closely allied to Miascite, but containing crystals of Zircon.

CONNECTION OF THE GRANITES AND SYENITES WITH THE VOLCANIC ROCKS.

The minerals which constitute alike the Plutonic and volcanic rocks consist, 
almost exclusively, of seven elements, namely, silica, alumina, magnesia, lime, 
soda, potash, and iron (see Table 28.1); and these may sometimes exist in about 
the same proportions in a porous lava, a compact trap, and a crystalline 
granite. The same lava, for example, may be glassy, or scoriaceous, or stony, or 
porphyritic, according to the more or less rapid rate at which it cools.

It would be easy to multiply examples and authorities to prove the gradation of 
the Plutonic into the trap rocks. On the western side of the Fiord of 
Christiania, in Norway, there is a large district of trap, chiefly greenstone-
porphyry and syenitic-greenstone, resting on fossiliferous strata. To this, on 
its southern limit, succeeds a region equally extensive of syenite, the passage 
from the trappean to the crystalline Plutonic rock being so gradual that it is 
impossible to draw a line of demarkation between them.

"The ordinary granite of Aberdeenshire," says Dr. MacCulloch, "is the usual 
ternary compound of quartz, feldspar, and mica; though sometimes hornblende is 
substituted for the mica. But in many places a variety occurs which is composed 
simply of feldspar and hornblende; and in examining more minutely this duplicate 
compound, it is observed in some places to assume a fine grain, and at length to 
become undistinguishable from the greenstones of the trap family. It also passes 
in the same uninterrupted manner into a basalt, and at length into a soft 
claystone, with a schistose tendency on exposure, in no respect differing from 
those of the trap islands of the western coast." The same author mentions, that 
in Shetland a granite composed of hornblende, mica, feldspar, and quartz 
graduates in an equally perfect manner into basalt. (System of Geology volume 1 
pages 157 and 158.) In Hungary there are varieties of trachyte, which, 
geologically speaking, are of modern origin, in which crystals, not only of 
mica, but of quartz, are common, together with feldspar and hornblende. It is 
easy to conceive how such volcanic masses may, at a certain depth from the 
surface, pass downward into granite.

GRANITIC VEINS.

(Figures 610 and 611. Junction of granite and argillaceous schist in Glen Tilt. 
(MacCulloch. (Geological Transactions First Series volume 3 plate 21.))

(FIGURE 610. Junction of granite and argillaceous schist in Glen Tilt.)

(FIGURE 611. Junction of granite and argillaceous schist in Glen Tilt.))

I have already hinted at the close analogy in the forms of certain granitic and 
trappean veins; and it will be found that strata penetrated by Plutonic rocks 
have suffered changes very similar to those exhibited near the contact of 
volcanic dikes. Thus, in Glen Tilt, in Scotland, alternating strata of limestone 
and argillaceous schist come in contact with a mass of granite. The contact does 
not take place as might have been looked for if the granite had been formed 
there before the strata were deposited, in which case the section would have 
appeared as in Figure 610; but the union is as represented in Figure 611, the 
undulating outline of the granite intersecting different strata, and 
occasionally intruding itself in torturous veins into the beds of clay-slate and 
limestone, from which it differs so remarkably in composition. The limestone is 
sometimes changed in character by the proximity of the granitic mass or its 
veins, and acquires a more compact texture, like that of hornstone or chert, 
with a splintery fracture, and effervescing freely with acids.

The conversion of the limestone and these and many other instances into a 
siliceous rock, effervescing slowly with acids, would be difficult of 
explanation, were it not ascertained that such limestones are always impure, 
containing grains of quartz, mica, or feldspar disseminated through them. The 
elements of these minerals, when the rock has been subjected to great heat, may 
have been fused, and so spread more uniformly through the whole mass.

(FIGURE 612. Granite veins traversing clay slate, Table Mountain, Cape of Good 
Hope. (Captain B. Hall Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh volume 
7.))

(FIGURE 613. Granite veins traversing gneiss, Cape Wrath. (MacCulloch (Western 
Islands plate 31.))

In the Plutonic, as in the volcanic rocks, there is every gradation from a 
torturous vein to the most regular form of a dike, such as intersect the tuffs 
and lavas of Vesuvius and Etna. Dikes of granite may be seen, among other 
places, on the southern flank of Mount Battock, one of the Grampians, the 
opposite walls sometimes preserving an exact parallelism for a considerable 
distance. As a general rule, however, granite veins in all quarters of the globe 
are more sinuous in their course than those of trap. They present similar shapes 
at the most northern point of Scotland, and the southernmost extremity of 
Africa, as Figures 612 and 613 will show.

It is not uncommon for one set of granite veins to intersect another; and 
sometimes there are three sets, as in the environs of Heidelberg, where the 
granite on the banks of the river Necker is seen to consist of three varieties, 
differing in colour, grain, and various peculiarities of mineral composition. 
One of these, which is evidently the second in age, is seen to cut through an 
older granite; and another, still newer, traverses both the second and the 
first. In Shetland there are two kinds of granite. One of them, composed of 
hornblende, mica, feldspar, and quartz, is of a dark colour, and is seen 
underlying gneiss. The other is a red granite, which penetrates the dark variety 
everywhere in veins. (MacCulloch System of Geology volume 2 page 58.)

(FIGURE 614. Granite veins passing through hornblende slate, Carnsilver Cove, 
Cornwall.)

Figure 614 is a sketch of a group of granite veins in Cornwall, given by Messrs. 
Von Oeynhausen and Von Dechen. (Philosophical Magazine and Annals No. 27 New 
Series March 1829.) The main body of the granite here is of a porphyritic 
appearance, with large crystals of feldspar; but in the veins it is fine-
grained, and without these large crystals. The general height of the veins is 
from 16 to 20 feet, but some are much higher.

Granite, syenite, and those porphyries which have a granitiform structure, in 
short all Plutonic rocks, are frequently observed to contain metals, at or near 
their junction with stratified formations. On the other hand, the veins which 
traverse stratified rocks are, as a general law, more metalliferous near such 
junctions than in other positions. Hence it has been inferred that these metals 
may have been spread in a gaseous form through the fused mass, and that the 
contact of another rock, in a different state of temperature, or sometimes the 
existence of rents in other rocks in the vicinity, may have caused the 
sublimation of the metals. (Necker Proceedings of the Geological Society No. 26 
page 392.)

(FIGURE 615. a, b. Quartz vein passing through gneiss and greenstone. Tronstad 
Strand, near Christiania.)

Veins of pure quartz are often found in granite as in many stratified rocks, but 
they are not traceable, like veins of granite or trap, to large bodies of rock 
of similar composition. They appear to have been cracks, into which siliceous 
matter was infiltered. Such segregation, as it is called, can sometimes clearly 
be shown to have taken place long subsequently to the original consolidation of 
the containing rock. Thus, for example, I observed in the gneiss of Tronstad 
Strand, near Drammen, in Norway, the section on the beach shown in Figure 615. 
It appears that the alternating strata of whitish granitiform gneiss and black 
hornblende-schist were first cut by a greenstone dike, about 2 1/2 feet wide; 
then the crack a-b passed through all these rocks, and was filled up with 
quartz. The opposite walls of the vein are in some parts incrusted with 
transparent crystals of quartz, the middle of the vein being filled up with 
common opaque white quartz.

(FIGURE 616. Euritic porphyry alternating with primary fossiliferous strata, 
near Christiania.)

We have seen that the volcanic formations have been called overlying, because 
they not only penetrate others but spread over them. M. Necker has proposed to 
call the granites the underlying igneous rocks, and the distinction here 
indicated is highly characteristic. It was, indeed, supposed by some of the 
earlier observers that the granite of Christiania, in Norway, was intercalated 
in mountain masses between the primary or palaeozoic strata of that country, so 
as to overlie fossiliferous shale and limestone. But although the granite sends 
veins into these fossiliferous rocks, and is decidedly posterior in origin, its 
actual superposition in mass has been disproved by Professor Keilhau, whose 
observations on this controverted point I had opportunities, in 1837, of 
verifying. There are, however, on a smaller scale, certain beds of euritic 
porphyry, some a few feet, others many yards in thickness, which pass into 
granite, and deserve, perhaps, to be classed as Plutonic rather than trappean 
rocks, which may truly be described as interposed conformably between 
fossiliferous strata, as the porphyries (a, c, Figure 616) which divide the 
bituminous shales and argillaceous limestones, f, f. But some of these same 
porphyries are partially unconformable, as b, and may lead us to suspect that 
the others also, notwithstanding their appearance of interstratification, have 
been forcibly injected. Some of the porphyritic rocks above mentioned are highly 
quartzose, others very feldspathic. In proportion as the masses are more 
voluminous, they become more granitic in their texture, less conformable, and 
even begin to send forth veins into contiguous strata. In a word, we have here a 
beautiful illustration of the intermediate gradations between volcanic and 
Plutonic rocks, not only in their mineralogical composition and structure, but 
also in their relations of position to associated formations. If the term 
"overlying" can in this instance be applied to a Plutonic rock, it is only in 
proportion as that rock begins to acquire a trappean aspect.

It has been already hinted that the heat which in every active volcano extends 
downward to indefinite depths must produce simultaneously very different effects 
near the surface and far below it; and we can not suppose that rocks resulting 
from the crystallising of fused matter under a pressure of several thousand 
feet, much less several miles, of the earth's crust can exactly resemble those 
formed at or near the surface. Hence the production at great depths of a class 
of rocks analogous to the volcanic, and yet differing in many particulars, might 
have been predicted, even had we no Plutonic formations to account for. How well 
these agree, both in their positive and negative characters, with the theory of 
their deep subterranean origin, the student will be able to judge by considering 
the descriptions already given.

It has, however, been objected, that if the granitic and volcanic rocks were 
simply different parts of one great series, we ought to find in mountain chains 
volcanic dikes passing upward into lava and downward into granite. But we may 
answer that our vertical sections are usually of small extent; and if we find in 
certain places a transition from trap to porous lava, and in others a passage 
from granite to trap, it is as much as could be expected of this evidence.

The prodigious extent of denudation which has been already demonstrated to have 
occurred at former periods, will reconcile the student to the belief that 
crystalline rocks of high antiquity, although deep in the earth's crust when 
originally formed, may have become uncovered and exposed at the surface. Their 
actual elevation above the sea may be referred to the same causes to which we 
have attributed the upheaval of marine strata, even to the summits of some 
mountain chains.


CHAPTER XXXII.

ON THE DIFFERENT AGES OF THE PLUTONIC ROCKS.

Difficulty in ascertaining the precise Age of a Plutonic Rock.
Test of Age by Relative Position.
Test by Intrusion and Alteration.
Test by Mineral Composition.
Test by included Fragments.
Recent and Pliocene Plutonic Rocks, why invisible.
Miocene Syenite of the Isle of Skye.
Eocene Plutonic Rocks in the Andes.
Granite altering Cretaceous Rocks.
Granite altering Lias in the Alps and in Skye.
Granite of Dartmoor altering Carboniferous Strata.
Granite of the Old Red Sandstone Period.
Syenite altering Silurian Strata in Norway.
Blending of the same with Gneiss.
Most ancient Plutonic Rocks.
Granite protruded in a solid Form.

When we adopt the igneous theory of granite, as explained in the last chapter, 
and believe that different Plutonic rocks have originated at successive periods 
beneath the surface of the planet, we must be prepared to encounter greater 
difficulty in ascertaining the precise age of such rocks than in the case of 
volcanic and fossiliferous formations. We must bear in mind that the evidence of 
the age of each contemporaneous volcanic rock was derived either from lavas 
poured out upon the ancient surface, whether in the sea or in the atmosphere, or 
from tuffs and conglomerates, also deposited at the surface, and either 
containing organic remains themselves or intercalated between strata containing 
fossils. But the same tests entirely fail, or are only applicable in a modified 
degree, when we endeavour to fix the chronology of a rock which has crystallised 
from a state of fusion in the bowels of the earth. In that case we are reduced 
to the tests of relative position, intrusion, alteration of the rocks in 
contact, included fragments, and mineral character; but all these may yield at 
best a somewhat ambiguous result.

TEST OF AGE BY RELATIVE POSITION.

Unaltered fossiliferous strata of every age are met with reposing immediately on 
Plutonic rocks; as at Christiania, in Norway, where the Post-pliocene deposits 
rest on granite; in Auvergne, where the fresh-water Miocene strata, and at 
Heidelberg, on the Rhine, where the New Red sandstone occupy a similar place. In 
all these, and similar instances, inferiority in position is connected with the 
superior antiquity of granite. The crystalline rock was solid before the 
sedimentary beds were superimposed, and the latter usually contain in them 
rounded pebbles of the subjacent granite.

TEST BY INTRUSION AND ALTERATION.

But when Plutonic rocks send veins into strata, and alter them near the point of 
contact, in the manner before described (Chapter 31), it is clear that, like 
intrusive traps, they are newer than the strata which they invade and alter. 
Examples of the application of this test will be given in the sequel.

TEST BY MINERAL COMPOSITION.

Notwithstanding a general uniformity in the aspect of Plutonic rocks, we have 
seen in the last chapter that there are many varieties, such as syenite, talcose 
granite, and others. One of these varieties is sometimes found exclusively 
prevailing throughout an extensive region, where it preserves a homogeneous 
character; so that, having ascertained its relative age in one place, we can 
recognise its identity in others, and thus determine from a single section the 
chronological relations of large mountain masses. Having observed, for example, 
that the syenitic granite of Norway, in which the mineral called zircon abounds, 
has altered the Silurian strata wherever it is in contact, we do not hesitate to 
refer other masses of the same zircon-syenite in the south of Norway to a post-
Silurian date. Some have imagined that the age of different granites might, to a 
great extent, be determined by their mineral characters alone; syenite, for 
instance, or granite with hornblende, being more modern than common or micaceous 
granite. But modern investigations have proved these generalisations to have 
been premature.

TEST BY INCLUDED FRAGMENTS.

This criterion can rarely be of much importance, because the fragments involved 
in granite are usually so much altered that they can not be referred with 
certainty to the rocks whence they were derived. In the White Mountains, in 
North America, according to Professor Hubbard, a granite vein, traversing 
granite, contains fragments of slate and trap which must have fallen into the 
fissure when the fused materials of the vein were injected from below 
(Silliman's Journal No. 69 page 123.), and thus the granite is shown to be newer 
than those slaty and trappean formations from which the fragments were derived.

RECENT AND PLIOCENE PLUTONIC ROCKS, WHY INVISIBLE.

The explanations already given in the 28th and in the last chapter of the 
probable relation of the Plutonic to the volcanic formations, will naturally 
lead the reader to infer that rocks of the one class can never be produced at or 
near the surface without some members of the other being formed below. It is not 
uncommon for lava-streams to require more than ten years to cool in the open 
air; and where they are of great depth, a much longer period. The melted matter 
poured from Jorullo, in Mexico, in the year 1759, which accumulated in some 
places to the height of 550 feet, was found to retain a high temperature half a 
century after the eruption. (See Principles Index Jorullo.) We may conceive, 
therefore, that great masses of subterranean lava may remain in a red-hot or 
incandescent state in the volcanic foci for immense periods, and the process of 
refrigeration may be extremely gradual. Sometimes, indeed, this process may be 
retarded for an indefinite period by the accession of fresh supplies of heat; 
for we find that the lava in the crater of Stromboli, one of the Lipari Islands, 
has been in a state of constant ebullition for the last two thousand years; and 
we may suppose this fluid mass to communicate with some caldron or reservoir of 
fused matter below. In the Isle of Bourbon, also, where there has been an 
emission of lava once in every two years for a long period, the lava below can 
scarcely fail to have been permanently in a state of liquefaction. If then it be 
a reasonable conjecture, that about 2000 volcanic eruptions occur in the course 
of every century, either above the waters of the sea or beneath them (Ibid. 
Volcanic Eruptions.), it will follow that the quantity of Plutonic rock 
generated or in progress during the Recent epoch must already have been 
considerable.

But as the Plutonic rocks originate at some depth in the earth's crust, they can 
only be rendered accessible to human observation by subsequent upheaval and 
denudation. Between the period when a Plutonic rock crystallises in the 
subterranean regions and the era of its protrusion at any single point of the 
surface, one or two geological periods must usually intervene. Hence, we must 
not expect to find the Recent or even the Pliocene granites laid open to view, 
unless we are prepared to assume that sufficient time has elapsed since the 
commencement of the Pliocene period for great upheaval and denudation. A 
Plutonic rock, therefore, must, in general, be of considerable antiquity 
relatively to the fossiliferous and volcanic formations, before it becomes 
extensively visible. As we know that the upheaval of land has been sometimes 
accompanied in South America by volcanic eruptions and the emission of lava, we 
may conceive the more ancient Plutonic rocks to be forced upward to the surface 
by the newer rocks of the same class formed successively below-- subterposition 
in the Plutonic, like superposition in the sedimentary rocks, being usually 
characteristic of a newer origin.

(FIGURE 617. Diagram showing the relative position which the Plutonic and 
sedimentary formations of different ages may occupy.
I. Primary Plutonic rocks.
II. Secondary Plutonic rocks.
III. Tertiary Plutonic rocks.
IV. Post-tertiary Plutonic rocks.
1. Primary fossiliferous or Palaeozoic strata.
2. Secondary or Mesozoic strata.
3. Tertiary or Cainozoic strata.
4. Post-tertiary strata.
The metamorphic rocks are not indicated in this diagram: but the student will 
infer, from what is said in Chapters 31 and 33, that some portions of the 
stratified formations, Nos. 1 and 2, invaded by granite, will have become 
metamorphic.)

In Figure 617 an attempt is made to show the inverted order in which sedimentary 
and Plutonic formations may occur in the earth's crust. The oldest Plutonic 
rock, No. I, has been upheaved at successive periods until it has become exposed 
to view in a mountain-chain. This protrusion of No. I has been caused by the 
igneous agency which produced the newer Plutonic rocks Nos. II, III and IV. Part 
of the primary fossiliferous strata, No. I, have also been raised to the surface 
by the same gradual process. It will be observed that the Recent STRATA No. 4 
and the Recent GRANITE or Plutonic rock No. IV are the most remote from each 
other in position, although of contemporaneous date. According to this 
hypothesis, the convulsions of many periods will be required before Recent or 
Post-tertiary granite will be upraised so as to form the highest ridges and 
central axes of mountain-chains. During that time the RECENT strata No. 4 might 
be covered by a great many newer sedimentary formations.

MIOCENE PLUTONIC ROCKS.

A considerable mass of syenite, in the Isle of Skye, is described by Dr. 
MacCulloch as intersecting limestone and shale, which are of the age of the 
lias. The limestone, which at a greater distance from the granite contains 
shells, exhibits no traces of them near its junction, where it has been 
converted into a pure crystalline marble. (Western Islands volume 1 page 330.) 
MacCulloch pointed out that the syenite here, as in Raasay, was newer than the 
secondary rocks, and Mr. Geikie has since shown that there is a strong 
probability that this Plutonic rock may be of Miocene age, because a similar 
Syenite having a true granitic character in its crystallisation has modified the 
Tertiary volcanic rocks of Ben More, in Mull, some of which have undergone 
considerable metamorphism.

EOCENE PLUTONIC ROCKS.

In a former part of this volume (Chapter 16), the great nummulitic formation of 
the Alps and Pyrenees was referred to the Eocene period, and it follows that 
vast movements which have raised those fossiliferous rocks from the level of the 
sea to the height of more than 10,000 feet above its level have taken place 
since the commencement of the Tertiary epoch. Here, therefore, if anywhere, we 
might expect to find hypogene formations of Eocene date breaking out in the 
central axis or most disturbed region of the loftiest chain in Europe. 
Accordingly, in the Swiss Alps, even the flysch, or upper portion of the 
nummulitic series, has been occasionally invaded by Plutonic rocks, and 
converted into crystalline schists of the hypogene class. There can be little 
doubt that even the talcose granite or gneiss of Mont Blanc itself has been in a 
fused or pasty state since the flysch was deposited at the bottom of the sea; 
and the question as to its age is not so much whether it be a secondary or 
tertiary granite or gneiss, as whether it should be assigned to the Eocene or 
Miocene epoch.

Great upheaving movements have been experienced in the region of the Andes, 
during the Post-tertiary period. In some part, therefore, of this chain, we may 
expect to discover tertiary Plutonic rocks laid open to view; and Mr. Darwin's 
account of the Chilian Andes, to which the reader may refer, fully realises this 
expectation: for he shows that we have strong ground to presume that Plutonic 
rocks there exposed on a large scale are of later date than certain Secondary 
and Tertiary formations.

But the theory adopted in this work of the subterranean origin of the hypogene 
formations would be untenable, if the supposed fact here alluded to, of the 
appearance of tertiary granite at the surface, was not a rare exception to the 
general rule. A considerable lapse of time must intervene between the formation 
of Plutonic and metamorphic rocks in the nether regions and their emergence at 
the surface. For a long series of subterranean movements must occur before such 
rocks can be uplifted into the atmosphere or the ocean; and, before they can be 
rendered visible to man, some strata which previously covered them must have 
been stripped off by denudation.

We know that in the Bay of Baiae in 1538, in Cutch in 1819, and on several 
occasions in Peru and Chili, since the commencement of the present century, the 
permanent upheaval or subsidence of land has been accompanied by the 
simultaneous emission of lava at one or more points in the same volcanic region. 
From these and other examples it may be inferred that the rising or sinking of 
the earth's crust, operations by which sea is converted into land, and land into 
sea, are a part only of the consequences of subterranean igneous action. It can 
scarcely be doubted that this action consists, in a great degree, of the baking, 
and occasionally the liquefaction, of rocks, causing them to assume, in some 
cases a larger, in others a smaller volume than before the application of heat. 
It consists also in the generation of gases, and their expansion by heat, and 
the injection of liquid matter into rents formed in superincumbent rocks. The 
prodigious scale on which these subterranean causes have operated in Sicily 
since the deposition of the Newer Pliocene strata will be appreciated when we 
remember that throughout half the surface of that island such strata are met 
with, raised to the height of from 50 to that of 2000 and even 3000 feet above 
the level of the sea. In the same island also the older rocks which are 
contiguous to these marine tertiary strata must have undergone, within the same 
period, a similar amount of upheaval.

The like observations may be extended to nearly the whole of Europe, for, since 
the commencement of the Eocene Period, the entire European area, including some 
of the central and very lofty portions of the Alps themselves, as I have 
elsewhere shown, has, with the exception of a few districts, emerged from the 
deep to its present altitude. (See map of Europe, and explanation, in Principles 
book 1.) There must, therefore, have been at great depths in the earth's crust, 
within the same period, an amount of subterranean change corresponding to this 
vast alteration of level affecting a whole continent.

The principal effect of subterranean movements during the Tertiary Period seems 
to have consisted in the upheaval of hypogene formations of an age anterior to 
the Carboniferous. The repetition of another series of movements, of equal 
violence, might upraise the Plutonic and metamorphic rocks of many secondary 
periods; and, if the same force should still continue to act, the next 
convulsions might bring up to the day the TERTIARY and RECENT hypogene rocks. In 
the course of such changes many of the existing sedimentary strata would suffer 
greatly by denudation, others might assume a metamorphic structure, or become 
melted down into Plutonic and volcanic rocks. Meanwhile the deposition of a 
great thickness of new strata would not fail to take place during the upheaval 
and partial destruction of the older rocks. But I must refer the reader to the 
last chapter but one of this volume for a fuller explanation of these views.

PLUTONIC ROCKS OF CRETACEOUS PERIOD.

(FIGURE 618. Section through three layers (b, c, d) of the Cretaceous series 
over granite (A).)

It will be shown in the next chapter that chalk, as well as lias, has been 
altered by granite in the eastern Pyrenees. Whether such granite be cretaceous 
or tertiary, can not easily be decided. Suppose b, c, d, Figure 618, to be three 
members of the Cretaceous series, the lowest of which, b, has been altered by 
the granite A, the modifying influence not having extended so far as c, or 
having but slightly affected its lowest beds. Now it can rarely be possible for 
the geologist to decide whether the beds d existed at the time of the intrusion 
of A, and alteration of b and c, or whether they were subsequently thrown down 
upon c. But as some Cretaceous and even Tertiary rocks have been raised to the 
height of more than 9000 feet in the Pyrenees, we must not assume that plutonic 
formations of the same periods may not have been brought up and exposed by 
denudation, at the height of 2000 or 3000 feet on the flanks of that chain.

PLUTONIC ROCKS OF THE OOLITE AND LIAS.

(FIGURE 619. Junction of granite with Jurassic or Oolite strata in the Alps, 
near Champoleon. (Granite over Altered Rocks over Secondary Schists.))

In the Department of the Hautes Alpes, in France, M. Eliede Beaumont traced a 
black argillaceous limestone, charged with belemnites, to within a few yards of 
a mass of granite. Here the limestone begins to put on a granular texture, but 
is extremely fine-grained. When nearer the junction it becomes grey, and has a 
saccharoid structure. In another locality, near Champoleon, a granite composed 
of quartz, black mica, and rose-coloured feldspar is observed partly to overlie 
the secondary rocks, producing an alteration which extends for about 30 feet 
downward, diminishing in the beds which lie farthest from the granite. (See 
Figure 619.) In the altered mass the argillaceous beds are hardened, the 
limestone is saccharoid, the grits quartzose, and in the midst of them is a thin 
layer of an imperfect granite. It is also an important circumstance that near 
the point of contact, both the granite and the secondary rocks become 
metalliferous, and contain nests and small veins of blende, galena, iron, and 
copper pyrites. The stratified rocks become harder and more crystalline, but the 
granite, on the contrary, softer and less perfectly crystallised near the 
junction. (Elie de Beaumont sur les Montagnes de l'Oisans etc. Mem. de la Soc. 
d'Hist. Nat. de Paris tome 5.) Although the granite is incumbent in the section 
(Figure 619), we can not assume that it overflowed the strata, for the 
disturbances of the rocks are so great in this part of the Alps that their 
original position is often inverted.

At Predazzo, in the Tyrol, secondary strata, some of which are limestones of the 
Oolitic period, have been traversed and altered by Plutonic rocks, one portion 
of which is an augitic porphyry, which passes insensibly into granite. The 
limestone is changed into granular marble, with a band of serpentine at the 
junction. (Von Buch Annales de Chimie etc.)

PLUTONIC ROCKS OF CARBONIFEROUS PERIOD.

The granite of Dartmoor, in Devonshire, was formerly supposed to be one of the 
most ancient of the Plutonic rocks, but is now ascertained to be posterior in 
date to the culm-measures of that county, which from their position, and, as 
containing true coal-plants, are now known to be members of the true 
Carboniferous series. This granite, like the syenitic granite of Christiania, 
has broken through the stratified formations, on the north-west side of 
Dartmoor, the successive members of the culm-measures abutting against the 
granite, and becoming metamorphic as they approach. These strata are also 
penetrated by granite veins, and Plutonic dikes, called "elvans." (Proceedings 
of the Geological Society volume 2 page 562 and Transactions second series 
volume 5 page 686.) The granite of Cornwall is probably of the same date, and, 
therefore, as modern as the Carboniferous strata, if not newer.

PLUTONIC ROCKS OF SILURIAN PERIOD.

(FIGURE 620. Section through Silurian strata and Granite.)

It has long been known that a very ancient granite near Christiania, in Norway, 
is posterior in date to the Lower Silurian strata of that region, although its 
exact position in the Palaeozoic series can not be defined. Von Buch first 
announced, in 1813, that it was of newer origin than certain limestones 
containing orthocerata and trilobites. The proofs consist in the penetration of 
granite veins into the shale and limestone, and the alteration of the strata, 
for a considerable distance from the point of contact, both of these veins and 
the central mass from which they emanate. (See Chapter 31.)Von Buch supposed 
that the Plutonic rock alternated with the fossiliferous strata, and that large 
masses of granite were sometimes incumbent upon the strata; but this idea was 
erroneous, and arose from the fact that the beds of shale and limestone often 
dip towards the granite up to the point of contact, appearing as if they would 
pass under it in mass, as at a, Figure 620, and then again on the opposite side 
of the same mountain, as at b, dip away from the same granite. When the 
junctions, however, are carefully examined, it is found that the Plutonic rock 
intrudes itself in veins, and nowhere covers the fossiliferous strata in large 
overlying masses, as is so commonly the case with trappean formations. (See the 
Gaea Norvegica and other works of Keilhau with whom I examined this country.)

Now this granite, which is more modern than the Silurian strata of Norway, also 
sends veins in the same country into an ancient formation of gneiss; and the 
relations of the Plutonic rock and the gneiss, at their junction, are full of 
interest when we duly consider the wide difference of epoch which must have 
separated their origin.

(FIGURE 621. Granite sending veins into Silurian strata and gneiss. Christiania, 
Norway.
a. Inclined gneiss.
b. Silurian strata.)

The length of this interval of time is attested by the following facts: The 
fossiliferous, or Silurian, beds rest unconformably upon the truncated edges of 
the gneiss, the inclined strata of which had been denuded before the sedimentary 
beds were superimposed (see Figure 621). The signs of denudation are twofold; 
first, the surface of the gneiss is seen occasionally, on the removal of the 
newer beds containing organic remains, to be worn and smoothed; secondly, 
pebbles of gneiss have been found in some of these Silurian strata. Between the 
origin, therefore, of the gneiss and the granite there intervened, first, the 
period when the strata of gneiss were denuded; secondly, the period of the 
deposition of the Silurian deposits upon the denuded and inclined gneiss, a. Yet 
the granite produced after this long interval is often so intimately blended 
with the ancient gneiss, at the point of junction, that it is impossible to draw 
any other than an arbitrary line of separation between them; and where this is 
not the case, tortuous veins of granite pass freely through gneiss, ending 
sometimes in threads, as if the older rock had offered no resistance to their 
passage. These appearances may probably be due to hydrothermal action (see 
Chapter 33). I shall merely observe in this place that had such junctions alone 
been visible, and had we not learnt, from other sections, how long a period 
elapsed between the consolidation of the gneiss and the injection of this 
granite, we might have suspected that the gneiss was scarcely solidified, or had 
not yet assumed its complete metamorphic character when invaded by the Plutonic 
rock. From this example we may learn how impossible it is to conjecture whether 
certain granites in Scotland, and other countries, which send veins into gneiss 
and other metamorphic rocks, are primary, or whether they may not belong to some 
secondary or tertiary period.

OLDEST GRANITES.

It is not half a century since the doctrine was very general that all granitic 
rocks were PRIMITIVE, that is to say, that they originated before the deposition 
of the first sedimentary strata, and before the creation of organic beings (see 
above Chapter 1). But so greatly are our views now changed, that we find it no 
easy task to point out a single mass of granite demonstrably more ancient than 
known fossiliferous deposits. Could we discover some Laurentian strata resting 
immediately on granite, there being no alterations at the point of contact, nor 
any intersecting granitic veins, we might then affirm the Plutonic rock to have 
originated before the oldest known fossiliferous strata. Still it would be 
presumptuous, as we have already pointed out (Chapter 26), to suppose that when 
a small part only of the globe has been investigated, we are acquainted with the 
oldest fossiliferous strata in the crust of our planet. Even when these are 
found, we can not assume that there never were any antecedent strata containing 
organic remains, which may have become metamorphic. If we find pebbles of 
granite in a conglomerate of the Lower Laurentian system, we may then feel 
assured that the parent granite was formed before the Laurentian formation. But 
if the incumbent strata be merely Cambrian or Silurian, the fundamental granite, 
although of high antiquity, may be posterior in date to KNOWN fossiliferous 
formations.

PROTRUSION OF SOLID GRANITE.

In part of Sutherlandshire, near Brora, common granite, composed of feldspar, 
quartz, and mica is in immediate contact with Oolitic strata, and has clearly 
been elevated to the surface at a period subsequent to the deposition of those 
strata. (Murchison Geological Transactions second series volume 2 page 307.) 
Professor Sedgwick and Sir R. Murchison conceive that this granite has been 
upheaved in a solid form; and that in breaking through the submarine deposits, 
with which it was not perhaps originally in contact, it has fractured them so as 
to form a breccia along the line of junction. This breccia consists of fragments 
of shale, sandstone, and limestone, with fossils of the oolite, all united 
together by a calcareous cement. The secondary strata at some distance from the 
granite are but slightly disturbed, but in proportion to their proximity the 
amount of dislocation becomes greater.

Mr. T. McKenney Hughes has suggested to me in explanation of these phenomena 
that they may be the effect of the association of more pliant strata with hard 
unyielding rocks, the whole of which were subjected simultaneously to great 
movements, whether of elevation or subsidence, and of lateral pressure, during 
which the more solid granite, being incapable of compression, was forced through 
the softer beds of shale, sandstone, and limestone. He remarks that similar 
breccias with slickensides are observed on a minor scale where rocks of 
different composition and rigidity are contorted together. Such protrusion may 
have been brought about by degrees by innumerable shocks of earthquakes repeated 
after long intervals of time along the same tract of country. The opening of new 
fissures in the hardest rocks is a frequent accompaniment of such convulsions, 
and during the consequent vibrations, breccias must often be caused. But these 
catastrophes, as we well know, do not imply that the land or sea of the 
disturbed region are rendered uninhabitable by living beings, and by no means 
indicate a state of things different from that witnessed in the ordinary course 
of nature.


CHAPTER XXXIII.

METAMORPHIC ROCKS.

General Character of Metamorphic Rocks.
Gneiss.
Hornblende-schist.
Serpentine.
Mica-schist.
Clay-slate.
Quartzite.
Chlorite-schist.
Metamorphic Limestone.
Origin of the metamorphic Strata.
Their Stratification.
Fossiliferous Strata near intrusive Masses of Granite converted into Rocks 
identical with different Members of the metamorphic Series.
Arguments hence derived as to the Nature of Plutonic Action.
Hydrothermal Action, or the Influence of Steam and Gases in producing 
Metamorphism.
Objections to the metamorphic Theory considered.

We have now considered three distinct classes of rocks: first, the aqueous, or 
fossiliferous; secondly, the volcanic; and, thirdly, the Plutonic; and it 
remains for us to examine those crystalline (or hypogene) strata to which the 
name of METAMORPHIC has been assigned. The last-mentioned term expresses, as 
before explained, a theoretical opinion that such strata, after having been 
deposited from water, acquired, by the influence of heat and other causes, a 
highly crystalline texture. They who still question this opinion may call the 
rocks under consideration the stratified hypogene formations or crystalline 
schists.

These rocks, when in their characteristic or normal state, are wholly devoid of 
organic remains, and contain no distinct fragments of other rocks, whether 
rounded or angular. They sometimes break out in the central parts of mountain 
chains, but in other cases extend over areas of vast dimensions, occupying, for 
example, nearly the whole of Norway and Sweden, where, as in Brazil, they appear 
alike in the lower and higher grounds. However crystalline these rocks may 
become in certain regions, they never, like granite or trap, send veins into 
contiguous formations. In Great Britain, those members of the series which 
approach most nearly to granite in their composition, as gneiss, mica-schist, 
and hornblende-schist, are confined to the country north of the rivers Forth and 
Clyde.

Many attempts have been made to trace a general order of succession or 
superposition in the members of this family; clay-slate, for example, having 
been often supposed to hold invariably a higher geological position than mica-
schist, and mica-schist to overlie gneiss. But although such an order may 
prevail throughout limited districts, it is by no means universal. To this 
subject, however, I shall again revert, in Chapter 35, where the chronological 
relations of the metamorphic rocks are pointed out.

PRINCIPAL METAMORPHIC ROCKS.

The following may be enumerated as the principal members of the metamorphic 
class:-- gneiss, mica-schist, hornblende-schist, clay-slate, chlorite-schist, 
hypogene or metamorphic limestone, and certain kinds of quartz-rock or 
quartzite.

GNEISS.

(FIGURE 622. Fragment of gneiss, natural size; section made at right angles to 
the planes of foliation.)

The first of these, gneiss, may be called stratified-- or by those who object to 
that term, foliated-- granite, being formed of the same materials as granite, 
namely, feldspar, quartz, and mica. In the specimen in Figure 622, the white 
layers consist almost exclusively of granular feldspar, with here and there a 
speck of mica and grain of quartz. The dark layers are composed of grey quartz 
and black mica, with occasionally a grain of feldspar intermixed. The rock 
splits most easily in the plane of these darker layers, and the surface thus 
exposed is almost entirely covered with shining spangles of mica. The 
accompanying quartz, however, greatly predominates in quantity, but the most 
ready cleavage is determined by the abundance of mica in certain parts of the 
dark layer. Instead of consisting of these thin laminae, gneiss is sometimes 
simply divided into thick beds, in which the mica has only a slight degree of 
parallelism to the planes of stratification.

Hand specimens may often be obtained from such gneiss which are 
undistinguishable from granite, affording an argument to which we shall allude 
in the concluding part of this chapter, in favour of those who regard all 
granite and syenite not as igneous rocks, but as aqueous formations so altered 
as to have lost all signs of their original stratified arrangement. Gneiss in 
geology is commonly used to designate not merely stratified and foliated rocks 
having the same component materials as granite or syenite, but also in a wider 
sense to embrace the formation with which other members of the metamorphic 
series, such as hornblende-schist, may alternate, and which are then considered 
subordinate to the true gneiss.

The different varieties of rock allied to gneiss, into which feldspar enters as 
an essential ingredient, will be understood by referring to what was said of 
granite. Thus, for example, hornblende may be superadded to mica, quartz, and 
feldspar, forming a hornblendic or syenitic gneiss; or talc may be substituted 
for mica, constituting talcose gneiss (called stratified protogine by the 
French), a rock composed of feldspar, quartz, and talc, in distinct crystals or 
grains.

EURITE, which has already been mentioned as a Plutonic rock, occurs also with 
precisely the same composition in beds subordinate to gneiss or mica-slate.

HORNBLENDE-SCHIST is usually black, and composed principally of hornblende, with 
a variable quantity of feldspar, and sometimes grains of quartz. When the 
hornblende and feldspar are in nearly equal quantities, and the rock is not 
slaty, it corresponds in character with the greenstones of the trap family, and 
has been called "primitive greenstone." It may be termed hornblende rock, or 
amphibolite. Some of these hornblendic masses may really have been volcanic 
rocks, which have since assumed a more crystalline or metamorphic texture.

SERPENTINE is a greenish rock, a silicate of magnesia, in which there is 
sometimes from 30 to 40 per cent of magnesia. It enters largely into the 
composition of a trap dike cutting through Old Red Sandstone in Forfarshire, and 
in that case is probably an altered basaltic dike which had contained much 
olivine. The theory of its having been originally a volcanic product 
subsequently altered by metamorphism may at first sight seem inconsistent with 
its occurrence in large and regularly stratified masses in the metamorphic 
series in Scotland, as in Aberdeenshire. But it has been suggested in 
explanation that such serpentine may have been originally regularly-bedded trap 
tuff, and volcanic breccia, with much olivine, which would still retain a 
stratified appearance after their conversion into a metamorphic rock.

ACTINOLITE SCHIST is a slaty foliated rock, composed chiefly of actinolite, an 
emerald-green mineral, allied to hornblende, with some admixture of garnet, 
mica, and quartz.

MICA-SCHIST or MICACEOUS SCHIST is, next to gneiss, one of the most abundant 
rocks of the metamorphic series. It is slaty, essentially composed of mica and 
quartz, the mica sometimes appearing to constitute the whole mass. Beds of pure 
quartz also occur in this formation. In some districts, garnets in regular 
twelve-sided crystals form an integrant part of mica-schist. This rock passes by 
insensible gradations into clay-slate.

CLAY-SLATE-- ARGILLACEOUS SCHIST-- ARGILLITE.

This rock sometimes resembles an indurated clay or shale. It is for the most 
part extremely fissile, often affording good roofing-slate. Occasionally it 
derives a shining and silky lustre from the minute particles of mica or talc 
which it contains. It varies from greenish or bluish-grey to a lead colour; and 
it may be said of this, more than of any other schist, that it is common to the 
metamorphic and fossiliferous series, for some clay-slates taken from each 
division would not be distinguishable by mineral characters alone. It is not 
uncommon to meet with an argillaceous rock having the same composition, without 
the slaty cleavage, which may be called argillite.

CHLORITE SCHIST	is a green slaty rock, in which chlorite is abundant in 
foliated plates, usually blended with minute grains of quartz, or sometimes with 
feldspar or mica; often associated with, and graduating into, gneiss and clay-
slate.

QUARTZITE, or QUARTZ ROCK, is an aggregate of grains of quartz which are either 
in minute crystals, or in many cases slightly rounded, occurring in regular 
strata, associated with gneiss or other metamorphic rocks. Compact quartz, like 
that so frequently found in veins, is also found together with granular 
quartzite. Both of these alternate with gneiss or mica-schist, or pass into 
those rocks by the addition of mica, or of feldspar and mica.

CRYSTALLINE, OR METAMORPHIC LIMESTONE.

This hypogene rock, called by the earlier geologists PRIMARY LIMESTONE, is 
sometimes a white crystalline granular marble, which when in thick beds can be 
used in sculpture; but more frequently it occurs in thin beds, forming a 
foliated schist much resembling in colour and arrangement certain varieties of 
gneiss and mica-schist. When it alternates with these rocks, it often contains 
some crystals of mica, and occasionally quartz, feldspar, hornblende, talc, 
chlorite, garnet, and other minerals. It enters sparingly into the structure of 
the hypogene districts of Norway, Sweden, and Scotland, but is largely developed 
in the Alps.

ORIGIN OF THE METAMORPHIC STRATA.

Having said thus much of the mineral composition of the metamorphic rocks, I may 
combine what remains to be said of their structure and history with an account 
of the opinions entertained of their probable origin. At the same time, it may 
be well to forewarn the reader that we are here entering upon ground of 
controversy, and soon reach the limits where positive induction ends, and beyond 
which we can only indulge in speculations. It was once a favourite doctrine, and 
is still maintained by many, that these rocks owe their crystalline texture, 
their want of all signs of a mechanical origin, or of fossil contents, to a 
peculiar and nascent condition of the planet at the period of their formation. 
The arguments in refutation of this hypothesis will be more fully considered 
when I show, in Chapter 35, to how many different ages the metamorphic 
formations are referable, and how gneiss, mica-schist, clay-slate, and hypogene 
limestone (that of Carrara, for example) have been formed, not only since the 
first introduction of organic beings into this planet, but even long after many 
distinct races of plants and animals had flourished and passed away in 
succession.

The doctrine respecting the crystalline strata implied in the name metamorphic 
may properly be treated of in this place; and we must first inquire whether 
these rocks are really entitled to be called stratified in the strict sense of 
having been originally deposited as sediment from water. The general adoption by 
geologists of the term stratified, as applied to these rocks, sufficiently 
attests their division into beds very analogous, at least in form, to ordinary 
fossiliferous strata. This resemblance is by no means confined to the existence 
in both occasionally of a laminated structure, but extends to every kind of 
arrangement which is compatible with the absence of fossils, and of sand, 
pebbles, ripple-mark, and other characters which the metamorphic theory supposes 
to have been obliterated by Plutonic action. Thus, for example, we behold alike 
in the crystalline and fossiliferous formations an alternation of beds varying 
greatly in composition, colour, and thickness. We observe, for instance, gneiss 
alternating with layers of black hornblende-schist or of green chlorite-schist, 
or with granular quartz or limestone; and the interchange of these different 
strata may be repeated for an indefinite number of times. In the like manner, 
mica-schist alternates with chlorite-schist, and with beds of pure quartz or of 
granular limestone. We have already seen that, near the immediate contact of 
granitic veins and volcanic dikes, very extraordinary alterations in rocks have 
taken place, more especially in the neighbourhood of granite. It will be useful 
here to add other illustrations, showing that a texture undistinguishable from 
that which characterises the more crystalline metamorphic formations has 
actually been superinduced in strata once fossiliferous.

FOSSILIFEROUS STRATA RENDERED METAMORPHIC BY INTRUSIVE MASSES OF GRANITE.

(FIGURE 623. Ground-plan of altered slate and limestone near granite. 
Christiania. The arrows indicate the dip, and the oblique lines the strike of 
the beds.)

In the southern extremity of Norway there is a large district, on the west side 
of the fiord of Christiania, which I visited in 1837 with the late Professor 
Keilhau, in which syenitic granite protrudes in mountain masses through 
fossiliferous strata, and usually sends veins into them at the point of contact. 
The stratified rocks, replete with shells and zoophytes, consist chiefly of 
shale, limestone, and some sandstone, and all these are invariably altered near 
the granite for a distance of from 50 to 400 yards. The aluminous shales are 
hardened, and have become flinty. Sometimes they resemble jasper. Ribboned 
jasper is produced by the hardening of alternate layers of green and chocolate-
coloured schist, each stripe faithfully representing the original lines of 
stratification. Nearer the granite the schist often contains crystals of 
hornblende, which are even met with in some places for a distance of several 
hundred yards from the junction; and this black hornblende is so abundant that 
eminent geologists, when passing through the country, have confounded it with 
the ancient hornblende-schist, subordinate to the great gneiss formation of 
Norway. Frequently, between the granite and the hornblende-slate above-
mentioned, grains of mica and crystalline feldspar appear in the schist, so that 
rocks resembling gneiss and mica-schist are produced. Fossils can rarely be 
detected in these schists, and they are more completely effaced in proportion to 
the more crystalline texture of the beds, and their vicinity to the granite. In 
some places the siliceous matter of the schist becomes a granular quartz; and 
when hornblende and mica are added, the altered rock loses its stratification, 
and passes into a kind of granite. The limestone, which at points remote from 
the granite is of an earthy texture and blue colour, and often abounds in 
corals, becomes a white granular marble near the granite, sometimes siliceous, 
the granular structure extending occasionally upward of 400 yards from the 
junction; the corals being for the most part obliterated, though sometimes 
preserved, even in the white marble. Both the altered limestone and hardened 
slate contain garnets in many places, also ores of iron, lead, and copper, with 
some silver. These alterations occur equally whether the granite invades the 
strata in a line parallel to the general strike of the fossiliferous beds, or in 
a line at right angles to their strike, both of which modes of junction will be 
seen by the ground-plan in Figure 623. (Keilhau Gaea Norvegica pages 61-63.)

The granite of Cornwall sends forth veins into a coarse argillaceous-schist, 
provincially termed killas. This killas is converted into hornblende-schist near 
the contact with the veins. These appearances are well seen at the junction of 
the granite and killas, in St. Michael's Mount, a small island nearly 300 feet 
high, situated in the bay, at a distance of about three miles from Penzance. The 
granite of Dartmoor, in Devonshire, says Sir H. De la Beche, has intruded itself 
into the Carboniferous slate and slaty sandstone, twisting and contorting the 
strata, and sending veins into them. Hence some of the slate rocks have become 
"micaceous; others more indurated, and with the characters of mica-slate and 
gneiss; while others again appear converted into a hard zoned rock strongly 
impregnated with feldspar." (Geological Manual page 479.)

We learn from the investigation of M. Dufrenoy that in the eastern Pyrenees 
there are mountain masses of granite posterior in date to the formations called 
lias and chalk of that district, and that these fossiliferous rocks are greatly 
altered in texture, and often charged with iron-ore, in the neighbourhood of the 
granite. Thus in the environs of St. Martin, near St. Paul de Fenouillet, the 
chalky limestone becomes more crystalline and saccharoid as it approaches the 
granite, and loses all trace of the fossils which it previously contained in 
abundance. At some points, also, it becomes dolomitic, and filled with small 
veins of carbonate of iron, and spots of red iron-ore. At Rancie the lias 
nearest the granite is not only filled with iron-ore, but charged with pyrites, 
tremolite, garnet, and a new mineral somewhat allied to feldspar, called, from 
the place in the Pyrenees where it occurs, "couzeranite."

"Hornblende-schist," says Dr. MacCulloch, "may at first have been mere clay; for 
clay or shale is found altered by trap into Lydian stone, a substance differing 
from hornblende-schist almost solely in compactness and uniformity of texture." 
(System of Geology volume 1 pages 210, 211.) "In Shetland," remarks the same 
author, "argillaceous-schist (or clay-slate), when in contact with granite, is 
sometimes converted into hornblende-schist, the schist becoming first siliceous, 
and ultimately, at the contact, hornblende-schist." In like manner gneiss and 
mica-schist may be nothing more than altered micaceous and argillaceous 
sandstones, granular quartz may have been derived from siliceous sandstone, and 
compact quartz from the same materials. Clay-slate may be altered shale, and 
granular marble may have originated in the form of ordinary limestone, replete 
with shells and corals, which have since been obliterated; and, lastly, 
calcareous sands and marls may have been changed into impure crystalline 
limestones.

The anthracite and plumbago associated with hypogene rocks may have been coal; 
for not only is coal converted into anthracite in the vicinity of some trap 
dikes, but we have seen that a like change has taken place generally even far 
from the contact of igneous rocks, in the disturbed region of the Appalachians. 
At Worcester, in the State of Massachusetts, 45 miles due west of Boston, a bed 
of plumbago and impure anthracite occurs, interstratified with mica-schist. It 
is about two feet in thickness, and has been made use of both as fuel, and in 
the manufacture of lead pencils. At the distance of 30 miles from the plumbago, 
there occurs, on the borders of Rhode Island, an impure anthracite in slates 
containing impressions of coal-plants of the genera Pecopteris, Neuropteris, 
Calamites, etc. This anthracite is intermediate in character between that of 
Pennsylvania and the plumbago of Worcester, in which last the gaseous or 
volatile matter (hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen) is to the carbon only in the 
proportion of three per cent. After traversing the country in various 
directions, I came to the conclusion that the carboniferous shales or slates 
with anthracite and plants, which in Rhode Island often pass into mica-schists, 
have at Worcester assumed a perfectly crystalline and metamorphic texture; the 
anthracite having been nearly transmuted into that state of pure carbon which is 
called plumbago or graphite. (See Lyell Quarterly Geological Journal volume 1 
page 199.)

Now the alterations above described as superinduced in rocks by volcanic dikes 
and granite veins prove incontestably that powers exist in nature capable of 
transforming fossiliferous into crystalline strata, a very few simple elements 
constituting the component materials common to both classes of rocks. These 
elements, which are enumerated in Table 28.1, may be made to form new 
combinations by what has been termed Plutonic action, or those chemical changes 
which are no doubt connected with the passage of heat, unusually heated steam 
and waters, through the strata.

HYDROTHERMAL ACTION, OR THE INFLUENCE OF STEAM AND GASES IN PRODUCING 
METAMORPHISM.

The experiments of Gregory Watt, in fusing rocks in the laboratory, and allowing 
them to consolidate by slow cooling, prove distinctly that a rock need not be 
perfectly melted in order that a re-arrangement of its component particles 
should take place, and a partial crystallisation ensue. (Philosophical 
Transactions 1804.) We may easily suppose, therefore, that all traces of shells 
and other organic remains may be destroyed, and that new chemical combinations 
may arise, without the mass being so fused as that the lines of stratification 
should be wholly obliterated. We must not, however, imagine that heat alone, 
such as may be applied to a stone in the open air, can constitute all that is 
comprised in Plutonic action. We know that volcanoes in eruption not only emit 
fluid lava, but give off steam and other heated gases, which rush out in 
enormous volume, for days, weeks, or years continuously, and are even disengaged 
from lava during its consolidation.

We also know that long after volcanoes have spent their force, hot springs 
continue for ages to flow out at various points in the same area. In regions, 
also, subject to violent earthquakes such springs are frequently observed 
issuing from rents, usually along lines of fault or displacement of the rocks. 
These thermal waters are most commonly charged with a variety of mineral 
ingredients, and they retain a remarkable uniformity of temperature from century 
to century. A like uniformity is also persistent in the nature of the earthy, 
metallic, and gaseous substances with which they are impregnated. It is well 
ascertained that springs, whether hot or cold, charged with carbonic acid, 
especially with hydrofluoric acid, which is often present in small quantities, 
are powerful causes of decomposition and chemical reaction in rocks through 
which they percolate.

The changes which Daubree has shown to have been produced by the alkaline waters 
of Plombieres in the Vosges, are more especially instructive. (Daubree Sur le 
Metamorphisme Paris 1860.) These waters have a heat of 160 degrees F., or an 
excess of 109 degrees above the average temperature of ordinary springs in that 
district. They were conveyed by the Romans to baths through long conduits or 
aqueducts. The foundations of some of their works consisted of a bed of concrete 
made of lime, fragments of brick, and sandstone. Through this and other masonry 
the hot waters have been percolating for centuries, and have given rise to 
various zeolites-- apophyllite and chabazite among others; also to calcareous 
spar, arragonite, and fluor spar, together with siliceous minerals, such as 
opal-- all found in the inter-spaces of the bricks and mortar, or constituting 
part of their re-arranged materials. The quantity of heat brought into action in 
this instance in the course of 2000 years has, no doubt, been enormous, but the 
intensity of it developed at any one moment has been always inconsiderable.

From these facts and from the experiments and observations of Senarmont, 
Daubree, Delesse, Scheerer, Sorby, Sterry Hunt, and others, we are led to infer 
that when in the bowels of the earth there are large volumes of matter 
containing water and various acids intensely heated under enormous pressure, 
these subterranean fluid masses will gradually part with their heat by the 
escape of steam and various gases through fissures, producing hot springs; or by 
the passage of the same through the pores of the overlying and injected rocks. 
Even the most compact rocks may be regarded, before they have been exposed to 
the air and dried, in the light of sponges filled with water. According to the 
experiments of Henry, water, under a hydrostatic pressure of 96 feet, will 
absorb three times as much carbonic acid gas as it can under the ordinary 
pressure of the atmosphere. There are other gases, as well as the carbonic acid, 
which water absorbs, and more rapidly in proportion to the amount of pressure. 
Although the gaseous matter first absorbed would soon be condensed, and part 
with its heat, yet the continual arrival of fresh supplies from below might, in 
the course of ages, cause the temperature of the water, and with it that of the 
containing rock, to be materially raised; the water acts not only as a vehicle 
of heat, but also by its affinity for various silicates, which, when some of the 
materials of the invaded rocks are decomposed, form quartz, feldspar, mica, and 
other minerals. As for quartz, it can be produced under the influence of heat by 
water holding alkaline silicates in solution, as in the case of the Plombieres 
springs. The quantity of water required, according to Daubree, to produce great 
transformations in the mineral structure of rocks, is very small. As to the heat 
required, silicates may be produced in the moist way at about incipient red 
heat, whereas to form the same in the dry way would require a much higher 
temperature.

M. Fournet, in his description of the metalliferous gneiss near Clermont, in 
Auvergne, states that all the minute fissures of the rock are quite saturated 
with free carbonic acid gas; which gas rises plentifully from the soil there and 
in many parts of the surrounding country. The various elements of the gneiss, 
with the exception of the quartz, are all softened; and new combinations of the 
acid with lime, iron, and manganese are continually in progress. (See Principles 
Index Carbonated Springs etc.)

The power of subterranean gases is well illustrated by the stufas of St. 
Calogero in the Lipari Islands, where the horizontal strata of tuffs, forming 
cliffs 200 feet high, have been discoloured in places by the jets of steam often 
above the boiling point, called "stufas," issuing from the fissures; and similar 
instances are recorded by M. Virlet of corrosion of rocks near Corinth, and by 
Dr. Daubeny of decomposition of trachytic rocks by sulphureted hydrogen and 
muriatic acid gases in the Solfatara, near Naples. In all these instances it is 
clear that the gaseous fluids must have made their way through vast thicknesses 
of porous or fissured rocks, and their modifying influence may spread through 
the crust for thousands of yards in thickness.

It has been urged as an argument against the metamorphic theory, that rocks have 
a small power of conducting heat, and it is true that when dry, and in the air, 
they differ remarkably from metals in this respect. The syenite of Norway, as we 
have seen (Chapter 31), has sometimes altered fossiliferous strata both in the 
direction of their dip and strike for a distance of a quarter of a mile, but the 
theory of gneiss and mica-schist above proposed requires us to imagine that the 
same influence has extended through strata miles in thickness. Professor Bischof 
has shown what changes may be superinduced, on black marble and other rocks, by 
the steam of a hot spring having a temperature of no more than 133 degrees to 
167 degrees Fahrenheit, and we are becoming more and more acquainted with the 
prominent part which water is playing in distributing the heat of the interior 
through mountain masses of incumbent strata, and of introducing into them 
various mineral elements in a fluid or gaseous state. Such facts may induce us 
to consider whether many granites and other rocks of that class may not 
sometimes represent merely the extreme of a similar slow metamorphism. But, on 
the other hand, the heat of lava in a volcanic crater when it is white and 
glowing like the sun must convince us that the temperature of a column of such a 
fluid at the depth of many miles exceeds any heat which can ever be witnessed at 
the surface. That large portions of the Plutonic rocks had been formed under the 
influence of such intense heat is in perfect accordance with their great volume, 
uniform composition, and absence of stratification. The forcing also of veins 
into contiguous stratified or schistose rocks is a natural consequence of the 
hydrostatic pressure to which columns of molten matter many miles in height must 
give rise.

OBJECTIONS TO THE METAMORPHIC THEORY CONSIDERED.

It has been objected to the metamorphic theory that the crystalline schists 
contain a considerable proportion of potash and soda, whilst the sedimentary 
strata out of which they are supposed to have been formed are usually wanting in 
alkaline matter. But this reasoning proceeds on mistaken data, for clay, marl, 
shale, and slate often contain a considerable proportion of alkali, so much so 
as to make them frequently unfit to be burnt into bricks or pottery, and the Old 
Red Sandstone in Forfarshire and other parts of Scotland, derived from 
disintegration of granite, contains much triturated feldspar rich in potash. In 
the common salt by which strata are often largely impregnated, as in Patagonia, 
much soda is present, and potash enters largely into the composition of fossil 
sea-weeds, and recent analysis has also shown that the carboniferous strata in 
England, the Upper and Lower Silurian in East Canada, and the oldest clay-slates 
in Norway, all contain as much alkali as is generally present in metamorphic 
rocks.

Another objection has been derived from the alternation of highly crystalline 
strata with others less crystalline. The heat, it is said, in its ascent from 
below, must have traversed the less altered schists before it reached a higher 
and more crystalline bed. In answer to this, it may be observed, that if a 
number of strata differing greatly in composition from each other be subjected 
to equal quantities of heat, or hydrothermal action, there is every probability 
that some will be much more fusible or soluble than others. Some, for example, 
will contain soda, potash, lime, or some other ingredient capable of acting as a 
flux or solvent; while others may be destitute of the same elements, and so 
refractory as to be very slightly affected by the same causes. Nor should it be 
forgotten that, as a general rule, the less crystalline rocks do really occur in 
the upper, and the more crystalline in the lower part of each metamorphic 
series.


CHAPTER XXXIV.

METAMORPHIC ROCKS
CONTINUED.

Definition of slaty Cleavage and Joints.
Supposed Causes of these Structures.
Crystalline Theory of Cleavage.
Mechanical Theory of Cleavage.
Condensation and Elongation of slate Rocks by lateral Pressure.
Lamination of some volcanic Rocks due to Motion.
Whether the Foliation of the crystalline Schists be usually parallel with the 
original Planes of Stratification.
Examples in Norway and Scotland.
Causes of Irregularity in the Planes of Foliation.

We have already seen that chemical forces of great intensity have frequently 
acted upon sedimentary and fossiliferous strata long subsequently to their 
consolidation, and we may next inquire whether the component minerals of the 
altered rocks usually arrange themselves in planes parallel to the original 
planes of stratification, or whether, after crystallisation, they more commonly 
take up a different position.

In order to estimate fairly the merits of this question, we must first define 
what is meant by the terms cleavage and foliation. There are four distinct forms 
of structure exhibited in rocks, namely, stratification, joints, slaty cleavage, 
and foliation; and all these must have different names, even though there be 
cases where it is impossible, after carefully studying the appearances, to 
decide upon the class to which they belong.

SLATY CLEAVAGE.

(FIGURE 624. Parallel planes of cleavage intersecting curved strata. 
(Sedgwick.))

Professor Sedgwick, whose essay "On the Structure of large Mineral Masses" first 
cleared the way towards a better understanding of this difficult subject, 
observes, that joints are distinguishable from lines of slaty cleavage in this, 
that the rock intervening between two joints has no tendency to cleave in a 
direction parallel to the planes of the joints, whereas a rock is capable of 
indefinite subdivision in the direction of its slaty cleavage. In cases where 
the strata are curved, the planes of cleavage are still perfectly parallel. This 
has been observed in the slate rocks of part of Wales (see Figure 624), which 
consists of a hard greenish slate. The true bedding is there indicated by a 
number of parallel stripes, some of a lighter and some of a darker colour than 
the general mass. Such stripes are found to be parallel to the true planes of 
stratification, wherever these are manifested by ripple-mark or by beds 
containing peculiar organic remains. Some of the contorted strata are of a 
coarse mechanical structure, alternating with fine-grained crystalline chloritic 
slates, in which case the same slaty cleavage extends through the coarser and 
finer beds, though it is brought out in greater perfection in proportion as the 
materials of the rock are fine and homogeneous. It is only when these are very 
coarse that the cleavage planes entirely vanish. In the Welsh hills these planes 
are usually inclined at a very considerable angle to the planes of the strata, 
the average angle being as much as from 30 to 40 degrees. Sometimes the cleavage 
planes dip towards the same point of the compass as those of stratification, but 
often to opposite points. (Geological Transactions second series volume 3 page 
461.) The cleavage, as represented in Figure 624, is generally constant over the 
whole of any area affected by one great set of disturbances, as if the same 
lateral pressure which caused the crumpling up of the rock along parallel, 
anticlinal, and synclinal axes caused also the cleavage.

(FIGURE 625. Section in Lower Silurian slates of Cardiganshire, showing the 
cleavage planes bent along the junction of the beds. (T. McK. Hughes.))

Mr. T. McK. Hughes remarks, that where a rough cleavage cuts flag-stones at a 
considerable angle to the planes of stratification, the rock often splits into 
large slabs, across which the lines of bedding are frequently seen, but when the 
cleavage planes approach within about 15 degrees of stratification, the rock is 
apt to split along the lines of bedding. He has also called my attention to the 
fact that subsequent movements in a cleaved rock sometimes drag and bend the 
cleavage planes along the junction of the beds in the manner indicated in Figure 
625.

JOINTED STRUCTURE.

In regard to joints, they are natural fissures which often traverse rocks in 
straight and well-determined lines. They afford to the quarryman, as Sir R. 
Murchison observes, when speaking of the phenomenon, as exhibited in Shropshire 
and the neighbouring counties, the greatest aid in the extraction of blocks of 
stone; and, if a sufficient number cross each other, the whole mass of rock is 
split into symmetrical blocks. The faces of the joints are for the most part 
smoother and more regular than the surfaces of true strata. The joints are 
straight-cut chinks, sometimes slightly open, and often passing, not only 
through layers of successive deposition, but also through balls of limestone or 
other matter which have been formed by concretionary action since the original 
accumulation of the strata. Such joints, therefore, must often have resulted 
from one of the last changes superinduced upon sedimentary deposits. (Silurian 
System page 246.)

(FIGURE 626. Stratification, joints, and cleavage (From Murchison's Silurian 
System page 245.))

In Figure 626 the flat-surfaces of rock, A, B, C, represent exposed faces of 
joints, to which the walls of other joints, J-J, are parallel. S-S are the lines 
of stratification; D, D are lines of slaty cleavage, which intersect the rock at 
a considerable angle to the planes of stratification.

In the Swiss and Savoy Alps, as Mr. Bakewell has remarked, enormous masses of 
limestone are cut through so regularly by nearly vertical partings, and these 
joints are often so much more conspicuous than the seams of stratification, that 
an inexperienced observer will almost inevitably confound them, and suppose the 
strata to be perpendicular in places where in fact they are almost horizontal. 
(Introduction to Geology chapter 4.)

Now such joints are supposed to be analogous to the partings which separate 
volcanic and Plutonic rocks into cuboidal and prismatic masses. On a small scale 
we see clay and starch when dry split into similar shapes; this is often caused 
by simple contraction, whether the shrinking be due to the evaporation of water, 
or to a change of temperature. It is well known that many sandstones and other 
rocks expand by the application of moderate degrees of heat, and then contract 
again on cooling; and there can be no doubt that large portions of the earth's 
crust have, in the course of past ages, been subjected again and again to very 
different degrees of heat and cold. These alternations of temperature have 
probably contributed largely to the production of joints in rocks.

In many countries where masses of basalt rest on sandstone, the aqueous rock 
has, for the distance of several feet from the point of junction, assumed a 
columnar structure similar to that of the trap. In like manner some hearth-
stones, after exposure to the heat of a furnace without being melted, have 
become prismatic. Certain crystals also acquire by the application of heat a new 
internal arrangement, so as to break in a new direction, their external form 
remaining unaltered.

CRYSTALLINE THEORY OF CLEAVAGE.

Professor Sedgwick, speaking of the planes of slaty cleavage, where they are 
decidedly distinct from those of sedimentary deposition, declared, in the essay 
before alluded to, his opinion that no retreat of parts, no contraction in the 
dimensions of rocks in passing to a solid state, can account for the phenomenon. 
He accordingly referred it to crystalline or polar forces acting simultaneously, 
and somewhat uniformly, in given directions, on large masses having a 
homogeneous composition.

Sir John Herschel, in allusion to slaty cleavage, has suggested that "if rocks 
have been so heated as to allow a commencement of crystallisation-- that is to 
say, if they have been heated to a point at which the particles can begin to 
move among themselves, or at least on their own axes, some general law must then 
determine the position in which these particles will rest on cooling. Probably, 
that position will have some relation to the direction in which the heat 
escapes. Now, when all, or a majority of particles of the same nature have a 
general tendency to one position, that must of course determine a cleavage-
plane. Thus we see the infinitesimal crystals of fresh-precipitated sulphate of 
barytes, and some other such bodies, arrange themselves alike in the fluid in 
which they float; so as, when stirred, all to glance with one light, and give 
the appearance of silky filaments. Some sorts of soap, in which insoluble 
margarates exist (Margaric acid is an oleaginous acid, formed from different 
animal and vegetable fatty substances. A margarate is a compound of this acid 
with soda, potash, or some other base, and is so named from its pearly lustre.), 
exhibit the same phenomenon when mixed with water; and what occurs in our 
experiments on a minute scale may occur in nature on a great one." (Letter to 
the author dated Cape of Good Hope February 20, 1836.)

MECHANICAL THEORY OF CLEAVAGE.

Professor Phillips has remarked that in some slaty rocks the form of the outline 
of fossil shells and trilobites has been much changed by distortion, which has 
taken place in a longitudinal, transverse, or oblique direction. This change, he 
adds, seems to be the result of a "creeping movement" of the particles of the 
rock along the planes of cleavage, its direction being always uniform over the 
same tract of country, and its amount in space being sometimes measurable, and 
being as much as a quarter or even half an inch. The hard shells are not 
affected, but only those which are thin. (Report British Association Cork 1843 
Section page 60.) Mr. D. Sharpe, following up the same line of inquiry, came to 
the conclusion that the present distorted forms of the shells in certain British 
slate rocks may be accounted for by supposing that the rocks in which they are 
imbedded have undergone compression in a direction perpendicular to the planes 
of cleavage, and a corresponding expansion in the direction of the dip of the 
cleavage. (Quarterly Geological Journal volume 3 page 87 1847.)

(FIGURE 627. Vertical section of slate rock in the cliffs near Ilfracombe, North 
Devon. Scale one inch to one foot. (Drawn by H.C. Sorby.)
a, b, c, e. Fine-grained slates, the stratification being shown partly by 
lighter or darker colours, and partly by different degrees of fineness in the 
grain.
d, f. A coarser grained light-coloured sandy slate with less perfect cleavage.)

Subsequently (1853) Mr. Sorby demonstrated the great extent to which this 
mechanical theory is applicable to the slate rocks of North Wales and Devonshire 
(On the Origin of Slaty Cleavage by H.C. Sorby Edinburgh New Philosophical 
Journal 1853 volume 55 page 137.), districts where the amount of change in 
dimensions can be tested and measured by comparing the different effects exerted 
by lateral pressure on alternating beds of finer and coarser materials. Thus, 
for example, in Figure 627 it will be seen that the sandy bed d-f, which has 
offered greater resistance, has been sharply contorted, while the fine-grained 
strata, a, b, c, have remained comparatively unbent. The points d and f in the 
stratum d-f must have been originally four times as far apart as they are now. 
They have been forced so much nearer to each other, partly by bending, and 
partly by becoming elongated in the direction of what may be called the longer 
axes of their contortions, and lastly, to a certain small amount, by 
condensation. The chief result has obviously been due to the bending; but, in 
proof of elongation, it will be observed that the thickness of the bed d-f is 
now about four times greater in those parts lying in the main direction of the 
flexures than in a plane perpendicular to them; and the same bed exhibits 
cleavage planes in the direction of the greatest movement, although they are 
much fewer than in the slaty strata above and below.

Above the sandy bed d-f, the stratum c is somewhat disturbed, while the next 
bed, b, is much less so, and a not at all; yet all these beds, c, b, and a, must 
have undergone an equal amount of pressure with d, the points a and g having 
approximated as much towards each other as have d and f. The same phenomena are 
also repeated in the beds below d, and might have been shown, had the section 
been extended downward. Hence it appears that the finer beds have been squeezed 
into a fourth of the space they previously occupied, partly by condensation, or 
the closer packing of their ultimate particles (which has given rise to the 
great specific gravity of such slates), and partly by elongation in the line of 
the dip of the cleavage, of which the general direction is perpendicular to that 
of the pressure. "These and numerous other cases in North Devon are analogous," 
says Mr. Sorby, "to what would occur if a strip of paper were included in a mass 
of some soft plastic material which would readily change its dimensions. If the 
whole were then compressed in the direction of the length of the strip of paper, 
it would be bent and puckered up into contortions, while the plastic material 
would readily change its dimensions without undergoing such contortions; and the 
difference in distance of the ends of the paper, as measured in a direct line or 
along it, would indicate the change in the dimensions of the plastic material."

By microscopic examination of minute crystals, and by other observations, Mr. 
Sorby has come to the conclusion that the absolute condensation of the slate 
rocks amounts upon an average to about one half their original volume. Most of 
the scales of mica occurring in certain slates examined by Mr. Sorby lie in the 
plane of cleavage; whereas in a similar rock not exhibiting cleavage they lie 
with their longer axes in all directions. May not their position in the slates 
have been determined by the movement of elongation before alluded to? To 
illustrate this theory some scales of oxide of iron were mixed with soft pipe-
clay in such a manner that they inclined in all directions. The dimensions of 
the mass were then changed artificially to a similar extent to what has occurred 
in slate rocks, and the pipe-clay was then dried and baked. When it was 
afterwards rubbed to a flat surface perpendicular to the pressure and in the 
line of elongation, or in a plane corresponding to that of the dip of cleavage, 
the particles were found to have become arranged in the same manner as in 
natural slates, and the mass admitted of easy fracture into thin flat pieces in 
the plane alluded to, whereas it would not yield in that perpendicular to the 
cleavage. (Sorby as cited above page 741 note.)

Dr. Tyndall, when commenting in 1856 on Mr. Sorby's experiments, observed that 
pressure alone is sufficient to produce cleavage, and that the intervention of 
plates of mica or scales of oxide of iron, or any other substances having flat 
surfaces, is quite unnecessary. In proof of this he showed experimentally that a 
mass of "pure white wax, after having been submitted to great pressure, 
exhibited a cleavage more clean than that of any slate-rock, splitting into 
laminae of surpassing tenuity." (Tyndall View of the Cleavage of Crystals and 
Slate rocks.) He remarks that every mass of clay or mud is divided and 
subdivided by surfaces among which the cohesion is comparatively small. On being 
subjected to pressure, such masses yield and spread out in the direction of 
least resistance, small nodules become converted into laminae separated from 
each other by surfaces of weak cohesion, and the result is that the mass cleaves 
at right angles to the line in which the pressure is exerted. In further 
illustration of this, Mr. Hughes remarks that "concretions which in the 
undisturbed beds have their longer axes parallel to the bedding are, where the 
rock is much cleaved, frequently found flattened laterally, so as to have their 
longer axes parallel to the cleavage planes, and at a considerable angle, even 
right angles, to their former position."

Mr. Darwin attributes the lamination and fissile structure of volcanic rocks of 
the trachytic series, including some obsidians in Ascension, Mexico, and 
elsewhere, to their having moved when liquid in the direction of the laminae. 
The zones consist sometimes of layers of air-cells drawn out and lengthened in 
the supposed direction of the moving mass. (Darwin Volcanic Islands pages 69, 
70.)

FOLIATION OF CRYSTALLINE SCHISTS.

After studying, in 1835, the crystalline rocks of South America, Mr. Darwin 
proposed the term FOLIATION for the laminae or plates into which gneiss, mica-
schist, and other crystalline rocks are divided. Cleavage, he observes, may be 
applied to those divisional planes which render a rock fissile, although it may 
appear to the eye quite or nearly homogeneous. Foliation may be used for those 
alternating layers or plates of different mineralogical nature of which gneiss 
and other metamorphic schists are composed.

That the planes of foliation of the crystalline schists in Norway accord very 
generally with those of original stratification is a conclusion long since 
espoused by Keilhau. (Norske Mag. Naturvidsk. volume 1 page 71.) Numerous 
observations made by Mr. David Forbes in the same country (the best probably in 
Europe for studying such phenomena on a grand scale) confirm Keilhau's opinion. 
In Scotland, also, Mr. D. Forbes has pointed out a striking case where the 
foliation is identical with the lines of stratification in rocks well seen near 
Crianlorich on the road to Tyndrum, about eight miles from Inverarnon, in 
Perthshire. There is in that locality a blue limestone foliated by the 
intercalation of small plates of white mica, so that the rock is often scarcely 
distinguishable in aspect from gneiss or mica-schist. The stratification is 
shown by the large beds and coloured bands of limestone all dipping, like the 
folia, at an angle of 32 degrees N.E. (Memoir read before the Geological Society 
London January 31, 1855.) In stratified formations of every age we see layers of 
siliceous sand with or without mica, alternating with clay, with fragments of 
shells or corals, or with seams of vegetable matter, and we should expect the 
mutual attraction of like particles to favour the crystallisation of the quartz, 
or mica, or feldspar, or carbonate of lime, along the planes of original 
deposition, rather than in planes placed at angles of 20 or 40 degrees to those 
of stratification.

We have seen how much the original planes of stratification may be interfered 
with or even obliterated by concretionary action in deposits still retaining 
their fossils, as in the case of the magnesian limestone (see Chapter 4). Hence 
we must expect to be frequently baffled when we attempt to decide whether the 
foliation does or does not accord with that arrangement which gravitation, 
combined with current-action, imparted to a deposit from water. Moreover, when 
we look for stratification in crystalline rocks, we must be on our guard not to 
expect too much regularity. The occurrence of wedge-shaped masses, such as 
belong to coarse sand and pebbles-- diagonal lamination (Chapter 2)-- ripple-
marked, unconformable stratification,-- the fantastic folds produced by lateral 
pressure-- faults of various width-- intrusive dikes of trap-- organic bodies of 
diversified shapes, and other causes of unevenness in the planes of deposition, 
both on the small and on the large scale, will interfere with parallelism. If 
complex and enigmatical appearances did not present themselves, it would be a 
serious objection to the metamorphic theory. Mr. Sorby has shown that the 
peculiar structure belonging to ripple-marked sands, or that which is generated 
when ripples are formed during the deposition of the materials, is distinctly 
recognisable in many varieties of mica-schists in Scotland. (H.C. Sorby 
Quarterly Geological Journal volume 19 page 401.)

(FIGURE 628. Lamination of clay-stone. Montagne de Seguinat, near Gavarnie, in 
the Pyrenees.)

In Figure 628 I have represented carefully the lamination of a coarse 
argillaceous schist which I examined in 1830 in the Pyrenees. In part it 
approaches in character to a green and blue roofing-slate, while part is 
extremely quartzose, the whole mass passing downward into micaceous schist. The 
vertical section here exhibited is about three feet in height, and the layers 
are sometimes so thin that fifty may be counted in the thickness of an inch. 
Some of them consist of pure quartz. There is a resemblance in such cases to the 
diagonal lamination which we see in sedimentary rocks, even though the layers of 
quartz and of mica, or of feldspar and other minerals, may be more distinct in 
alternating folia than they were originally.


CHAPTER XXXV.

ON THE DIFFERENT AGES OF THE METAMORPHIC ROCKS.

Difficulty of ascertaining the Age of metamorphic Strata.
Metamorphic Strata of Eocene date in the Alps of Switzerland and Savoy.
Limestone and Shale of Carrara.
Metamorphic Strata of older date than the Silurian and Cambrian Rocks.
Order of Succession in metamorphic Rocks.
Uniformity of mineral Character.
Supposed Azoic Period.
Connection between the Absence of Organic Remains and the Scarcity of calcareous 
Matter in metamorphic Rocks.

According to the theory adopted in the last chapter, the metamorphic strata have 
been deposited at one period, and have become crystalline at another. We can 
rarely hope to define with exactness the date of both these periods, the fossils 
having been destroyed by Plutonic action, and the mineral characters being the 
same, whatever the age. Superposition itself is an ambiguous test, especially 
when we desire to determine the period of crystallisation. Suppose, for example, 
we are convinced that certain metamorphic strata in the Alps, which are covered 
by cretaceous beds, are altered lias; this lias may have assumed its crystalline 
texture in the cretaceous or in some tertiary period, the Eocene for example.

When discussing the ages of the Plutonic rocks, we have seen that examples occur 
of various primary, secondary, and tertiary deposits converted into metamorphic 
strata near their contact with granite. There can be no doubt in these cases 
that strata once composed of mud, sand, and gravel, or of clay, marl, and shelly 
limestone, have for the distance of several yards, and in some instances several 
hundred feet, been turned into gneiss, mica-schist, hornblende-schist, chlorite-
schist, quartz rock, statuary marble, and the rest. (See Chapters 33 and 34.) It 
may be easy to prove the identity of two different parts of the same stratum; 
one, where the rock has been in contact with a volcanic or Plutonic mass, and 
has been changed into marble or hornblende-schist, and another not far distant, 
where the same bed remains unaltered and fossiliferous; but when hydrothermal 
action, as described in Chapter 33, has operated gradually on a more extensive 
scale, it may have finally destroyed all monuments of the date of its 
development throughout a whole mountain chain, and all the labour and skill of 
the most practised observers are required, and may sometimes be at fault. I 
shall mention one or two examples of alteration on a grand scale, in order to 
explain to the student the kind of reasoning by which we are led to infer that 
dense masses of fossiliferous strata have been converted into crystalline rocks.

EOCENE STRATA RENDERED METAMORPHIC IN THE ALPS.

In the eastern part of the Alps, some of the Palaeozoic strata, as well as the 
older Mesozoic formations, including the oolitic and cretaceous rocks, are 
distinctly recognisable. Tertiary deposits also appear in a less elevated 
position on the flanks of the Eastern Alps; but in the Central or Swiss Alps, 
the Palaeozoic and older Mesozoic formations disappear, and the Cretaceous, 
Oolitic, Liassic, and at some points even the Eocene strata, graduate insensibly 
into metamorphic rocks, consisting of granular limestone, talc-schist, talcose-
gneiss, micaceous schist, and other varieties.

As an illustration of the partial conversion into gneiss of portions of a highly 
inclined set of beds, I may cite Sir R. Murchison's memoir on the structure of 
the Alps. Slates provincially termed "flysch" (see Chapter 16), overlying the 
nummulite limestone of Eocene date, and comprising some arenaceous and some 
calcareous layers, are seen to alternate several times with bands of granitoid 
rock, answering in character to gneiss. In this case heat, vapour, or water at a 
high temperature may have traversed the more permeable beds, and altered them so 
far as to admit of an internal movement and re-arrangement of the molecules, 
while the adjoining strata did not give passage to the same heated gases or 
water, or, if so, remained unchanged because they were composed of less fusible 
or decomposable materials. Whatever hypothesis we adopt, the phenomena establish 
beyond a doubt the possibility of the development of the metamorphic structure 
in a tertiary deposit in planes parallel to those of stratification. The strata 
appear clearly to have been affected, though in a less intense degree, by that 
same Plutonic action which has entirely altered and rendered metamorphic so many 
of the subjacent formations; for in the Alps this action has by no means been 
confined to the immediate vicinity of granite. Granite, indeed, and other 
Plutonic rocks, rarely make their appearance at the surface, notwithstanding the 
deep ravines which lay open to view the internal structure of these mountains. 
That they exist below at no great depth we can not doubt, for at some points, as 
in the Valorsine, near Mont Blanc, granite and granitic veins are observable, 
piercing through talcose gneiss, which passes insensibly upward into secondary 
strata.

It is certainly in the Alps of Switzerland and Savoy, more than in any other 
district in Europe, that the geologist is prepared to meet with the signs of an 
intense development of Plutonic action; for here strata thousands of feet thick 
have been bent, folded, and overturned, and marine secondary formations of a 
comparatively modern date, such as the Oolitic and Cretaceous, have been 
upheaved to the height of 12,000, and some Eocene strata to elevations of 10,000 
feet above the level of the sea; and even deposits of the Miocene era have been 
raised 4000 or 5000 feet, so as to rival in height the loftiest mountains in 
Great Britain. In one of the sections described by M. Studer in the highest of 
the Bernese Alps, namely in the Roththal, a valley bordering the line of 
perpetual snow on the northern side of the Jungfrau, there occurs a mass of 
gneiss 1000 feet thick, and 15,000 feet long, which I examined, not only resting 
upon, but also again covered by strata containing oolitic fossils. These 
anomalous appearances may partly be explained by supposing great solid wedges of 
intrusive gneiss to have been forced in laterally between strata to which I 
found them to be in many sections unconformable. The superposition, also, of the 
gneiss to the oolite may, in some cases, be due to a reversal of the original 
position of the beds in a region where the convulsions have been on so 
stupendous a scale.

NORTHERN APENNINES.-- CARRARA.

The celebrated marble of Carrara, used in sculpture, was once regarded as a type 
of primitive limestone. It abounds in the mountains of Massa Carrara, or the 
"Apuan Alps," as they have been called, the highest peaks of which are nearly 
6000 feet high. Its great antiquity was inferred from its mineral texture, from 
the absence of fossils, and its passage downward into talc-schist and 
garnetiferous mica-schist; these rocks again graduating downward into gneiss, 
which is penetrated, at Forno, by granite veins. But the researches of MM. Savi, 
Boue, Pareto, Guidoni, De la Beche, Hoffman, and Pilla demonstrated that this 
marble, once supposed to be formed before the existence of organic beings, is, 
in fact, an altered limestone of the Oolitic period, and the underlying 
crystalline schists are secondary sandstones and shales, modified by Plutonic 
action. In order to establish these conclusions it was first pointed out that 
the calcareous rocks bordering the Gulf of Spezia, and abounding in Oolitic 
fossils, assume a texture like that of Carrara marble, in proportion as they are 
more and more invaded by certain trappean and Plutonic rocks, such as diorite, 
serpentine, and granite, occurring in the same country.

It was then observed that, in places where the secondary formations are 
unaltered, the uppermost consist of common Apennine limestone with nodules of 
flint, below which are shales, and at the base of all, argillaceous and 
siliceous sandstones. In the limestone fossils are frequent, but very rare in 
the underlying shale and sandstone. Then a gradation was traced laterally from 
these rocks into another and corresponding series, which is completely 
metamorphic; for at the top of this we find a white granular marble, wholly 
devoid of fossils, and almost without stratification, in which there are no 
nodules of flint, but in its place siliceous matter disseminated through the 
mass in the form of prisms of quartz. Below this, and in place of the shales, 
are talc-schists, jasper, and hornstone; and at the bottom, instead of the 
siliceous and argillaceous sandstones, are quartzite and gneiss. (See notices of 
Savi, Hoffman, and others, referred to by Boue, Bull. de la Soc. Geol. de France 
tome 5 page 317 and tome 3 page 44; also Pilla, cited by Murchison Quarterly 
Geological Journal volume 5 page 266.) Had these secondary strata of the 
Apennines undergone universally as great an amount of transmutation, it would 
have been impossible to form a conjecture respecting their true age; and then, 
according to the method of classification adopted by the earlier geologists, 
they would have ranked as primary rocks. In that case the date of their origin 
would have been thrown back to an era antecedent to the deposition of the Lower 
Silurian or Cambrian strata, although in reality they were formed in the Oolitic 
period, and altered at some subsequent and perhaps much later epoch.

METAMORPHIC STRATA OF OLDER DATE THAN THE SILURIAN AND CAMBRIAN ROCKS.

It was remarked (Figure 617) that as the hypogene rocks, both stratified and 
unstratified, crystallise originally at a certain depth beneath the surface, 
they must always, before they are upraised and exposed at the surface, be of 
considerable antiquity, relatively to a large portion of the fossiliferous and 
volcanic rocks. They may be forming at all periods; but before any of them can 
become visible, they must be raised above the level of the sea, and some of the 
rocks which previously concealed them must have been removed by denudation.

In Canada, as we have seen (Chapter 27), the Lower Laurentian gneiss, quartzite, 
and limestone may be regarded as metamorphic, because, among other reasons, 
organic remains (Eozoon Canadense) have been detected in a part of one of the 
calcareous masses. The Upper Laurentian or Labrador series lies unconformably 
upon the Lower, and differs from it chiefly in having as yet yielded no fossils. 
It consists of gneiss with Labrador-feldspar and feldstones, in all 10,000 feet 
thick, and both its composition and structure lead us to suppose that, like the 
Lower Laurentian, it was originally of sedimentary origin and owes its 
crystalline condition to metamorphic action. The remote date of the period when 
some of these old Laurentian strata of Canada were converted into gneiss may be 
inferred from the fact that pebbles of that rock are found in the overlying 
Huronian formation, which is probably of Cambrian age (Chapter 27).

The oldest stratified rock of Scotland is the hornblendic gneiss of Lewis, in 
the Hebrides, and that of the north-west coast of Ross-shire, represented at the 
base of the section given at Figure 82. It is the same as that intersected by 
numerous granite veins which forms the cliffs of Cape Wrath, in Sutherlandshire 
(see Figure 613), and is conjectured to be of Laurentian age. Above it, as shown 
in the section (Figure 82), lie unconformable beds of a reddish or purple 
sandstone and conglomerate, nearly horizontal, and between 3000 and 4000 feet 
thick. In these ancient grits no fossils have been found, but they are supposed 
to be of Cambrian date, for Sir R. Murchison found Lower Silurian strata resting 
unconformably upon them. These strata consist of quartzite with annelid burrows 
already alluded to (Chapter 7), and limestone in which Mr. Charles Peach was the 
first to find, in 1854, three or four species of Orthoceras, also the genera 
Cyrtoceras and Lituites, two species of Murchisonia, a Pleurotomaria, a species 
of Maclurea, one of Euomphalus, and an Orthis. Several of the species are 
believed by Mr. Salter to be identical with Lower Silurian fossils of Canada and 
the United States.

The discovery of the true age of these fossiliferous rocks was one of the most 
important steps made of late years in the progress of British Geology, for it 
led to the unexpected conclusion that all the Scotch crystalline strata to the 
eastward, once called primitive, which overlie the limestone and quartzite in 
question, are referable to some part of the Silurian series.

These Scotch metamorphic strata are of gneiss, mica-schist, and clay-slate of 
vast thickness, and having a strike from north-east to south-west almost at 
right angles to that of the older Laurentian gneiss before mentioned. The newer 
crystalline series, comprising the crystalline rocks of Aberdeenshire, 
Perthshire, and Forfarshire, were inferred by Sir R. Murchison to be altered 
Silurian strata; and his opinion has been since confirmed by the observations of 
three able geologists, Messrs. Ramsay, Harkness, and Geikie. The newest of the 
series is a clay-slate, on which, along the southern borders of the Grampians, 
the Lower Old Red, containing Cephalaspis Lyelli, Pterygotus Anglicus, and Parka 
decipiens, rests unconformably.

ORDER OF SUCCESSION IN METAMORPHIC ROCKS.

There is no universal and invariable order of superposition in metamorphic 
rocks, although a particular arrangement may prevail throughout countries of 
great extent, for the same reason that it is traceable in those sedimentary 
formations from which crystalline strata are derived. Thus, for example, we have 
seen that in the Apennines, near Carrara, the descending series, where it is 
metamorphic, consists of, first, saccharine marble; secondly, talcose-schist; 
and thirdly, of quartz-rock and gneiss: where unaltered, of, first, 
fossiliferous limestone; secondly, shale; and thirdly, sandstone.

But if we investigate different mountain chains, we find gneiss, mica-schist, 
hornblende-schist, chlorite-schist, hypogene limestone, and other rocks, 
succeeding each other, and alternating with each other in every possible order. 
It is, indeed, more common to meet with some variety of clay-slate forming the 
uppermost member of a metamorphic series than any other rock; but this fact by 
no means implies, as some have imagined, that all clay-slates were formed at the 
close of an imaginary period when the deposition of the crystalline strata gave 
way to that of ordinary sedimentary deposits. Such clay-slates, in fact, are 
variable in composition, and sometimes alternate with fossiliferous strata, so 
that they may be said to belong almost equally to the sedimentary and 
metamorphic order of rocks. It is probable that, had they been subjected to more 
intense Plutonic action, they would have been transformed into hornblende-
schist, foliated chlorite-schist, scaly talcose-schist, mica-schist, or other 
more perfectly crystalline rocks, such as are usually associated with gneiss.

UNIFORMITY OF MINERAL CHARACTER IN HYPOGENE ROCKS.

It is true, as Humboldt has happily remarked, that when we pass to another 
hemisphere, we see new forms of animals and plants, and even new constellations 
in the heavens; but in the rocks we still recognise our old acquaintances-- the 
same granite, the same gneiss, the same micaceous schist, quartz-rock, and the 
rest. There is certainly a great and striking general resemblance in the 
principal kinds of hypogene rocks in all countries, however different their 
ages; but each of them, as we have seen, must be regarded as geological families 
of rocks, and not as definite mineral compounds. They are more uniform in aspect 
than sedimentary strata, because these last are often composed of fragments 
varying greatly in form, size, and colour, and contain fossils of different 
shapes and mineral composition, and acquire a variety of tints from the mixture 
of various kinds of sediment. The materials of such strata, if they underwent 
metamorphism, would be subject to chemical laws, simple and uniform in their 
action, the same in every climate, and wholly undisturbed by mechanical and 
organic causes. It would, however, be a great error to assume, as some have 
done, that the hypogene rocks, considered as aggregates of simple minerals, are 
really more homogeneous in their composition than the several members of the 
sedimentary series. Not only do the proportional quantities of feldspar, quartz, 
mica, hornblende, and other minerals, vary in hypogene rocks bearing the same 
name; but what is still more important, the ingredients, as we have seen, of the 
same simple mineral are not always constant (Chapter 28 and Table 28.1).

SUPPOSED AZOIC PERIOD.

The total absence of any trace of fossils has inclined many geologists to 
attribute the origin of the most ancient strata to an azoic period, or one 
antecedent to the existence of organic beings. Admitting, they say, the 
obliteration, in some cases, of fossils by Plutonic action, we might still 
expect that traces of them would oftener be found in certain ancient systems of 
slate which can scarcely be said to have assumed a crystalline structure. But in 
urging this argument it seems to have been forgotten that there are stratified 
formations of enormous thickness, and of various ages, some of them even of 
Tertiary date, and which we know were formed after the earth had become the 
abode of living creatures, which are, nevertheless, in some districts, entirely 
destitute of all vestiges of organic bodies. In some, the traces of fossils may 
have been effaced by water and acids, at many successive periods; indeed the 
removal of the calcareous matter of fossil shells is proved by the fact of such 
organic remains being often replaced by silex or other minerals, and sometimes 
by the space once occupied by the fossil being left empty, or only marked by a 
faint impression.

Those who believed the hypogene rocks to have originated antecedently to the 
creation of organic beings, imputed the absence of lime, so remarkable in 
metamorphic strata, to the non-existence of those mollusca and zoophytes by 
which shells and corals are secreted; but when we ascribe the crystalline 
formations to Plutonic action, it is natural to inquire whether this action 
itself may not tend to expel carbonic acid and lime from the materials which it 
reduces to fusion or semi-fusion. Not only carbonate of lime, but also free 
carbonic acid gas, is given off plentifully from the soil and crevices of rocks 
in regions of active and spent volcanoes, as near Naples and in Auvergne. By 
this process, fossil shells or corals may often lose their carbonic acid, and 
the residual lime may enter into the composition of augite, hornblende, garnet, 
and other hypogene minerals. Although we can not descend into the subterranean 
regions where volcanic heat is developed, we can observe in regions of extinct 
volcanoes, such as Auvergne and Tuscany, hundreds of springs, both cold and 
thermal, flowing out from granite and other rocks, and having their waters 
plentifully charged with carbonate of lime.

If all the calcareous matter transferred in the course of ages by these and 
thousands of other springs from the lower part of the earth's crust to the 
atmosphere could be presented to us in a solid form, we should find that its 
volume was comparable to that of many a chain of hills. Calcareous matter is 
poured into lakes and the ocean by a thousand springs and rivers; so that part 
of almost every new calcareous rock chemically precipitated, and of many reefs 
of shelly and coralline stone, must be derived from mineral matter subtracted by 
Plutonic agency, and driven up by gas and steam from fused and heated rocks in 
the bowels of the earth.

The scarcity of limestone in many extensive regions of metamorphic rocks, as in 
the Eastern and Southern Grampians of Scotland, may have been the result of some 
action of this kind; and if the limestones of the Lower Laurentian in Canada 
afford a remarkable exception to the general rule, we must not forget that it is 
precisely in this most ancient formation that the Eozoon Canadense has been 
found. The fact that some distinct bands of limestone from 700 to 1500 feet 
thick occur here, may be connected with the escape from destruction of some few 
traces of organic life, even in a rock in which metamorphic action has gone so 
far as to produce serpentine, augite, and other minerals found largely 
intermixed with the carbonate of lime.


CHAPTER XXXVI.

MINERAL VEINS.

Different Kinds of mineral Veins.
Ordinary metalliferous Veins or Lodes.
Their frequent Coincidence with Faults.
Proofs that they originated in Fissures in solid Rock.
Veins shifting other Veins.
Polishing of their Walls or "Slicken sides."
Shells and Pebbles in Lodes.
Evidence of the successive Enlargement and Reopening of veins.
Examples in Cornwall and in Auvergne.
Dimensions of Veins.
Why some alternately swell out and contract.
Filling of Lodes by Sublimation from below.
Supposed relative Age of the precious Metals.
Copper and lead Veins in Ireland older than Cornish Tin.
Lead Vein in Lias, Glamorganshire.
Gold in Russia, California, and Australia.
Connection of hot Springs and mineral Veins.

The manner in which metallic substances are distributed through the earth's 
crust, and more especially the phenomena of those more or less connected masses 
of ore called mineral veins, from which the larger part of the precious metals 
used by man are obtained, are subjects of the highest practical importance to 
the miner, and of no less theoretical interest to the geologist.

ON DIFFERENT KINDS OF MINERAL VEINS.

The mineral veins with which we are most familiarly acquainted are those of 
quartz and carbonate of lime, which are often observed to form lenticular masses 
of limited extent traversing both hypogene strata and fossiliferous rocks. Such 
veins appear to have once been chinks or small cavities, caused, like cracks in 
clay, by the shrinking of the mass, during desiccation, or in passing from a 
higher to a lower temperature. Siliceous, calcareous, and occasionally metallic 
matters have sometimes found their way simultaneously into such empty spaces, by 
infiltration from the surrounding rocks. Mixed with hot water and steam, 
metallic ores may have permeated the mass until they reached those receptacles 
formed by shrinkage, and thus gave rise to that irregular assemblage of veins, 
called by the Germans a "stockwerk," in allusion to the different floors on 
which the mining operations are in such cases carried on.

The more ordinary or regular veins are usually worked in vertical shafts, and 
have evidently been fissures produced by mechanical violence. They traverse all 
kinds of rocks, both hypogene and fossiliferous, and extend downward to 
indefinite or unknown depths. We may assume that they correspond with such rents 
as we see caused from time to time by the shock of an earthquake. Metalliferous 
veins referable to such agency are occasionally a few inches wide, but more 
commonly three or four feet. They hold their course continuously in a certain 
prevailing direction for miles or leagues, passing through rocks varying in 
mineral composition.

THAT METALLIFEROUS VEINS WERE FISSURES.

(FIGURES 629, 630 and 631. Vertical sections of the mine of Huel Peever, 
Redruth, Cornwall.

(Figure 629. Vertical section of the mine of Huel Peever, Redruth, Cornwall. 
Tin.)

(FIGURE 630. Vertical section of the mine of Huel Peever, Redruth, Cornwall. 
Copper.)

(FIGURE 631. Vertical section of the mine of Huel Peever, Redruth, Cornwall. 
Clay and copper.))

As some intelligent miners, after an attentive study of metalliferous veins, 
have been unable to reconcile many of their characteristics with the hypothesis 
of fissures, I shall begin by stating the evidence in its favour. The most 
striking fact, perhaps, which can be adduced in its support is, the coincidence 
of a considerable proportion of mineral veins with FAULTS, or those dislocations 
of rocks which are indisputably due to mechanical force, as above explained 
(Chapter 5). There are even proofs in almost every mining district of a 
succession of faults, by which the opposite walls of rents, now the receptacles 
of metallic substances, have suffered displacement. Thus, for example, suppose 
a-a, Figure 629, to be a tin lode in Cornwall, the term LODE being applied to 
veins containing metallic ores. This lode, running east and west, is a yard 
wide, and is shifted by a copper lode (b-b) of similar width. The first fissure 
(a-a) has been filled with various materials, partly of chemical origin, such as 
quartz, fluor-spar, peroxide of tin, sulphuret of copper, arsenical pyrites, 
bismuth, and sulphuret of nickel, and partly of mechanical origin, comprising 
clay and angular fragments or detritus of the intersected rocks. The plates of 
quartz and the ores are, in some places, parallel to the vertical sides or walls 
of the vein, being divided from each other by alternating layers of clay or 
other earthy matter. Occasionally the metallic ores are disseminated in detached 
masses among the vein-stones.

It is clear that, after the gradual introduction of the tin and other 
substances, the second rent (b-b) was produced by another fracture accompanied 
by a displacement of the rocks along the plane of b-b. This new opening was then 
filled with minerals, some of them resembling those in a-a, as fluor-spar (or 
fluate of lime) and quartz; others different, the copper being plentiful and the 
tin wanting or very scarce. We must next suppose a third movement to occur, 
breaking asunder all the rocks along the line c-c, Figure 630; the fissure, in 
this instance, being only six inches wide, and simply filled with clay, derived, 
probably, from the friction of the walls of the rent, or partly, perhaps, washed 
in from above. This new movement has displaced the rock in such a manner as to 
interrupt the continuity of the copper vein (b-b), and, at the same time, to 
shift or heave laterally in the same direction a portion of the tin vein which 
had not previously been broken.

Again, in Figure 631 we see evidence of a fourth fissure (d-d), also filled with 
clay, which has cut through the tin vein (a-a), and has lifted it slightly 
upward towards the south. The various changes here represented are not ideal, 
but are exhibited in a section obtained in working an old Cornish mine, long 
since abandoned, in the parish of Redruth, called Huel Peever, and described 
both by Mr. Williams and Mr. Carne. (Geological Transactions volume 4 page 139; 
Transactions of the Royal Geological Society Cornwall volume 2 page 90.) The 
principal movement here referred to, or that of c-c, Figure 631, extends through 
a space of no less than 84 feet; but in this, as in the case of the other three, 
it will be seen that the outline of the country above, d, c, b, a, etc., or the 
geographical features of Cornwall, are not affected by any of the dislocations, 
a powerful denuding force having clearly been exerted subsequently to all the 
faults. (See Chapter 5.) It is commonly said in Cornwall, that there are eight 
distinct systems of veins, which can in like manner be referred to as many 
successive movements or fractures; and the German miners of the Hartz Mountains 
speak also of eight systems of veins, referable to as many periods.

Besides the proofs of mechanical action already explained, the opposite walls of 
veins are often beautifully polished, as if glazed, and are not unfrequently 
striated or scored with parallel furrows and ridges, such as would be produced 
by the continued rubbing together of surfaces of unequal hardness. These 
smoothed surfaces resemble the rocky floor over which a glacier has passed (see 
Figure 106). They are common even in cases where there has been no shift, and 
occur equally in non-metalliferous fissures. They are called by miners "slicken-
sides," from the German schlichten, to plane, and seite, side. It is supposed 
that the lines of the striae indicate the direction in which the rocks were 
moved.

In some of the veins in the mountain limestone of Derbyshire, containing lead, 
the vein-stuff, which is nearly compact, is occasionally traversed by what may 
be called a vertical crack passing down the middle of the vein. The two faces in 
contact are slicken-sides, well polished and fluted, and sometimes covered by a 
thin coating of lead-ore. When one side of the vein-stuff is removed, the other 
side cracks, especially if small holes be made in it, and fragments fly off with 
loud explosions, and continue to do so for some days. The miner, availing 
himself of this circumstance, makes with his pick small holes about six inches 
apart, and four inches deep, and on his return in a few hours finds every part 
ready broken to his hand. (Conybeare and Phil. Geol. page 401 and Farey's 
Derbyshire page 243.)

That a great many veins communicated originally with the surface of the country 
above, or with the bed of the sea, is proved by the occurrence in them of well-
rounded pebbles, agreeing with those in superficial alluviums, as in Auvergne 
and Saxony. Marine fossil shells, also, have been found at great depths, having 
probably been ingulfed during submarine earthquakes. Thus, a gryphaea is stated 
by M. Virlet to have been met with in a lead-mine near Semur, in France, and a 
madrepore in a compact vein of cinnabar in Hungary. (Fournet Etudes sur les 
Depots Metalliferes.) In Bohemia, similar pebbles have been met with at the 
depth of 180 fathoms; and in Cornwall, Mr. Carne mentions true pebbles of quartz 
and slate in a tin lode of the Relistran Mine, at the depth of 600 feet below 
the surface. They were cemented by oxide of tin and bisulphuret of copper, and 
were traced over a space more than twelve feet long and as many wide. (carne 
Transactions of the Geological Society Cornwall volume 3 page 238.) When 
different sets or systems of veins occur in the same country, those which are 
supposed to be of contemporaneous origin, and which are filled with the same 
kind of metals, often maintain a general parallelism of direction. Thus, for 
example, both the tin and copper veins in Cornwall run nearly east and west, 
while the lead veins run north and south; but there is no general law of 
direction common to different mining districts. The parallelism of the veins is 
another reason for regarding them as ordinary fissures, for we observe that 
faults and trap dikes, admitted by all to be masses of melted matter which have 
filled rents, are often parallel.

FRACTURE, RE-OPENING AND SUCCESSIVE FORMATION OF VEINS.

Assuming, then, that veins are simply fissures in which chemical and mechanical 
deposits have accumulated, we may next consider the proofs of their having been 
filled gradually and often during successive enlargements.

Werner observed, in a vein near Gersdorff, in Saxony, no less than thirteen beds 
of different minerals, arranged with the utmost regularity on each side of the 
central layer. This layer was formed of two plates of calcareous spar, which had 
evidently lined the opposite walls of a vertical cavity. The thirteen beds 
followed each other in corresponding order, consisting of fluor-spar, heavy 
spar, galena, etc. In these cases the central mass has been last formed, and the 
two plates which coat the walls of the rent on each side are the oldest of all. 
If they consist of crystalline precipitates, they may be explained by supposing 
the fissure to have remained unaltered in its dimensions, while a series of 
changes occurred in the nature of the solutions which rose up from below: but 
such a mode of deposition, in the case of many successive and parallel layers, 
appears to be exceptional.

(FIGURE 632. Copper lode, near Redruth, enlarged at six successive periods.)

If a vein-stone consist of crystalline matter, the points of the crystals are 
always turned inward, or towards the centre of the vein; in other words, they 
point in the direction where there was space for the development of the 
crystals. Thus each new layer receives the impression of the crystals of the 
preceding layer, and imprints its crystals on the one which follows, until at 
length the whole of the vein is filled: the two layers which meet dovetail the 
points of their crystals the one into the other. But in Cornwall, some lodes 
occur where the vertical plates, or COMBS, as they are there called, exhibit 
crystals so dovetailed as to prove that the same fissure has been often 
enlarged. Sir H. De la Beche gives the following curious and instructive example 
(Figure 632), from a copper-mine in granite, near Redruth. (Geological Report on 
Cornwall page 340.) Each of the plates or combs (a, b, c, d, e, f) is double, 
having the points of their crystals turned inward along the axis of the comb. 
The sides or walls (2, 3, 4, 5 and 6) are parted by a thin covering of ochreous 
clay, so that each comb is readily separable from another by a moderate blow of 
the hammer. The breadth of each represents the whole width of the fissure at six 
successive periods, and the outer walls of the vein, where the first narrow rent 
was formed, consisted of the granitic surfaces 1 and 7.

A somewhat analogous interpretation is applicable to many other cases, where 
clay, sand, or angular detritus, alternate with ores and vein-stones. Thus, we 
may imagine the sides of a fissure to be incrusted with siliceous matter, as Von 
Buch observed, in Lancerote, the walls of a volcanic crater formed in 1731 to be 
traversed by an open rent in which hot vapours had deposited hydrate of silica, 
the incrustation nearly extending to the middle. (Principles chapter 27 8th 
edition page 422.) Such a vein may then be filled with clay or sand, and 
afterwards re-opened, the new rent dividing the argillaceous deposit, and 
allowing a quantity of rubbish to fall down. Various metals and spars may then 
be precipitated from aqueous solutions among the interstices of this 
heterogeneous mass.

That such changes have repeatedly occurred, is demonstrated by occasional cross-
veins, implying the oblique fracture of previously formed chemical and 
mechanical deposits. Thus, for example, M. Fournet, in his description of some 
mines in Auvergne worked under his superintendence, observes that the granite of 
that country was first penetrated by veins of granite, and then dislocated, so 
that open rents crossed both the granite and the granitic veins. Into such 
openings, quartz, accompanied by sulphurets of iron and arsenical pyrites, was 
introduced. Another convulsion then burst open the rocks along the old line of 
fracture, and the first set of deposits were cracked and often shattered, so 
that the new rent was filled, not only with angular fragments of the adjoining 
rocks, but with pieces of the older vein-stones. Polished and striated surfaces 
on the sides or in the contents of the vein also attest the reality of these 
movements. A new period of repose then ensued, during which various sulphurets 
were introduced, together with hornstone quartz, by which angular fragments of 
the older quartz before mentioned were cemented into a breccia. This period was 
followed by other dilatations of the same veins, and the introduction of other 
sets of mineral deposits, as well as of pebbles of the basaltic lavas of 
Auvergne, derived from superficial alluviums, probably of Miocene or even Older 
Pliocene date. Such repeated enlargement and re-opening of veins might have been 
anticipated, if we adopt the theory of fissures, and reflect how few of them 
have ever been sealed up entirely, and that a country with fissures only 
partially filled must naturally offer much feebler resistance along the old 
lines of fracture than anywhere else.

CAUSE OF ALTERNATE CONTRACTION AND SWELLING OF VEINS.

(FIGURES 633 to 635. Irregular fissures.

(FIGURE 633.)

(FIGURE 634.)

(FIGURE 635.))

A large proportion of metalliferous veins have their opposite walls nearly 
parallel, and sometimes over a wide extent of country. There is a fine example 
of this in the celebrated vein of Andreasburg in the Hartz, which has been 
worked for a depth of 500 yards perpendicularly, and 200 horizontally, retaining 
almost everywhere a width of three feet. But many lodes in Cornwall and 
elsewhere are extremely variable in size, being one or two inches in one part, 
and then eight or ten feet in another, at the distance of a few fathoms, and 
then again narrowing as before. Such alternate swelling and contraction is so 
often characteristic as to require explanation. The walls of fissures in 
general, observes Sir H. De la Beche, are rarely perfect planes throughout their 
entire course, nor could we well expect them to be so, since they commonly pass 
through rocks of unequal hardness and different mineral composition. If, 
therefore, the opposite sides of such irregular fissures slide upon each other, 
that is to say, if there be a fault, as in the case of so many mineral veins, 
the parallelism of the opposite walls is at once entirely destroyed, as will be 
readily seen by studying Figures 633 to 635.

Let a-b, Figure 633, be a line of fracture traversing a rock, and let a-b, 
Figure 634, represent the same line. Now, if we cut in two a piece of paper 
representing this line, and then move the lower portion of this cut paper 
sideways from a to a', taking care that the two pieces of paper still touch each 
other at the points 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, we obtain an irregular aperture at c, and 
isolated cavities at d, d, d, and when we compare such figures with nature we 
find that, with certain modifications, they represent the interior of faults and 
mineral veins. If, instead of sliding the cut paper to the right hand, we move 
the lower part towards the left, about the same distance that it was previously 
slid to the right, we obtain considerable variation in the cavities so produced, 
two long irregular open spaces, f, f, Figure 635, being then formed. This will 
serve to show to what slight circumstances considerable variations in the 
character of the openings between unevenly fractured surfaces may be due, such 
surfaces being moved upon each other, so as to have numerous points of contact.

(FIGURE 636. Nipped ores where the course of a vein departs from verticality.)

Most lodes are perpendicular to the horizon, or nearly so; but some of them have 
a considerable inclination or "hade," as it is termed, the angles of dip being 
very various. The course of a vein is frequently very straight; but if tortuous, 
it is found to be choked up with clay, stones, and pebbles, at points where it 
departs most widely from verticality. Hence at places, such as a, Figure 636, 
the miner complains that the ores are "nipped," or greatly reduced in quantity, 
the space for their free deposition having been interfered with in consequence 
of the pre-occupancy of the lode by earthy materials. When lodes are many 
fathoms wide, they are usually filled for the most part with earthy matter, and 
fragments of rock, through which the ores are disseminated. The metallic 
substances frequently coat or encircle detached pieces of rock, which our miners 
call "horses" or "riders." That we should find some mineral veins which split 
into branches is also natural, for we observe the same in regard to open 
fissures.

CHEMICAL DEPOSITS IN VEINS.

If we now turn from the mechanical to the chemical agencies which have been 
instrumental in the production of mineral veins, it may be remarked that those 
parts of fissures which were choked up with the ruins of fractured rocks must 
always have been filled with water; and almost every vein has probably been the 
channel by which hot springs, so common in countries of volcanoes and 
earthquakes, have made their way to the surface. For we know that the rents in 
which ores abound extend downward to vast depths, where the temperature of the 
interior of the earth is more elevated. We also know that mineral veins are most 
metalliferous near the contact of Plutonic and stratified formations, especially 
where the former send veins into the latter, a circumstance which indicates an 
original proximity of veins at their inferior extremity to igneous and heated 
rocks. It is moreover acknowledged that even those mineral and thermal springs 
which, in the present state of the globe, are far from volcanoes, are 
nevertheless observed to burst out along great lines of upheaval and dislocation 
of rocks. (See Dr. Daubeny's Volcanoes.) It is also ascertained that all the 
substances with which hot springs are impregnated agree with those discharged in 
a gaseous form from volcanoes. Many of these bodies occur as vein-stones; such 
as silex, carbonate of lime, sulphur, fluor-spar, sulphate of barytes, magnesia, 
oxide of iron, and others. I may add that, if veins have been filled with 
gaseous emanations from masses of melted matter, slowly cooling in the 
subterranean regions, the contraction of such masses as they pass from a plastic 
to a solid state would, according to the experiments of Deville on granite (a 
rock which may be taken as a standard), produce a reduction in volume amounting 
to 10 per cent. The slow crystallisation, therefore, of such Plutonic rocks 
supplies us with a force not only capable of rending open the incumbent rocks by 
causing a failure of support, but also of giving rise to faults whenever one 
portion of the earth's crust subsides slowly while another contiguous to it 
happens to rest on a different foundation, so as to remain unmoved.

Although we are led to infer, from the foregoing reasoning, that there has often 
been an intimate connection between metalliferous veins and hot springs holding 
mineral matter in solution, yet we must not on that account expect that the 
contents of hot springs and mineral veins would be identical. On the contrary, 
M. E. de Beaumont has judiciously observed that we ought to find in veins those 
substances which, being least soluble, are not discharged by hot springs-- or 
that class of simple and compound bodies which the thermal waters ascending from 
below would first precipitate on the walls of a fissure, as soon as their 
temperature began slightly to diminish. The higher they mount towards the 
surface, the more will they cool, till they acquire the average temperature of 
springs, being in that case chiefly charged with the most soluble substances, 
such as the alkalies, soda and potash. These are not met with in veins, although 
they enter so largely into the composition of granitic rocks. (Bulletin 4 page 
1278.)

To a certain extent, therefore, the arrangement and distribution of metallic 
matter in veins may be referred to ordinary chemical action, or to those 
variations in temperature which waters holding the ores in solution must 
undergo, as they rise upward from great depths in the earth. But there are other 
phenomena which do not admit of the same simple explanation. Thus, for example, 
in Derbyshire, veins containing ores of lead, zinc, and copper, but chiefly 
lead, traverse alternate beds of limestone and greenstone. The ore is plentiful 
where the walls of the rent consist of limestone, but is reduced to a mere 
string when they are formed of greenstone, or "toad-stone," as it is called 
provincially. Not that the original fissure is narrower where the greenstone 
occurs, but because more of the space is there filled with vein-stones, and the 
waters at such points have not parted so freely with their metallic contents.

"Lodes in Cornwall," says Mr. Robert W. Fox, "are very much influenced in their 
metallic riches by the nature of the rock which they traverse, and they often 
change in this respect very suddenly, in passing from one rock to another. Thus 
many lodes which yield abundance of ore in granite, are unproductive in clay-
slate, or killas and vice versa.

SUPPOSED RELATIVE AGE OF THE DIFFERENT METALS.

After duly reflecting on the facts above described, we can not doubt that 
mineral veins, like eruptions of granite or trap, are referable to many distinct 
periods of the earth's history, although it may be more difficult to determine 
the precise age of veins; because they have often remained open for ages, and 
because, as we have seen, the same fissure, after having been once filled, has 
frequently been re-opened or enlarged. But besides this diversity of age, it has 
been supposed by some geologists that certain metals have been produced 
exclusively in earlier, others in more modern times; that tin, for example, is 
of higher antiquity than copper, copper than lead or silver, and all of them 
more ancient than gold. I shall first point out that the facts once relied upon 
in support of some of these views are contradicted by later experience, and then 
consider how far any chronological order of arrangement can be recognised in the 
position of the precious and other metals in the earth's crust.

In the first place, it is not true that veins in which tin abounds are the 
oldest lodes worked in Great Britain. The government survey of Ireland has 
demonstrated that in Wexford veins of copper and lead (the latter as usual being 
argentiferous) are much older than the tin of Cornwall. In each of the two 
countries a very similar series of geological changes has occurred at two 
distinct epochs-- in Wexford, before the Devonian strata were deposited; in 
Cornwall, after the Carboniferous epoch. To begin with the Irish mining 
district: We have granite in Wexford traversed by granite veins, which veins 
also intrude themselves into the Silurian strata, the same Silurian rocks as 
well as the veins having been denuded before the Devonian beds were 
superimposed. Next we find, in the same county, that elvans, or straight dikes 
of porphyritic granite, have cut through the granite and the veins before 
mentioned, but have not penetrated the Devonian rocks. Subsequently to these 
elvans, veins of copper and lead were produced, being of a date certainly 
posterior to the Silurian, and anterior to the Devonian; for they do not enter 
the latter, and, what is still more decisive, streaks or layers of derivative 
copper have been found near Wexford in the Devonian, not far from points where 
mines of copper are worked in the Silurian strata.

Although the precise age of such copper lodes can not be defined, we may safely 
affirm that they were either filled at the close of the Silurian or commencement 
of the Devonian period. Besides copper, lead, and silver, there is some gold in 
these ancient or primary metalliferous veins. A few fragments also of tin found 
in Wicklow in the drift are supposed to have been derived from veins of the same 
age. (Sir H. De la Beche MS. Notes on Irish Survey.)

Next, if we turn to Cornwall, we find there also the monuments of a very 
analogous sequence of events. First, the granite was formed; then, about the 
same period, veins of fine-grained granite, often tortuous (see Figure 614), 
penetrating both the outer crust of granite and the adjoining fossiliferous or 
primary rocks, including the coal-measures; thirdly, elvans, holding their 
course straight through granite, granitic veins, and fossiliferous slates; 
fourthly, veins of tin also containing copper, the first of those eight systems 
of fissures of different ages already alluded to. Here, then, the tin lodes are 
newer than the elvans. It has, indeed, been stated by some Cornish miners that 
the elvans are in some instances posterior to the oldest tin-bearing lodes, but 
the observations of Sir H. de la Beche during the survey led him to an opposite 
conclusion, and he has shown how the cases referred to in corroboration can be 
otherwise interpreted. (Report on the Geology of Cornwall page 310.) We may, 
therefore, assert that the most ancient Cornish lodes are younger than the coal-
measures of that part of England, and it follows that they are of a much later 
date than the Irish copper and lead of Wexford and some adjoining counties. How 
much later, it is not so easy to declare, although probably they are not newer 
than the beginning of the Permian period, as no tin lodes have been discovered 
in any red sandstone which overlies the coal in the south-west of England.

There are lead veins in Glamorganshire which enter the lias, and others near 
Frome, in Somersetshire, which have been traced into the Inferior Oolite. In 
Bohemia, the rich veins of silver of Joachimsthal cut through basalt containing 
olivine, which overlies tertiary lignite, in which are leaves of dicotyledonous 
trees. This silver, therefore, is decidedly a tertiary formation. In regard to 
the age of the gold of the Ural mountains, in Russia, which, like that of 
California, is obtained chiefly from auriferous alluvium, it occurs in veins of 
quartz in the schistose and granitic rocks of that chain, and is supposed by Sir 
R. Murchison, MM. Deverneuil and Keyserling to be newer than the syenitic 
granite of the Ural-- perhaps of tertiary date. They observe that no gold has 
yet been found in the Permian conglomerates which lie at the base of the Ural 
Mountains, although large quantities of iron and copper detritus are mixed with 
the pebbles of those Permian strata. Hence it seems that the Uralian quartz 
veins, containing gold and platinum, were not formed, or certainly not exposed 
to aqueous denudation, during the Permian era.

In the auriferous alluvium of Russia, California, and Australia, the bones of 
extinct land-quadrupeds have been met with, those of the mammoth being common in 
the gravel at the foot of the Ural Mountains, while in Australia they consist of 
huge marsupials, some of them of the size of the rhinoceros and allied to the 
living wombat. They belong to the genera Diprotodon and Nototherium of Professor 
Owen. The gold of Northern Chili is associated in the mines of Los Hornos with 
copper pyrites, in veins traversing the cretaceo-oolitic formations, so-called 
because its fossils have the character partly of the cretaceous and partly of 
the oolitic fauna of Europe. (Darwin's South America page 209 etc.) The gold 
found in the United States, in the mountainous parts of Virginia, North and 
South Carolina, and Georgia, occurs in metamorphic Silurian strata, as well as 
in auriferous gravel derived from the same.

Gold has now been detected in almost every kind of rock, in slate, quartzite, 
sandstone, limestone, granite, and serpentine, both in veins and in the rocks 
themselves at short distances from the veins. In Australia it has been worked 
successfully not only in alluvium, but in vein-stones in the native rock, 
generally consisting of Silurian shales and slates. It has been traced on that 
continent over more than nine degrees of latitude (between the parallels of 30 
degrees and 39 degrees S.), and over twelve of longitude, and yielded in 1853 an 
annual supply equal, if not superior, to that of California; nor is there any 
apparent prospect of this supply diminishing, still less of the exhaustion of 
the gold-fields.

ORIGIN OF GOLD IN CALIFORNIA.

Mr. J. Arthur Phillips, in his treatise "On the Gold Fields of California," has 
shown that the ore in the gold workings is derived from drifts, or gravel clay, 
and sand, of two distinct geological ages, both comparatively modern, but 
belonging to different river-systems, the older of which is so ancient as to be 
capped by a thick sheet of lava divided by basaltic columns. (Proceedings of the 
Royal Society 1868 page 294.) The auriferous quartz of these drifts is derived 
from veins apparently due to hydrothermal agency, proceeding from granite and 
penetrating strata supposed to be of Jurassic and Triassic date. The fossil wood 
of the drift is sometimes beautifully silicified, and occasionally the trunks of 
trees are replaced by iron pyrites, but gold seems not to have been found as in 
the pyrites of similarly petrified trees in the drift of Australia.

The formation of recent metalliferous veins is now going on, according to Mr. 
Phillips, in various parts of the Pacific coast. Thus, for example, there are 
fissures at the foot of the eastern declivity of the Sierra Nevada in the state 
of that name, from which boiling water and steam escape, forming siliceous 
incrustations on the sides of the fissures. In one case, where the fissure is 
partially filled up with silica inclosing iron and copper pyrites, gold has also 
been found in the vein-stone.

It has been remarked by M. de Beaumont, that lead and some other metals are 
found in dikes of basalt and greenstone, as well as in mineral veins connected 
with trap-rock, whereas tin is met with in granite and in veins associated with 
the Plutonic series. If this rule hold true generally, the geological position 
of tin accessible to the miner will belong, for the most part, to rocks older 
than those bearing lead. The tin veins will be of higher relative antiquity for 
the same reason that the "underlying" igneous formations or granites which are 
visible to man are older, on the whole, than the overlying or trappean 
formations.

If different sets of fissures, originating simultaneously at different levels in 
the earth's crust, and communicating, some of them with volcanic, others with 
heated Plutonic masses, be filled with different metals, it will follow that 
those formed farthest from the surface will usually require the longest time 
before they can be exposed superficially. In order to bring them into view, or 
within reach of the miner, a greater amount of upheaval and denudation must take 
place in proportion as they have lain deeper when first formed and filled. A 
considerable series of geological revolutions must intervene before any part of 
the fissure which has been for ages in the proximity of the Plutonic rock, so as 
to receive the gases discharged from it when it was cooling, can emerge into the 
atmosphere. But I need not enlarge on this subject, as the reader will remember 
what was said in the 30th, 32d, and 35th chapters on the chronology of the 
volcanic and hypogene formations.


INDEX.

Abbeville, flint tools of.

Aberdeenshire, granite of.

Abich, M., on trachytic rocks.

Acer trilobatum, Miocene.

Acrodus nobilis, Lias.

Acrogens, term explained.

Acrolepis Sedgwickii, Permian.

Actaeon acutus, Great Oolite.

Actinocyclas, in Atlantic mud.

Actinolite.
-- schist.

Aechmodus Leachii, Lias.

Adiantites Hibernica, Old Red.

Agassiz on fish of Sheppey.
-- on fish of the Brown-Coal.
-- on fish of Monte Bolca.
-- on Old Red fossil fish.
-- on Silurian fish.

Age of metamorphic rocks.
-- of Plutonic rocks.
-- of strata, tests of.
-- of volcanic rocks.

Agglomerate described.

Agnostus integer. A. Rex.

Air-breathers of the Coal.

Aix-la-Chapelle, Cretaceous flora of.

Alabaster defined.

Alberti on Keuper.

Albite.

Aldeby and Chillesford beds.

Alkali, present in the Palaeozoic strata.

Alpine blocks on the Jura.

Alps, age of metamorphic rocks in.
--, nummulitic limestone and flysch of.

Alum schists of Norway and Sweden.

Alluvial deposits, Recent and Post-pliocene.

Alluvium, term explained.
-- in Auvergne.

Alternations of marine and fresh-water strata.

Alum Bay beds, plants of the.

Amblyrhynchus cristatus, a living marine saurian.

America. See United States, Canada, Nova Scotia.
--, North, Glacial formations of.
--, South, gradual rise of land in.
--, Silurian strata of.

American character of Lower Miocene flora.
-- forms in Swiss Miocene flora.

Amiens, flint tools of.

Ammonites bifrons, Lias.
-- Braikenridgii, Oolite.
-- Bucklandi, Lias.
-- Deshayesii, Neocomian.
-- Humphresianus, Inferior Oolite.
-- Jason, Oxford Clay.
-- Noricus, Speeton.
-- macrocephalus, Oolite.
-- margaritatus, Lias.
-- planorbis, Lias.
-- rhotomagensis, Chalk marl.

Amphibole group of minerals.

Amphistegina Hauerina, Vienna basin.

Amphitherium Broderipii, in Stonesfield.
-- Prevostii, Stonesfield slate.

Ampullaria glauca.

Amygdaloid.

Analcime.

Anamesite, a variety of basalt.

Ananchytes ovatus, White chalk.
--, with crania attached.

Ancillaria subulata, Eocene.

Ancyloceras gigas.
-- spinigerum, Gault.
-- Duvallei, Neocomian.

Ancylus velletia (A. elegans).

Andalusite.

Andes, Plutonic rocks of the.

Andreasburg, metalliferous vein of.

Angelin, on Cambrian of Sweden.

Angiosperms.
-- of the Coal.

Anglesea, dike cutting through shale in.

Anodonta Cordierii.
-- Jukesii, Upper Old Red.
-- latimarginata.

Anoplotherium commune, Binstead.
-- gracile, Paris basin.

Anorthite.

Annularia sphenophylloides, Coal.

Antholithes, coal-measures.

Anthracite, conversion of coal into.

Anticlinal and synclinal curves.

Antrim, Chalk altered by a dike in.
--, Lower Miocene, volcanic rocks of.

Antwerp Crag.

Apateon pedestris, a carboniferous reptile.

Apatite.

Apennines, Northern, metamorphic rocks of.

Apes, fossil of the Upper Miocene.

Apiocrinites rotundus, Bradford.

Appalachians, long lines of flexures in.
--, vast thickness of successive strata in.

Aptychus, part of ammonite.

Aqueous rocks defined.

Araucaria sphaerocarpa, Inferior Oolite.

Arbroath, section of Old Red at.

Archaeopteryx macrura, Solenhofen.

Archegosaurus minor and A. medius, coal measures.

Archiac, M. de, on nummulites.
--, on chalk of France.

Arctic Miocene Flora.

Area of the Wealden.

Areas, permanence of continental.

Arenaceous rocks described.

Arenicolites linearis, Arenig beds.

Arenig or Stiper-Stones group.
--, volcanic formations of.

Argile plastique.

Argillaceous rocks described.

Argillite, Argillaceous schist.

Argyll, Duke of, on Isle of Mull leaf-beds.

Armagh, bone-beds in Mountain Limestone at.

Arran, amygdaloid filled with spar near.
--, erect trees in volcanic ash of.
--, Greenstone dike in.

Arthur's seat, trap rocks of.

Arvicola, tooth of.

Asaphus caudatus, Silurian.
-- tyrannus, A. Buchii.

Ascension, lamination of volcanic rocks in.

Ash, Mr., on fossils of Tremadoc beds.

Ashby-de-la-Zouch, fault in coal field of.

Aspidura loricata, Muschelkalk.

Astarte borealis (=A. arctica = A. compressa).
-- Omalii, Crag.

Asterophyllites foliosus, Coal.

Astrangia lineata (Anthophyllum lineatum).

Astraea basaltiforme, Carboniferous.

Astropecten crispatus, London clay.

Atherfield clay.

Atlantic mud, composition of.

Atrypa reticularis, Aymestry.

Aturia ziczac (Nautilus ziczac).

Augite.

Auricula, recent.

Austen, Mr. Godwin, on marine deposit of Selsea Bill.
--, on boulders in chalk.

Australian cave breccias.

Australia, auriferous gravel of.

Auvergne, alluvium in.
--, chain of extinct volcanoes in.
--, granite veins in.
--, Lower Miocene of.
--, Miocene volcanic rocks of.
--, Post-pliocene volcanic eruptions in.
--, springs from spent volcanoes in.

Aveline Mr., on Tarannon shales.

Avicula contorta, Rhaetic beds.
-- cygnipes, Lias.
-- inaequivalvis, Lias.
-- socialis, Muschelkalk.

Aviculopecten papyraceus, coal measures.
-- sublobatus, mountain limestone.

Aymestry Limestone.

Azoic period, supposed.

Azores, Miocene lavas with shells.

Bacillaria paradoxa.

Baculites anceps, Lower Chalk.
-- Fauiasii, chalk.

Baffin's Bay, formation of drift in.

Bagshot sands.

Baiae, Bay of, subterranean igneous action in.

Bakewell, Mr., on cleavage in Swiss Alps.

Bala and Caradoc beds.

Balistidae, defensive spine of.

Bangor, or Longmynd group.

Banksia, seed and fruit of, Lower Miocene.

Barmouth sandstones.

Barnes, Mr. J., on insects in American coal.

Barnstaple, Upper Devonian of.

Barrande, M. Joachim, his "Primordial Zone."
--, on metamorphosis of trilobites.

Barrett, Mr., on bird in Blackdown beds.

Barton series sands and clays.
-- shells, percentage of, common to London clay.

Basalt, columnar.
--, composition of.

Basaltic rocks, poor in silica.
--, specific gravity of minerals in.

Basilosaurus, Eocene, United States.

Basset, term explained.

Basterot, M. de, on Bordeaux tertiary strata.

Bath Oolite.

Batrachian reptiles in coal.

Bay of Fundy, denudation in coalfield in.

Bean, Mr., on Yorkshire Oolite.

Bear Island carboniferous flora.

Beaumont, M. E. de, on island in Cretaceous sea.
--, on mineral veins.
--, on Jurassic plutonic rocks.
--, on formation of granite.

Beckles, Mr. S.H., on footprints in Hastings sands.
-- on Mammalia of Purbeck.

Belemnitella mucronata, Chalk.

Belemnites hastatus, Oxford clay.
-- Puzosianus, Oxford clay.

Belgium, Lower Miocene of.

Bellerophon costatus, Mountain Limestone.

Belosepia sepioidea, Sheppey.

Belt, Mr., on subdivision of Lingula Flags.

Bembridge beds, Yarmouth.

Berger, Dr., on rocks altered by dikes.

Berlin, Miocene strata near.

Bernese Alps, gneiss in the.

Berthier on isomorphism.

Bertrich-Baden, columnar basalt of.

Beyrich on term Oligocene for Lower Miocene.

Billings, Mr., on trilobites.

Binney, Mr., on Sigillariae in volcanic ash.
--, on Stigmaria, the root of Sigillaria.

Biotite.

Bird in argile plastique.

Bischoff, Professor, on Nile and Rhine mud.
--, on conversion of coal into anthracite.
--, on hydrothermal action.

Blackdown beds.

Blacklead of Borrowdale.

Bog-iron-ore.

Bohemia, Cambrian rocks of.
--, silver veins in.

Bolderberg, in Belgium, Upper Miocene of.

Bone-bed of fish remains, Armagh.
-- of Upper Ludlow.
-- of the Trias.

Boom, Lower Miocene of.

Bordeaux, Upper Miocene of.

Borrowdale, blacklead of.

Bosquet, M. on chalk fossils.
--, on Maestricht beds.

Botanical nomenclature.

Boucher de Perthes on Abbeville alluvium.

Boulder-clay, whether formed by icebergs or land-ice.

Boulder-clay of Canada.
-- fauna of.

Boulders and pebbles in chalk.

Bournemouth beds (Lower Bagshot).

Bovey Tracey, lignites and clays of.

Bowerbank, Mr., on fossil fruits of London Clay.
--, on fossil fruits of Sheppey.

Bowman, Mr., on uniting of distinct coal-seams.

Brachiopoda, preponderance of, in older rocks.
--, mode of recognising shells of.

Bracklesham beds and Bagshot Sands.

Bradford encrinites.

Breccias of Lower Permian.

Brick-earth or fluviatile loam.

Bridlington drift.

Bristol, dolomitic conglomerate of.

Bristow, Mr., on volcanic minerals.

Brixham cave near Torquay.

Brocchi on Italian tertiary strata.
-- on subapennine strata.

Brockenhurst, corals and shells of.

Brodie, Reverend P.B., on Lias insects.

Brodie, Mr. W.R., on Purbeck mammalia.

Brongniart, M. Adolphe, on botanical nomenclature.
--, on Lias plants.
--, on flora of the Bunter.
--, on flora of the coal.
--, on fruit of Lepidodendron.
--, M. Alex., on Tertiary series.

Bronteus flabellifer, Devonian.

Brora, oolitic coal formation of.

Brown, Mr. Richard, on Stigmaria.
--, on carboniferous rain-prints.

Brown, Robert, on Eocene protaceous fruit.

Brown, Reverend T., on marine shells in Scotch drift.

Brown-coal of Germany.

Bryce, Mr., on Scotch till.

Bryozoa of Mountain Limestone.
-- and polyzoa, terms explained.

Buch, von. See Von Buch.

Buckland, Dr., on Kirkdale cave.
--, on violent death of saurians.
--, on spines of fish.
--, on Eocene oysters.
--, on pot-stones in chalk.

Buddle, Mr., on creeps in coal-mines.

Bulimus ellipticus, Bembridge.
-- lubricus, Loess.

Bullock, Captain, R.N., on Atlantic mud.

Bunbury, Sir C., on leaf-bed of Madeira.
--, on ferns of the Maryland coal

Bunter of Germany.
-- or Lower Trias of England.

Buprestis? Elytron of, Stonesfield.

Burmeister on trilobites.

Cainozoic, term defined.

Caithness, fish beds of.

Calamite, root of.

Calamites Sucowii, coal, and restored stem.

Calamophyllia radiata, Bath Oolite.

Calcaire de la Beauce, age of the.
-- grossier, fossils of the.
-- siliceux of France.

Calcareous matter poured out by springs.
-- rocks described.
-- nodules in Lias.

Calcarina rarispina, Eocene.

Calceola sandalina, Devonian.
--, schiefer of Germany.

California, aurifrous gravel of.
--, gold in petrified wood of age of alluvium.

Calymene Blumenbachii, Silurian.

Cambrian Group, classification of the.

Cambrian, Upper.
--, Lower.
--, of Sweden and Norway.
--, strata of Bohemia.
--, of North America.
--, volcanic rocks.

Campophyllum flexuosum.

Canada, Cambrian of.
--, Devonian of.
--, trap-rocks of.

Canadian drift.

Canary, Grand, shelly tuffs of.

Cantal, Lower Miocene of the.

Cape Breton, rain-prints in coal-measures of.

Cape Wrath, granite veins in gneiss at.

Caradoc and Bala beds.

Carbonate of lime in rocks, how tested.

Carboniferous Group, subdivisions of the.
-- flora.
-- limestone, thickness of.
--, marine fauna of the.
-- Period, trap-rocks of.
-- plutonic rocks.
-- reptiles.
-- insects.

Carcharodon angustidens, Bracklesham.

Cardiganshire, section of slaty cleavage in.

Cardiocarpon Ottonis, Permian.

Cardita (Venericardia) planicosta.
-- sulcata, Barton.

Cardium dissimile, Portland Stone.
-- rhaeticum, Rhaetic Beds.
-- striatulum, Kimmeridge clay.

Carne, Mr. N., on Cornish lodes.

Carpenter, Dr., on Atlantic mud.
--, on Eozoon Canadense.

Carrara, marble of.

Carruthers, Mr., on Eocene proteaceous fruit.
--, on cycads of the Purbeck.
--, on leaves of calamite.
--, on spores of carboniferous Lycopodiaceae.
--, on structure of sigillaria.
--, on trees in volcanic ash.

Cashmere, recent formations in.

Cassian, St., Triassic strata of.

Castrogiovanni, curved strata near.

Catania, laterite formed in.
--, Tertiary beds in.

Catillus Lamarckii, White Chalk.

Caucasus, absence of lakes in the.

Caulopteris primaeva, Coal.

Cave-breccias of Australia.

Cavern deposits with human and animal remains.

Caves of Kirkdale and Brixham.

Celts described.

Cementing of strata.

Cephalaspis Lyelli, Old Red.

Ceratites nodosus, Muschelkalk.

Cerithium concavum, Headon.
-- elegans, Hempstead beds.
-- (Terebra) Portlandicum.
-- plicatum, Hempstead beds.
-- melanoides.

Cervus alces, tooth of.

Cestracion Phillippi, Recent.

Chabasite.

Chalk, composition, extent, and origin of.
-- of Faxoe.
-- flints, origin of.
-- fossils of the White.
--, iceborne boulders in the.
-- of North and South Europe.
--, Lower White, without flints.
-- marl, fossils of the.
-- Period, popular error concerning.

Chalk-pit with pot-stones, view of.

Chama squamosa, Barton.

Champoleon, junction of granite with Jurassic strata near.

Chara elastica, C. medicaginula.
-- tuberculata, Bembridge.

Charpentier, M., on Alpine glaciers.
--, on depression of Alps in Glacial Period.

Chatham coal-field.

Cheirotherium, footprints of.

Chemical deposits in veins.
-- and mechanical deposits.

Chiapa, fall of volcanic dust at.

Chichester, erratics near.

Chili, copper pyrites with gold in.
--, walls cracked by earthquake in.

Chillesford and Aldeby beds.

Chimaera monstrosa, Lias.

Chlorite-schist.

Chloritic series, or Upper Greensand.

Christiania, Euritic porphyry at.
--, granite veins in Silurian strata of.
--, quartz vein in gneiss at.

Chronological groups of formations.

Chronology, test of, in rocks.

Cinder-bed of the Purbeck.

Cinnamomum polymorphum, Miocene.
-- Rossmassleri, Miocene.

Claiborne beds, Eocene fossils of.

Clarke County, United States, Zeuglodon of.

Classification of Tertiary formations.
--, value of shells in.

Clausilia bidens, Loess.

Clay defined.
-- iron-stone defined.
--, plastic.
-- slate.
--, Weald.

Cleavage explained.
--, crystalline theory of.
--, mechanical theory of.
-- of metamorphic rocks.

Cleidotheca operculata.

Clermont, metalliferous gneiss near.

Climate of the Crags.
-- of the Coal.
-- of the Miocene in the Arctic regions.
-- of the Post-pliocene period.

Clinkstone.

Clinton group, fossils of the.

Clyde, buried canoes in estuary of.
--, arctic marine shells in drifts of.

Clymenia linearis, Devonian.

Clymenien-Kalk of Germany.

Coal, conversion into anthracite of.
-- a land and swamp formation.
--, cause of the purity of.
--, conversion of lignite into.
--, erect trees in.
--, structure of the.
--, vegetation of the.
--, air-breathers in the.

Coal Period, climate of the.
-- field of Virginia.
-- measures of Nova Scotia.
-- measures, thickness of, in Wales.
-- pipes, danger of.
--, rainprints in.
-- seams, uniting of.

Coalbrook-Dale, faults in.

Cochliodus contortus.

Cockfield Fell rocks, altered by dikes.

Coelacanthus granulatus, Permian.

Coleoptera of Oeningen beds.

Collyrites ringens, Inferior Oolite.

Columnar structure of volcanic rocks.
-- basalt in the Vicentin.

Compact feldspar.

Concretionary structure.

Cone of Tartaret.
-- of Come.

Cones and craters described.
--, absence of, in England.

Conformable stratification.

Conglomerate or pudding-stone.
--, Dolomitic, of Bristol.

Coniferae of the coal-measures.

Connecticut Valley, New Red Sandstone of.

Conocephalus striatus.

Conocoryphe striata.

Conrad, Mr., on age of American cretaceous rocks.

Consolidation of strata.

Continents and oceans, permanence of.

Contorted strata, in drift.

Conularia ornata, Devonian.

Conulus priscus, Coal.

Conus deperditus, Bracklesham.

Conybeare and Phillips on ninety-fathom dike.

Conybeare, Mr., on reptiles of the Lias.

Copper lode near Redruth.

Coprolite bed of Chloritic Series.
-- beds of Red and Coralline crags.

Coprolites of fish from the chalk.

Coral Rag, fossils of the.

Coralline of White Crag.

Corals of the Devonian.
-- of the Mountain Limestone.
--, Neozoic type of.
--, Palaeozoic type of.

Corbicella (Cyrena) fluminalis.

Corbula pisum, Hempstead beds.

Corinth, corrosion of rocks by gases near.

Cornbrash or Forest Marble.

Cornwall, granite veins in.
--, lodes in.
--, mass of granite in.
--, vertical sections of veins in mine.

Cosequina volcano, burying of organic remains by.

Crag, term defined.
-- of Antwerp.
--, fauna of, its relation to that of present seas.
--, Norwich.
--, Coralline or White.
--, Red.
--, tables of marine testacea in.
-- deposits, climate of.

Crania attached to a sea-urchin.
-- Parisiensis, White Chalk.

Crassatella sulcata, Barton.

Craters and cones described.
--, Theory of Elevation.

Craven fault.

Creeps in coal-mines.

Cretaceous rocks of United States.
-- Period, error as to continuity of.
--, flora of the Upper.
-- volcanic rocks.
-- plutonic rocks.
-- Period, distinct mineral character of rocks in.
-- rocks, classification of.
-- strata, connection between Upper and Lower.

Crinoidea of Mountain Limestone.

Croatia, Lower Miocene beds of.

Croll, Mr., on amount of subaerial denudation.

Cromer forest-bed.

Crop out, term explained.

Crossopterygidae, or fringe-finned fish.

Crowfoot, Mr., on shells of Aldeby beds.

Crust of the earth defined.

Crustaceans of Old Red Sandstone.

Cryptodon angulatum, London Clay.

Crystalline Limestone.
-- rocks defined.
-- schists, much alkali in the.
-- theory of cleavage.

Cup and Star corals.

Curved strata.

Cutch, salt-layers in the Runn of.

Cuvier, M., on fauna of the Paris basin.
--, on Mammalia of Paris gypsum.
--, on Tertiary series.

Cyathocrinus caryocrinoides.
-- planus.

Cyathophyllum caespitosum.

Cyclopean isles, beds of tuff and clay in.
--, contorted strata in.

Cyclopteris Hibernica, Old Red.

Cyclostigma (Lepidodendron), Old Red.

Cyclostoma elegans, Loess.

Cylindrites acutus, Great Oolite.

Cypress swamps of the Mississippi.

Cyprides in the Weald Clay.

Cypridina serrato-striata.

Cypris in fresh-water deposits.
-- gibbosa, C. tuberculata, C. leguminella.
-- striato-punctata, C. fasciculata, C. granulata.
-- Purbeckensis, Cypris punctata.
-- spinigera, Weald Clay.

Cyrena (Corbicella) fluminalis.
-- cuneiformis, Woolwich Clays.
-- obovata.
-- semistriata, Hempstead beds.

Cystideae of Silurian rocks.

Cythere inflata, coal-measures.

Dadoxylon, fragment of coniferous wood.

Dana, on volcanic minerals.

Danish kitchen-middens.

Dapedius monilifer, Lias.

Darbishire on shells of Moel Tryfaen.

Dartmoor, post-carboniferous granite of.
-- intrusive granite at.

Darwin, Mr., on foliation and lamination.
--, on mammalia of South America.
--, on marine saurian.
--, on rise of part of South America.
--, on sinking of coral reefs.
--, on plutonic rocks of the Andes.
--, on relationship of extinct to living types.

Dates of discovery of fossil vertebrata.

Daubeny, Dr., on decomposition of trachytic rocks.

Daubree, on formation of zeolites.
--, on alkaline waters of Plombieres.

Davidson, Mr., on Spiriferina.

Davis, Mr. E., on fossils of Lingula Flags.

Dawkins, Mr. Boyd, on Hyaena spelaea.
--, on mammalia of Cromer Forest-bed.
--, on Triassic mammifer.

Dawson, Dr., on Devonian flora and insects.
--, on Eozoon Canadense.
--, on Nova Scotia coal-measures.
--, on Nova Scotia coal-plants.
--, on Pupa vetusta.
--, on reptiles and shells in Nova Scotia coal.
--, on structure of calamite.
--, on structure of sigillaria.

Deane, Dr., on footprints in Trias.

Debey, Dr., on flora and fauna of Aix.

Dechen, M. von, on organic remains of the brown coal.
--, on Cornish granite veins.

De la Beche, Sir H., on granite of Dartmoor.
--, on Carrara marble.
--, on mineral veins.
--, on Redruth copper-mine.
--, on saurians of the Lias.
--, on trap-rocks of New Red.
--, on Welsh coal-measures.

Delesse, on action of water in metamorphism.

Deltas, strata accumulated in.

Dendrerpeton in Coal.

Denudation defined.
--, subaerial.
--, littoral.
--, submarine.
--, average annual amount of subaerial.
-- of carboniferous strata.
-- counteracting upheaval.
-- a means of exposing crystalline rocks.
--, trap-dikes cut off by.
-- and volcanic force antagonistic powers.

Deposition, rate of, shown by fossils.

Derbyshire, veins in Mountain Limestone.

Derivative shells of the Red Crag.

Desnoyers, M., on age of Faluns.
--, on Eocene fossil footprints.

Desor, M., on Celtic coins in lake-dwellings.

Devonian Period, Upper, Middle, Lower.
-- fossils of the Eifel.
-- of Russia.
-- of United States and Canada.
-- insects of Canada.
-- strata, classification of.

Devonshire, cleavage of slate rocks in.

Diabase.

Diagonal, or cross-stratification.

Diagram of fossiliferous rocks.
-- of plutonic and sedimentary formations.

Diallage.

Diastopora diluviana, Bath Oolite.

Diatomaceae forming tripoli.

Diceras Lonsdalii, Neocomian.

Didelphys Azarae, Recent.

Didymograpsus geminus.
-- Murchisonii.

Dike cutting through shale, Anglesea.
-- cutting through chalk, Antrim.

Dikelocephalus Minnesotensis.

Dikes defined.
-- of Monte Somma.
-- in Palagonia, ground-plan of.
--, volcanic or trap.

Diluvium, origin of term.

Dinornis Palapteryx, of New Zealand.

Dinotherium giganteum.

Diorite.

Dip and strike, terms explained.

Diplograpsus folium, Llandeilo Flags.
-- pristis, Llandeilo beds.

Dirt-bed of the Purbeck.

Dogger-bank described.

Dolerite, a variety of basalt.

Dolomite defined.

Dolomitic conglomerate of Bristol.

Downs, escarpments of North and South.

Downton Sandstone.

Dowson, Mr., on shells of Aldeby beds.

Drew, Mr., on Hastings Sands.

Drift of Ireland.
-- of Norfolk cliffs.
-- of Scandinavia.
-- of Bridlington.
-- carried by icebergs.
-- shells in Canada.
--, contorted strata in.
--, marine shells in Scotch.

Dudley Limestone.

Dufrenoy, M., on granite of Pyrenees.

Dumont, Professor, on Belgian Lower Eocene.

Duncan, Dr., on Neozoic corals passing down to Devonian.

Dundry Hill, near Bristol, section of.

Dunker, Dr., on wealden of Germany.

Dura Den, yellow sandstone of.

Earth's crust defined.

Echinoderms of Suffolk Crag.

Echinosphaeronites balticus.

Egerton, Sir P., on fish of Headon series.
--, on fish of the Permian.
--, on fish of Penarth beds.

Ehrenberg, Professor, on term Bryozoum.
--, on Silurian foraminifera.
--, on infusoria.

Eifel Limestone.
--, Lake-craters of.
-- Miocene, volcanic rocks of.
-- Pliocene, volcanoes of the.
--, trass of the.

Elephas antiquus, molar of.
-- meridionalis, molar of.
-- primigenius, molar of.

Elevation craters, theory of.

Elvans, term explained.
-- of Ireland and Cornwall.

Elytron of Buprestis? Stonesfield.

Emmons, Professor, on jaws of Triassic quadruped.
--, on Dromatherium.

Encrinites of Bradford.

Encrinus liliiformis, Muschelkalk.

Endogens, term explained.

Engihoul cave, human and animal remains in.

England and Wales, glaciation of.

Enstatite.

Eocene areas of Europe, map of.
-- foraminifera.
-- formations of France.
-- of England.
-- period, volcanic rocks of.
--, plutonic rocks of the.
--, metamorphic rocks of the.
-- of France, footprints in.
-- and Miocene, line between the.
--, term defined.
-- of the United States.

Eozoon Canadense, oldest known fossil.

Epidote.

Eppelsheim, Dinotherium of.

Equisetaceae of the Coal.

Equisetites columnaris, Keuper.

Equus caballus, tooth of.

Erratic blocks, nature of.
-- of Greenland.
-- near Chichester.
-- in the Red Crag.

Erratics, Alpine.

Escarpments explained.

Eschara disticha, White Chalk.

Escharina oceani, White Chalk.

Estheria minuta, Trias.
-- ovata, Richmond, Virginia.

Ethridge, Mr., on Atlantic mud.
--, on Devonian series, in Devon.
--, on Devonian fauna.
--, on mollusca of Bracklesham.
--, on St. Cassian fossils.

Etna, built up since Newer Pliocene.
--, Pliocene lavas of.

Ettingshausen on Sheppey Eocene fruit.

Eunomia radiata, Bath Oolite.

Eunotia bidens, Atlantic mud.

Euomphalus pentangulatus.

Eurite.

Euritic porphyry of Norway.

Evans, Mr., on Archaeopteryx.

Exogens.

Exogyra virgula, Kimmeridge Clay.

Extracrinus (Pentacrinus) Briareus, Lias.

Falconer, Dr., on Miocene fauna of Siwalik Hills.
--, on Brixham Cave flint knives.
--, on Purbeck mammalia.

Faluns of Loire, recent shells in.
-- of Touraine.

Farnham, phosphate of lime near.

Fascicularia aurantium, Coralline crag.

Faults in coal-measures of Coalbrook Dale.
-- described.
-- often the result of repeated movements.

Fauna of the crag, its relation to that of our present seas.
-- of the Mountain Limestone.
-- of the Paris basin.

Favosites cervicornis, Devonian.
-- Gothlandica, Silurian.

Favre, M. E., on glaciers and moraines of the Caucasus.

Faxoe, chalk of.

Feldspar-porphyry.

Feldspar, varieties of.

Feldstone.

Felis tigris, tooth of.

Fenestella retiformis, Magnesian Limestone.

Ferns of the coal.

Fife, trap-dike in.

Fish, fossil of the Carboniferous.
--, Eocene of Monte Bolca.
--, oldest known fossil.
--, number of living.
--, fresh-water and marine.
-- of the Upper Ludlow.
-- of the Old Red Sandstone.
-- of the Permian marl slate.
-- of the brown coal.
-- of the Lias.

Fisherton, Greenland lemming in drift of.

Fissures, filled with metallic matter.

Fitton, Dr., on the Neocomian strata.

Fleming, Dr., on Parka decipiens.
--, on trap-dike in Fife.

Flints in the Chalk.

Flisk dike of Fife.

Flora of the Carboniferous.
--, Devonian, compared to Carboniferous.
-- of the Subapennines.
--, Lower Miocene of Switzerland.
--, Miocene of the Arctic Regions.
--, Older Pliocene of Italy.
-- of the Permian.
-- of the Upper Cretaceous.
--, Upper Miocene of Switzerland.
-- of the Wealden.

Fluvio-marine or Norwich Crag.

Flysch of the Alps.
--, plutonic rocks invading.

Folding and denudation of Nova Scotia Carboniferous rocks.

Folds of parallel strata, arrangement and direction of.

Foliation of crystalline rocks.
--, irregularities in.

Folkestone and Hythe beds.

Fontainebleau, Gres de.

Footprints in Potsdam sandstone.
-- of reptiles in Coal-measures.
--, fossil in New red.
-- in Paris gypsum.

Foraminifera, Eocene.
-- of Mountain Limestone.
-- of the Chalk.

Forbes, Mr. David, on glass cavities in quartz.
--, on planes of foliation.
--, on specific gravity of quartz.
--, on volcanic minerals.

Forbes, Professor E., on fossils of Bembridge beds.
--, on Hempstead beds.
--, on shells of the crag.
--, on sphaeronites.
--, on subdivisions of the Purbeck.
--, on testacea of the Faluns.
--, on thickness of Upper Neocomian.

Forest-bed at Cromer.
-- marble or cornbrash.
--, submerged.
--, fossil in Coal.
--, fossil of Isle of Portland.

Forfarshire, Cephalaspis beds of.
--, contorted strata in.

Formation, term defined.

Fossil, term defined.
-- trees erect in coal.
-- Fish of Old Red Sandstone.

Fossiliferous groups, table of succession of.

Fossils, arrangement of, in strata.
--, destruction of, in older formations.
--, fresh-water and marine.
-- obliterated by metamorphic action.
--, recent, and Post-pliocene.
-- of the drift.
-- of the Crags.
--, Upper Miocene.
--, Lower Miocene of Switzerland.
-- of the Hempstead Beds.
--, Eocene.
-- of the Barton Clay.
-- of the White Chalk.
-- of the Neocomian.
-- of the Oolite.
-- of the Stonesfield Slate.
-- of the Lias.
-- of the Trias.
-- of the Magnesian Limestone.
-- of the Coal.
-- plants of the Coal.
-- of the Mountain Limestone.
--, Devonian.
--, Silurian.
--, Cambrian.
-- Laurentian.

Fournet, M. on metalliferous gneiss.
--, on veins in granite.

Fox, Reverend D., on Isle of Wight Eocene fossils.

Fox, Mr. R., on lodes in Cornwall.

Fractures of strata, and faults.

Fragments, included, a test of age of plutonic rocks.
--, included, a test of age of strata.
-- a test of age in volcanic rocks.

France, Eocene formations of.
--, Lower Miocene of.
--, Upper Miocene of.

Freshfield, Mr., on absence of lakes in the Caucasus.

Fresh-water strata, how distinguished from marine. 
-- formation of Auvergne.

Fucoid sandstones of Sweden.

Fulgur canaliculatus, Maryland.

Fuller's earth, fossils of the.

Fundy, Bay of, fossil trees exposed in cliffs at.

Fusilina cylindrica.

Fusion of quartz.

Fusus contrarius (Trophon antiquum).
-- quadricostatus, Maryland.

Gabbro.

Gaillonella ferruginea, and G. distans.

Galapagos Islands, living marine saurian in.

Galeocerdo latidens, Bracklesham.

Galerites albogalerus, White Chalk.

Galestes in Middle Purbeck.

Ganoids, the type of Old Red Sandstone fish.
-- of the Wealden.
-- of the Trias.

Gaps in the sequence of fossil remains.

Garnet.

Gases, corrosion of rocks by.

Gaudin on Lower Miocene of Switzerland.
-- on Pliocene flora of Italy.
-- on Proteaceae in Bournemouth Eocene.

Gault, thickness and fossils of.

Geikie, Mr. A., on Ayrshire Permian trap-rocks.
--, on subaerial denudation.
--, on ice erosion of lake-basins.
--, on Isle of Mull volcanic rocks.
--, on Pentland Old Red volcanic rocks.
--, on Silurian metamorphic rocks.
--, on syenite of Skye.

Geinitz, M., on Permian flora.

Gemunder Maar, volcanic rocks of.

Geneva, Lower Miocene of.

Geology defined.

Gergovia, tuffs and associated lacustrine strata of.

Germany, Lower Miocene of.
--, Triassic fauna of.

Gers, Upper Miocene of.

Gervillia anceps, Neocomian.
-- socialis, Muschelkalk.

Giant's Causeway basalt, age of.
--, laterite of the.
--, columnar basalt of.

Girgenti, Newer Pliocene of.

Glacial drift, distribution and nature of.
-- epoch in the Post-pliocene.
-- formations of Pliocene age.

Glaciation of Russia and Scandinavia.
-- of Scotland.
-- of Wales and England.
-- of North America.

Glaciers, transporting and abrading power of.

Glasgow, marine strata near.

Glauconie grossiere.

Glen Tilt, junction of granite and schist at.

Globiform pitchstone.

Globigerina bulloides.

Globular structure of volcanic rocks.

Glyptostrobus, Europaeus, Oeningen.

Gneiss, granite veins traversing.
-- defined and figured.
--, fundamental, of Scotland.

Gold mines of Australia and Chili.
-- veins of Russia.
-- of California, of age of alluvium.

Goldenberg, Professor, on Saarbruck coal insects.

Goldfuss, Professor, on reptiles in coal.

Goniatites crenistria.
-- Listeri, coal-measures.

Goppert, on American forms in Swiss Miocene flora.
-- on petrification.
-- on plants of coal-measures.

Gorgonia infundibuliformis, Permian.

Graham's Island, forming ashy conglomerate.

Grampians, Old Red conglomerates of.
--, trap-rocks of the.
--, former glaciers in the.

Grand Canary, Upper Miocene, shelly tuffs of.

Granite, composition of.
--, graphic and columnar.
--, how far connected with trap-rocks.
--, hydrothermal action in formation of.
-- metamorphosing fossiliferous strata.
--, porphyritic.
--, oldest.
--, protrusion of solid.
--, passage of, into trap.
--, schorly.
-- veins.
-- veins in talcose gneiss.

Granton, angiosperm found in coal at.

Graptolites of Llandeilo flags.

Graptolites Murchisonii. Llandeilo flags.

Graptolithus priodon, Silurian.

Gray's, Essex, pachyderms found at.

Great (or Bath) Oolite.

Greece, Upper Miocene formations of.

Greenland, continental ice of.
--, gradual sinking of.

Greenstone.

Gres de Beauchamp, Paris basin.

Gres de Fontainebleau, age of the.

Griffiths, Sir R., on yellow sandstone of Ireland.

Grit defined.

Groups, older, rise highest above the sea.
-- why the newest to be studied first.

Gryllacris lithanthraca, coal.

Gryphaea coated with serpulae.
-- columba, Chloritic Sand.
-- convexa, Chalk.
-- incurva (G. arcuata).
-- virgula, Kimmeridge clay.

Gryphite Limestone.

Guadaloupe, glass cavities in quartz of.

Gulf-Stream, probable abrading power of.

Gumbel, M., on Rhaetic beds.

Gunn, Mrs., on pot-stones in the chalk.

Gutbier, Colonel, on Permian flora.

Gymnogens, term explained.

Gypseous marls of Auvergne.

Gypsum and gypseous marl defined.

Gyrolepis tenuistriatus, Rhaetic beds.

Haime, Mr., on palaeozoic corals.

Hakea silicina, and Hakea saligna, Oeningen.

Hall, Captain Basil, on Cyclopean Isles.

Hall, Sir James, on curved strata.

Hall, Mr. J., on Appalachian palaeozoic rocks.

Hallstadt and St. Cassian beds.

Halysites catenularis, Silurian.

Hamilton, Sir W., on eruption of Vesuvius.

Hamites spiniger, Gault.

Hancock, Mr., on Protosaurus in Permian.

Harkness, Professor, on Silurian metamorphic rocks.

Harlech grits, fossils of the.

Harris, Major, on the Salt Lakes.

Harpactor maculipes, Oeningen.

Harpe, M. de la, on Bournemouth Eocene flora.

Hartung, Mr., cited.

Hartz mountains, mineral veins of.
--, Bunter Sandstein of.

Hastings Sands, subdivisions of the.

Hautes Alpes, granite of the.

Hauy on isomorphism.

Headon series, fossils of the.

Heat, powerful in consolidating rocks.
--, rocks upraised and folded by.

Hebert, M., on age of Sables de Bracheux.
--, comparison of Sables Moyens and Barton shells.
--, on pisolitic limestone.

Hebrides, dikes in the.

Heer, Professor, on American genera in Swiss Miocene.
--, on age of Madeira leaf-bed.
--, on Arctic Miocene flora.
--, on Bear Island flora.
--, on Bovey Tracey Miocene flora.
--, on fossil plants of Switzerland.
--, on Lower Miocene plants of Mull.
--, on Monte Bolca Eocene plants.
--, on Proteas of Lower Miocene.
--, on plants of Hempstead beds.
--, on plants of coal-field, Virginia.
--, on Swiss Miocene insects.
--, on supposed Proteaceae of Oeningen beds.
--, on Superga fossil plants.

Heidelberg, varieties of granite near.

Heliolites porosa, Devonian.

Helix hispida (plebeia).
-- labyrinthica, Headon.
-- occlusa, Bembridge.
-- Turonensis, faluns.

Hemicidaris Purbeckensis, Purbeck.

Hemipneustes radiatus, Chalk.

Hemitelites Brownii, Inferior Oolite.

Hempstead beds, subdivisions of the.

Henry, on absorption of carbonic acid gas in water.

Henslow, Professor, on dike in Anglesea.
--, on Red Crag coprolite bed.

Herschel, Sir J., on slaty cleavage.

Hertfordshire pudding-stone.

Heterocercal tail of fish.

Hicks, Dr., on fossils of Arenig beds.
--, on fossils of Harlech grits.
--, on Menevian beds.

Himalaya, shells 18,000 feet high in.
--, Upper Miocene of.

Hippopodium ponderosum, Lias.

Hippopotamus, tooth of.

Hippurite Limestone.

Hippurites organisans, Chalk.

Histioderma hibernica.

Hitchcock, Professor, on Trias footprints.

Holoptychius nobilissimus, scale of, and restoration.

Homalonotus Delphinocephalus.
-- armatus, Devonian.

Homfray, Mr., on fossils of Tremadoc beds.

Homocercal tail of fish.

Hooghly River, analysis of water.

Hooker, Dr., on coniferae.
--, on structure of sigillaria.
--, on sporangia of Silurian plant.

Horizontality of strata.

Horizontal strata, upheaval of.

Hornblende.

Hornblende-schist.

Hornes, Dr., on fossil mollusca of Vienna basin.

Horstead, pot-stones at.

Hour-glass illustrating the destruction and renovation of land.

Howse, Mr., on Protosaurus in Permian.

Hubbard, Professor, on granite of White Mountains.

Hudson River Group, fossils of the.

Hughes, Mr. T. McKenny, cited.
--, on slaty cleavage.
--, on protrusion of solid granite.

Hull, Mr. E., on breccias in Permian.
-- on carboniferous of Lancashire.
--, on carboniferous rocks of north of England.
--, on faults in Lancashire coal-field.
--, on anticlinals and synclinals, Lancashire.
--, on thickness of the Upper Trias.
--, on thickness of Permian.
--, on three lines of flexure since the coal in Lancashire.

Human remains of Recent Period.
-- in cavern deposits.

Humboldt, on mineral character of rocks.

Humphrey and Abbot on Mississippi denudation.

Hungary, trachyte of.

Hunt, Sterry, on action of water in metamorphism.

Huronian series, thickness of the.

Huxley, Professor, on Atlantic chalk-mud.
--, on affinity between reptiles and birds.
--, on batrachians of the coal.
--, on fish of Old Red Sandstone.
--, on Pteraspis.

Hyaena den of Kirkdale cave.

Hyaena spelaea, tooth of.

Hybodus plicatilis, Rhaetic beds.
-- reticulatus, Lias.

Hydrothermal action producing metamorphism.
-- in formation of granite.
-- forming granite veins.

Hymenocaris vermicauda.

Hyperodapedon Gordoni, Trias.

Hypersthene.
-- rock.
-- rocks of Skye.

Hypogene rocks, uniformity of mineral character in.
-- rocks, term defined.

Hypsiprymnus Gaimardi, molar of recent.

Hythe, Neocomian beds of.

Ice, erosion of lake-basins considered.
--, abrading power of.
--, continental, of Greenland.

Icebergs, drift carried by.
-- stranded in Baffin's Bay.

Ice-borne erratics at Chichester.

Iceland, glass cavities in quartz of.
--, flow of lava in.

Ichthyosaurus communis, Lias.

Idocrase.

Ichthyodorulite of the Lias.

Iguanodon Mantelli, Weald Clay.

Ilfracombe Group of Devon.

Inclined strata.

India, Miocene formations of.

India, Upper Miocene of.

Inferior Oolite, thickness and fossils of.

Infusoria in tripoli.

Inland sea-cliffs.

Inoceramus Lamarckii, White Chalk.

Insect in American coal.
-- beds of the Lias.
-- wing of neuropterous.

Insects, Devonian, of Canada.
-- in European coal.
--, Miocene, of Croatia.
--, Upper Miocene, at Oeningen.

Intrusion, a test of age of Plutonic rocks.
--, a test of age of volcanic rocks.

Inundation mud of rivers.

Ireland, glacial drift of.
--, yellow sandstone of.

Iron pyrites.
-- weapons of Swiss lake-dwellings.

Isastraea oblonga, Portland Sand.

Isle of Bourbon, lava current of the.
-- Wight, Hempstead beds.
-- Wight, Eocene beds.
-- Mull, Miocene leaf-bed of.
-- Mull, volcanic rocks.

Isomorphism, theory of.

Italy, Lower Miocene of.
--, Older Pliocene volcanoes of.
--, Pliocene of.
--, Older Pliocene flora of.
--, Upper Miocene strata of.

Jamieson, Mr. T.F., on Scotch glacial drift.

Jaws of mammalia in Purbeck.

Jeffreys, Mr. Gwyn, on Atlantic mud.

Jointed structure of metamorphic rocks.

Jones, Dr. Rupert, on Eozoon Canadense.

Jorullo, lava stream of.

Judd, Mr., on Speeton clay.

Jukes, Mr., on Tarannon shales.

Jura, erratic blocks on the.
--, structure of the.

Kangaroo, jaws of.

Kasegrotte, Bertrich Baden, Basaltic pillars of.

Kaup, Professor, on footprints of the Trias.

Keilhau, Professor, on granite veins.
--, on planes of foliation.
--, on Silurian granite of Norway.
--, on protrusion of granite.

Keller, Dr. F., on lake-dwellings.

Kelloway Rock, percentage of Oxford clay fossils in.

Kentish Rag.

Keuper, of Germany.
-- or Upper Trias of England.

Kilkenny, fossil plants of.

Killas, altered by granite in Cornwall.

Kiltorkan, yellow sandstone of, with Anodonta.

Kimmeridge Clay.

King, Dr., on reptile footprints in coal.
--, Mr., on Permian fossils.

Kirkdale cave, hyaena's den of.

Kitchen-middens of Denmark.

Kleyn Spawen beds.

Konen, Baron von, on Brockenhurst shells.

Koninck, M. de, on Mountain Limestone fish.
--, on shells of Mayence basin.

Koninckia Leonhardi, Hallstadt.

Labrador rock.
-- series.

Labradorite.

Labyrinthodon Jaegeri, section of tooth.
--, tooth of.

Labyrinthodonts of Coal.

Lake-craters of the Eifel.

Lake districts, southern limits of the.

Lake-dwellings, scarcity of human remains in.
-- of Switzerland.

Lakes, deposits in.
--, connection of, with glacial action.

Lamarck on bivalve mollusca.

Lamination of clay slate.

Lamna elegans, Bracklesham.

Lancashire, vast thickness of rocks without corresponding altitude in.

Land, balance of dry, how preserved.
-- has been raised, not the sea lowered.
--, mean height of, above the sea.
--, rise of, in Sweden.
--, rise and fall of, affecting denudation.

Land-ice, action of, in Greenland.

Land's End, columnar granite at.
--, porphyritic granite at.

La Roche, recent deposits in estuary of.

Lartet, M., on mammalia of Faluns.
--, on Gastornis Parisiensis.
--, on reindeer period.

Lastraea stiriaca, Monod.

Lateral compression causing curved strata.

Laterite of Giant's Causeway.

Laurentian gneiss of Scotland.
-- Group, Upper and Lower.
-- metamorphic rocks.
-- volcanic rocks.

Lava.
-- consolidating on slopes.
-- currents of Auvergne.
-- streams, effect of.
-- of La Coupe d'Ayzac.
-- of Jorullo.

Lead veins, age of.

Leaf-bed of Madeira in basalt and scoriae.
--, Isle of Mull Miocene.

Leda amygdaloides, London Clay.
-- Deshayesiana (Nucula Deshayesiana).
-- lanceolata (L. oblonga), Scotch drift.
-- truncata, Scotch drift.

Lee, Mr. J.E., on Pteraspis of Lower Ludlow.

Leidy, Dr., on fossil quadrupeds of Nebraska.

Leperditia inflata, coal-measures.

Lepidodendron Griffithsii.
-- corrugatum, carboniferous. 
-- Sternbergii, coal-measures.

Lepidolite.

Lepidostrobus ornatus, Coal.

Lepidotus gigas, Lias.
-- Mantelli, Wealden.

Leptaena depressa, Wenlock.
-- Moorei, Lias.

Level of surface altered by change of subterranean heat.

Lewis, hornblendic gneiss of.

Lias, fishes of the.
--, fossils of the.
-- and Oolite, origin of the.
--, reptiles of the.
--, insects of the.
--, plants of the.
--, plutonic rocks of the.
--, subdivisions of the.
--, volcanic rocks of the.

Liebig, on conversion of coal into anthracite.
--, on origin of stalactite.

Liege, limestone caverns at.

Lightbody, Mr., on Lower Ludlow shales.

Lignite, conversion of into coal.

Lima giganteum.
-- Hoperi, Chalk.
-- spinosa, White Chalk.

Limagne d'Auvergne, Lower Miocene mammalia of the.

Limburg beds.

Lime, scarcity of, in metamorphic rocks.
-- in solution, source of.

Limestone, block of striated.
--, brecciated.
-- of chemical and organic origin.
--, compact.
--, Hippurite.
--, magnesian.
--, metamorphic or crystalline.
--, Mountain, and its fossils.
--, striated.

Limnaea longiscata.

Lingula beds, volcanic tuffs of the.

Lingula Credneri, Permian.
-- Flags, fossils of the.
-- Dumortieri, Crag.
-- Lewisii, Ludlow.

Lingulella Davisii.

Lipari Isles, tufas in.

Liquidambar europaeum.

Lithrostrotion basaltiforme, Carboniferous.

Lits coquilliers.

Littoral denudation defined.

Lituites giganteus, Ludlow.

Llanberis slates.

Llandeilo Flags, fossils of the.

Llandeilo formation, thickness of the.
--, Lower.

Llandovery Group, classification of the.
-- Rocks, thickness of the Lower.

Loam defined.

Lodes, shells and pebbles in.
-- See Mineral Veins.

Loess of fluviatile loam described.
--, fossil shells of the.

Logan, Sir W., on Eozoon Canadense.
--, on Gaspe sandstones.
--, on Huronian and Laurentian.
--, on stigmaria in under-clays.
--, on thickness of Nova Scotia coal.
--, on thickness of Laurentian in Canada.

Loire, faluns of the.

London Clay, fossils of the.

Longevity, relative, of mammalia and testacea.

Longmynd Group, fauna of the.

Lonsdale, Mr., on corals of America.
--, on Devonian fossils.
--, on Stonesfield slate.
--, on United States Miocene corals.

Lonsdaleia floriformis, Carboniferous.

Lowe, Reverend R.T., on Mogador shells.

Lubbock, Sir J., on the two stone-periods.

Lucina serrata, Bracklesham.

Ludlow formation, Upper.
-- Lower.
--, bone-bed of the Upper.

Lulworth Cove, dirt-bed of.

Lycett, Mr., on fossils of the Great Oolite.

Lycopodiaceae of Coal.

Lycopodium densum, living species.

Lym-fiord, mingled fresh-water and marine strata of.

Lymnea caudata, Headon.
-- longiscata, Bembridge.

Lynton Group of Devon.

Maclaren, Mr., on Pentland Hills, volcanic rocks.

Macclesfield, marine shells 1,200 feet high at.

MacClintock, Sir L., on Atlantic mud.

MacCulloch, Dr., on Aberdeenshire granite.
--, on basaltic columns in Skye.
--, on formation of hornblende-schist.
--, on trap.

MacMullen, Mr. J., on Eozoon Canadense.

Macropus atlas, lower jaw of.
-- major (living), lower jaw of.

Madeira, beds of laterite in.
--, dike in valley in.
--, Pliocene leaf-bed and shells in lavas of.
--, Miocene volcanic rocks of.
--, wind, removing scoriae in.

Maestricht beds and their fossils.

Maffiotte, Don Pedro, cited.

Magas pumila, White Chalk.

Magnesian Limestone defined.
-- and marl-slate.

Magnetite.

Maidstone, Upper Cretaceous fossils of.

Malacolite.

Malaise, Professor, on Engihoul cave.

Mammalia, anterior to Paris gypsum, table of.
--, extinct, coeval with man.
--, fossil, of Middle Purbeck.
--, fossil, in Pliocene in Val d'Arno.
--, fossil, in the Crag.
--, fossil, of Vienna basin.
-- of the Limagne d'Auvergne.
-- of Siwalik Hills.
-- of the Stonesfield slate.
--, teeth of Post-pliocene.

Mammalia and testacea, comparative longevity of.

Mammoth, rude carving of in Perigord cave.
-- in Scotch till.
-- See Elephas primigenius.

Man, antiquity of.

Manfredi on amount of subaerial denudation.

Mantell, Dr., on iguanodon of Wealden.
--, on Oxford Clay belemnites.
--, on Wealden fossils.

Mantellia nidiformis, Purbeck.

Map of Chalk formation in France.
-- of Eocene tertiary basins.
-- of Hallstadt and St. Cassian beds.

Marble defined.
-- of Carrara, metamorphic.

Marcou, M., on age of Wealden beds.

Margaric acid.

Marine fauna of the Carboniferous.
-- beds underlying the London Clay.
-- and brackish-water strata in coal.
-- strata, how distinguished from fresh-water.

Marl from Lake Superior.
-- and marl-slate defined.
--, red, green, and white, of Auvergne.
-- slate of Middle Permian.

Marsupials, extinct, of Australia.

Marsupites Milleri, White Chalk.

Massachusetts, plumbago of.

Mastodon arvernensis, molar of, Norwich crag.
-- giganteus, in United States after the drift.

Mayence basin tertiaries.

May-Hill Sandstone.

Mechanical and chemical deposits.
-- theory of cleavage.

Mediterranean, one zoological province.

Megalodon cucullatus, Devonian.

Melania inquinata (Cerithium melanoides).

Melania turritissima, Bembridge.

Melanopsis buccinoidea.

Melaphyre, a variety of basalt.

Menevian beds and their fossils.

Mesozoic, term explained.
-- and Cainozoic periods, gap between the.
-- and Palaeozoic rocks, limits of the.

Metals, relative age of different.

Metamorphic limestone.
-- strata, origin of.
-- theory, objections to, considered.
-- rocks defined.

Metamorphic rocks.
--, cleavage of.
--, scarcity of lime in.
--, ages of.
--, order of succession of.
--, uniformity of mineral character in.

Metamorphism, hydrothermal action producing.

Metamorphosis of trilobites.

Meteorites, minerals in.

Mexico, Gulf of, terrestrial remains washed into.

Meyer, Mr. Karl, on fossil shells of Madeira.
--, M. H. von, on reptiles in coal.
--, on Wealden of Germany.

Miascite.

Mica and its varieties.
--, how deposited.
-- schist or micaceous schist.

Micaceous sandstone, origin of.

Micraster cor-anguinum.

Microconchus carbonarius, coal-measures.

Microlestes antiquus, Upper Trias.

Migrations of quadrupeds.

Miliolite limestone.

Miller, Hugh, on Old Red Sandstone fish.
--, on salt lakes.

Milne Edwards, Mr., on Palaeozoic corals.

Minchinhampton, Great Oolite of.

Mineral composition a test of age of volcanic rocks.
-- a test of age of plutonic rocks.
-- a test of age of strata.
-- character of hypogene rocks.
-- springs of Auvergne.

Mineral veins.
-- formed in fissures.
--, successive formation of.
--, swelling and contraction of.
--, relative age of.
--, pebbles in.

Mineralisation of organic remains.

Minerals in meteorites.
--, table of the most abundant in hypogene rocks.

Miocene of Bordeaux and south of France.
-- and Eocene, line between the.
--, Lower, of England.
--, Lower, of Germany and Croatia.
--, Lower, of Central France.
--, Lower, of Italy.
--, Lower, of Nebraska, United States.
--, term defined.
--, Upper, of the Bolderberg.
--, Upper, of France.
--, Upper, of Italy.
--, Upper, of Greece.
--, Upper, of India.
--, Upper, of Vienna basin.

Mississippi, sediment of, used as a test of denudation by rivers.
-- valley, deposition and denudation in the.

Mitchell, Mr., on Aralia fruit in Alum Bay, Eocene.

Mitchell, Sir T., on Wellington caves.

Mitchell, Reverend Hugh, on Pteraspis.

Mitra Scabra, Barton clay.

Mitscherlich, on Isomorphism.

Modiola acuminata, Permian.

Moel Tryfaen, shells found at.

Mohs on isomorphism.

Molasse, Lower, of Switzerland.
--, Middle, or Marine, of Switzerland.
--, Upper, fresh-water, of Switzerland.
--, term explained.

Mollusca. See Shells.
--, longevity of species of.
-- of Hallstadt beds.
--, value of, in classification.
-- of the Carboniferous.

Monitor of Thuringia.

Monoclinic feldspars.

Monod, flora of the Lower Molasse at.

Mons, unconformable strata near.

Montblanc, talcose granite of.
-- Dor, Auvergne, extinct volcanoes of.
--, age of volcano of.

Monte Bolca, fossil fish of.
-- Calvo, section of cross stratification.
-- Mario, age of volcanic deposits of.
-- Nuovo, formed 1538.

Montmartre, gypseous series of.

Monts Dome, Auvergne, extinct volcanoes.

Moore, Mr. C., on Rhaetic beds.
--, on Upper Trias quadrupeds.

Moraines described.

Morea, cretaceous volcanic rocks of.

Mortillet, M. de, on ice-erosion of lake-basins.

Morton, Dr., on age of American cretaceous rocks.

Mosasaurus Camperi, Chalk.

Mountain Limestone, fossils of the.

Mull, Isle of, leaf-bed.

Munster, Count, on fossils of Solenhofen.

Murchison, Sir R., on brackish-water strata in coal.
--, on Devonian series.
--, on Devonian ichthyolites.
--, on Eocene igneous rocks.
--, on Llandovery beds.
--, on Laurentian gneiss of Scotland.
--, on metamorphic rocks of North Highlands.
--, on Monte Bolca fish-beds.
--, on name Permian.
--, on Old Red Sandstone.
--, on Palaeozoic strata, Queenaig.
--, on protrusion of solid granite.
--, on Silurian.
--, on Tertiary volcanic rocks of Italy.
--, on thickness of chalk in Russia.
--, on thickness of the Trias.
--, on the Upper "Old Red."

Murchisonia gracilis.

Murex vaginatus.

Muschelkalk, fossils of the.

Muscovite, or common mica.

Musk-ox, fossil, in Thames valley.

Myliobates Edwardsi, Bracklesham.

Mytilus septifer, Permian.

Naples, Post-pliocene volcanic rocks of.
--, escape of carbonic acid near.

Natica clausa, Scotch drift.
-- helicoides, Chillesford beds.

Natrolite.

Nautilus centralis, London Clay.
-- Danicus, Faxoe Chalk.
-- plicatus, Hythe beds.
-- truncatus, Lias.
-- ziczac (Aturia ziczac).

Nebraska, Miocene strata of.

Necker, M., on "underlying" igneous rocks.
--, on dikes in Vesuvius.

Neocomian, Upper.
--, Middle.
--, Lower.
--, use of the term.

Neolithic era.

Neozoic type of corals.

Nerinaea Goodhallii, Coral Rag.

Nerinaean limestone.

Nerita conoidea (N. Schmidelliana).
-- costulata, Great Oolite.
-- granulosa.

Neritina concava. Headon.
-- globulus.

Neufchatel, coins and iron tools in lake of.

Newberry, Dr., on flora of American cretaceous rocks.

Newcastle coal-field, faults in.

Newfoundland bank described.

New Jersey, mastodon in.

New Madrid, "Sunk Country" in.

New Red sandstone of Connecticut Valley.
--, trappean rocks of the.

New York, Devonian strata of.
--, Cambrian strata of.
--, Silurian strata of.
--, Laurentian strata of.

Niagara Limestone, fossils of the.

Nidau, iron tools in lake of.

Nile, homogeneous mud of the.

Ninety-fathom dike in coal.

Nipadites ellipticus, Sheppey.

Nodules in strata, how formed.

Noeggerathia cuneifolia, Permian.

Nomenclature of rocks.
-- of volcanic minerals.

Norfolk cliffs, drift of.

North America. See America.

Norway, Cambrian of.
--, foliation of crystalline schists in.
--, granite veins in gneiss of.
--, granite altering fossiliferous strata in.

Norwich, or Fluvio-marine crag.

Nova Scotia coal-measures.
-- coal, reptiles and shells in.
--, folding and denudation of beds in.

Nucula Cobboldiae, Crag.

Nummulites laevigata, Bracklesham.
-- Puschi, Pyrenees.
-- variolaria, Bracklesham.

Nummulitic formations.

Obolus Apollinis, in Russian grit.

Obsidian.

Oceanic areas, permanence of.

Oeningen, Upper Miocene beds of.

Oeynhausen, M. von, on Cornish granite veins.

Ogygia Buchii.

Oldhamia radiata: O. antiqua.

Old Red Sandstone, Upper.
--, Middle, with fish.
--, Lower.
--, trap of the.
--, classification of.

Olenus micrurus.

Oligocene, term for Lower Miocene.

Oligoclase.

Oliva Dufresnii, Bolderberg, Belgium.

Olivine.

Omphyma turbinatum, Silurian.

Onchus tenuistriatus, Silurian.

Oolite, classification and physical geography of the.
--, defined.
--, Inferior, fossils of the.
-- and Lias, origin of the.
-- and Chalk, Palaeontological break between.

Oolitic strata, palaeontological relations of.
-- volcanic rocks.

Ophioderma tenuibrachiata, Lias.

Oppel on zones of Lias.

Orbigny, Alcide de, on foraminifera of Vienna basin.
--, on orbitoidal limestone.
--, on Pisolitic limestone.
--, on Senonian.

Oreodaphne Heerii, Italian Pliocene.

Organic remains, mineralisation of.
--, tests of age of strata.
--, tests of age of volcanic rocks.
--, geological provinces of.

Oriskany Sandstone.

Orthis elegantula, Ludlow.
-- grandis, Caradoc beds.
-- tricenaria, Bala beds.
-- vespertilio, Bala beds.

Orthoceras duplex.
-- Ludense, Silurian.
-- laterale.
-- ventricosum, Silurian.

Orthoclase.

Orthoclastic feldspars.

Osborne or St. Helen's series, Eocene.

Osteolepis, Old Red Sandstone.

Ostraceon, spine of, Bracklesham.

Ostrea acuminata, Fuller's earth.
-- carinata, Chalk marl.
-- columba, Chloritic sand.
-- gregarea, Coral Rag.
-- deltoidea, Kimmeridge clay.
-- distorta, Middle Purbeck.
-- expansa, Portland sand.
-- Marshii, Oolite.
-- vesicularis, Chalk.

Otodus obliquus, Bracklesham.

Outcrop of strata.

Overlapping strata.

Owen, Professor on Archaeopteryx.
--, on Eocene Zeuglodon.
--, on footprints in Trias.
--, on fauna of Sheppey.
--, on Gastornis Parisiensis.
--, on Labyrinthodon.
--, on mammalia of Stonesfield.
--, on Purbeck mammalia.
--, on reptiles of coal.
--, on zoological provinces of extinct animals.

Ox, tooth of (recent).

Oxford Clay, thickness and fossils of.

Pagham, erratic block at.

Palaeaster asperimus.

Palaechinus gigas, Mountain Limestone.

Palaeocoma tenuibrachiata, Lias.

Palaeoniscus, Permian fish.
-- comptus, P. elegans, P. glaphyrus.

Palaeotherium magnum.

Palaeophis typhoeus, Bracklesham.

Palaeozoic or Paleozoic, term defined.
-- Plutonic rocks.
-- rocks.
-- type of corals.

Palagonia, dikes of lava in.

Paleolithic era.
--, alluvial deposits of.

Palm in Swiss Miocene.

Palma, volcanic crater of.

Paludina lenta, Hempstead beds.
-- orbicularis, Bembridge.

Paradoxides Bohemicus.
-- Davidis, Lower Cambrian.

Parallelism of folded strata for long distances.

Paris basin, Tertiary group first studied in.
--, Tertiaries of the.

Parka decipiens, "Old Red."

Parkfield Colliery, ground-plan of.

Patagonia, strata of, rich in soda.

Patella rugosa, Great Oolite.

Paterson, Dr., on angiosperm of the Coal.

Peach, Mr. C, cited.
--, Pteraspis, found by.

Pearlstone.

Pebbles in mineral veins.
-- in chalk.

Pecopteris elliptica, Coal.

Pecten Beaveri, White Chalk.
-- cinctus, Neocomian.
-- islandicus, Scotch Drift.
-- jacobaeus, in tertiary of Sicily.
-- quinque-costatus.
-- Valoniensis, Rhaetic beds.

Pegmatite.

Penarth beds.

Pengelly, Mr., on Bovey Tracey lignite.
--, on flint-knives of Brixham Cave.

Pentacrinus Briareus, Lias.

Pentamerus Knightii, Aymestry.
-- oblongus, and P. lirata.

Pentland Hills, volcanic rocks of the.

Perigord cave, carving of mammoth in.

Permanence of continents and oceans.

Permian Flora.
-- of Germany.
-- strata, thickness of, in north of England.
--, Upper and Middle.
--, Lower.

Perna Mulleti, Neocomian.

Petherwyn, Devonian fossils of.

Petrifaction, process of.

Petrophiloides Richardsoni, Sheppey.

Pahcops caudatus, Silurian.
-- latifrons, Devonian.

Phascolotherium Bucklandi.

Phasianella Heddingtonensis, and cast.

Phillippi, on tertiary shells of Sicily.

Phillips, Professor, on fossils distorted by cleavage.
--, on ninety fathom dike.
--, on Wenlock limestone and shale.
--, on Yoredale series.

Phillips, Mr. J. Arthur, on origin of gold of California.

Phlebopteris contigua, Inferior Oolite.

Phlogopite.

Pholadomya fidicula, Inferior Oolite.

Phonolite.

Phorus extensus, London Clay.

Phragmoceras ventricosum, Silurian.

Physa Bristovii, Middle Purbeck.
-- columnaris.
-- hypnorum.

Piedmont, absence of lakes in.

Pile dwellings of Switzerland.

Pilton, group of, Devon.

Pinnularia in Atlantic mud.

Pinus sylvestris in peat.

Pisolitic limestone of France.

Pitchstone.

Placodus gigas, Muschelkalk.

Placoids, rare in Old Red Sandstone.

Plagiaulax Becklesii, jaw and molar of.

Plagioclastic feldspars.

Plagiostoma giganteum, Lias.
-- Hoperi, Chalk.

Planorbis discus, Bembridge.
-- euomphalus.

Plants of Bovey Tracey, Miocene.
--, fossil fresh-water.
-- of the Coal.
-- of the Lias.
-- of the Swiss Upper Miocene.

Plas Newydd, rock altered by dike near.

Plastic Clay, Eocene.

Platanus aceroides, Miocene.

Platystoma Suessii, Hallstadt.

Playfair, on amount of subaerial denudation.
-- on faults.

Plectrodus mirabilis, Ludlow.

Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus, Lias.

Pleurotoma attenuata, Bracklesham.
-- exorta, Eocene.

Pleurotomaria anglica, and cast.
-- carinata (flammigera).
-- granulata, Inferior Oolite.
-- ornata, Inferior Oolite.

Plieninger, Professor, on Triassic mammifer.

Pliocene glacial formations.
-- Period.
-- plutonic rocks.
-- strata of Sicily.
--, term defined.
-- volcanic rocks.

Plombieres, alkaline waters of.

Plumbago of Massachusetts.

Plutonic and sedimentary formations, diagram of.
--, origin of the term.
-- rocks, Mesozoic.
--, Recent and Pliocene.
--, Miocene and Eocene.
--, uncertain tests of age of.
-- defined.

Podocarya Bucklandi, Oolite.

Polypterus of the Nile.

Polyzoa and Bryozoa, terms explained.

Pomel, M., on fossil mammalia of the Limagne.

Ponza Islands, globiform pitchstone of.

Porites pyriformis, Devonian.

Porphyritic granite.

Porphyry.

Portland, Cycads in dirt-bed of.
-- oolite and sand.

"Portland screw," a cast of a shell.

Porto Santo, marine shells in volcanic tuff of.

Post-pliocene period, climate of the.
-- mammalia, teeth of.
--, term defined.
-- lakes of Switzerland.
-- volcanic rocks.

Potamides cicntus.

Pothocites Grantonii, coal-measures.

Potsdam Sandstone.

Pot-stones in the Chalk.

Pottsville, coal seams of.

Powrie, Mr., on Cephalaspis beds.
--, on Parka decipiens.

Pratt, Mr., on Eocene Isle of Wight mammalia.

Predazzo, altered rocks at.

Pressure, solidifying rocks.

Prestwich, Mr., on age of Sables inferieurs.
--, on Chillesford beds.
--, on Coalbrook Dale insects.
--, on Eocene strata.
--, on faults in coal-measure of Coalbrook Dale.
--, on shells of London clay.
--, on thickness of Coralline Crag.

Prevost, M. Constant, on Paris basin.

Primary Limestone.
-- rocks.
--, term defined.

"Primordial Zone" of Bohemia.

Productus horridus, Permian.
-- semireticulatus (antiquatus).

Progressive development indicated by low grade of early mammals.

Proteaceae of Aix-la-Chapelle flora.
-- of Lower Molasse, Switzerland.
-- of Oeningen beds.

Protogine.

Protosaurus of Thuringia.

Protrusion of solid granite.

Provinces of animals and plants.

Psammodus porosus.

Pseudocrinites bifasciatus, Silurian.

Psilophyton princeps, Devonian.

Pteraspis in Lower Ludlow shale.

Pterichthys, Old Red Sandstone.

Pterodactyl of Kentish chalk.

Pterodactylus anglicus, Old Red.
-- crassirostris, Solenhofen.

Ptychodus decurrens, White Chalk.

Pudding-stone or conglomerate.
--, formation of.

Pumice.

Punfield beds, brackish and marine.

Pupa muscorum.
-- tridens, Loess.
-- vetusta, Coal.

Purbeck beds, Upper, Middle, and Lower.
--, fossil mammalia of the Middle.
-- marble.
--, subdivisions of the.

Purity of coal, cause of.

Purpura tetragona, Red Crag.

Purpuroidea nodulata, Great Oolite.

Puy de Come, cone and lava-current of.
-- de Tartaret, lava-current and cone of.
-- de Pariou, crater of the.

Puzzuoli, elevation of land at.

Pygopterus mandibularis, Permian.

Pyrenees, chalk altered by granite in the.
--, curved strata in.
--, lamination of clay-slate in.

Pyroxene group of minerals.

Pyrula reticulata, Crag.

Quader-sandstein, Cretaceous age of the.

Quadrumana of Gers.

Quadrupeds, extinct, in Paleolithic gravels.

Quartz, specific gravity of.

Quartzite or Quartz Rock.

Queenaig, unconformable Palaeozoic strata at.

Quenstedt on zones of Lias.

Radaboj Miocene, brown coal of.

Radiolites foliaceus, White Chalk.
-- Mortoni, White Chalk.
-- radiosa, White Chalk.

Radnorshire, stratified trap in.

Rain-prints with worm tracks in Coal.
--, carboniferous.

Ramsay, Professor, on break between Upper and Lower Cretaceous.
--, on breccias in Permian.
--, on escarpments.
--, on denudation.
--, on ice-erosion of lake-basins.
--, on Lingula Flags.
--, on position of Tremadoc beds.
--, on Silurian metamorphic rocks.
--, on submergence in glacial period.
--, on thickness of the Lower Trias.
--, on thickness of Llandeilo beds.
--, on thickness of the Bala beds.
--, on volcanic tuffs of Snowdon.
--, on zones of the Lias.

Rastrites peregrinus, Llandeilo Flags.

Rath, Von, on Tridymite.

Recent Period defined.
-- volcanic rocks.

Record, imperfection of, in the earth's crust.

Red Crag, older Pliocene.
-- Sandstone, Origin of.
-- Sea and Mediterranean, distinct species in.

Redruth, Cornwall, section of veins in mine.

Reindeer Period in South of France.

Relistran mine, pebbles in tin of.

Reptiles of the Coal.

Reptiles of the Lias.

Retepora flustracea, Permian.

Rhaetic beds between Lias and Trias.

Rhine, fresh-water strata of the.
--, loess of the.

Rhinoceros in drift of Abbeville.
-- leptorhinus (megarhinus), molar of.
-- tichorhinus, molar of.

Rhode Island, metamorphic rocks of.

Rhynchonella navicula, Ludlow.
-- octoplicata, White Chalk.
-- spinosa, Inferior Oolite.
-- Wilsoni, Aymestry.

Richmond, Virginia, Triassic coal-field of.

Rigi and Speer, Lower Miocene of the.

Rimula clathrata, Great Oolite.

Rink, Mr., on Greenland land-ice.

Ripple-marked sandstone, how formed.

Rise and fall of land.

Rissoa Chastelii, Hempstead beds.

Rivers, denuding powers of.

Roches moutonnees described.

Rock, term defined.

Rocks altered by volcanic dikes.
-- altered by subterranean gases.
--, analysis of minerals in.
--, aqueous or stratified.
--, classification of.
--, great thickness of palaeozoic.
--, glacial scorings on.
--, metamorphic, age of.
--, plutonic age of.
--, volcanic, age of.
--, trappean.
--, metamorphic, defined.
--, four classes of contemporaneous.
--, plutonic, defined.
--, tests of age of. 
--, four contemporaneous classes of.
--, underlying, not always the oldest.
--, volcanic, defined.

Rock-salt of Trias.
--, origin of.

Rogers, Mr. H.D., on blending of coal-seams.
--, on Virginian fault.

Rose, Gustavus, on isomorphism.
--, on Fifeshire dike.
--, on quartz in granite.

Rosso antico, red porphyry of Egypt.

Rostellaria (Hippocrenes) ampla, London Clay.

Roth, M., on Miocene of Greece.

Runn of Cutch, salt of.

Rupelian beds of Dumont.

Russia, glaciation of.
--, Devonian of.
--, Silurian strata of.

Saarbruck, reptiles in coal-field of.

Sabal major, Lower Miocene.

Sables de Bracheux.
-- moyens, Paris basin.

Sahlite.

St. Abb's Head, curved strata of.
--, unconformable stratification at.

St. Andrews, carboniferous trap-rocks of.

St. Cassian, fossil mollusca of.
-- and Hallstadt beds.

St. David's, Menevian beds of.

St. Mary's, shells of.

Salt, rock, origin of.

Salter, Mr., on fossils of Arenig group.
--, on Menevian beds.
--, on Tremadoc fossils.

Sandberger, Dr. F., on Mayence basin.

Sandstone, New Red.
--, Old Red.
-- slab with cracks.
--, slab of ripple-marked.
-- slab with footprints.

Sao hirsuta.

Saurians of the Lias.
--, sudden destruction of.

Saurichthys apicalis, Rhaetic Beds.

Saussure, on vertical conglomerates.

Saxicava rugosa, Scotch drift.

Saxony, beds of minerals in.

Scandinavia, glaciation of.

Scaphites aequalis, Chloritic marl.

Scapolite.

Scheerer on action of water in metamorphism.

Schist, mica.
--, argillaceous.
--, hornblende.

Schizodus Schlotheimi, Permian.
-- truncatus, Permian.

Schmerling, Dr., on Liege caverns.

Schorl-rock, and schorly granite.

Schwab, M., on Celtic coins in lake-dwellings.

Scoliostoma, St. Cassian.

Scoresby, on Arctic icebergs.

Scoriaceous lava.

Scoriae.

Scotland, "Fundamental gneiss" of.
--, Old Red Sandstone of.
--, glaciation of.

Screws, fossil, internal casts of shells.

Scrope, Mr., on Isle of Ponza, globiform pitchstone.
--, on minerals in lava.
--, on water in lava.

Scudder, Mr., on Devonian insects of Canada.

Sea, apparent fall of, caused by rise of land.
--, denuding power of the.
--, deep soundings in.
--, mean depth of the.
-- cliffs, inland.

Secondary and Tertiary, gap between the.
--, term defined.

Section of Auvergne alluvium.
-- of carboniferous rocks, Lancashire.
-- of chalk and greensand.
-- of crags near Woodbridge, Suffolk.
-- of cross-stratification.
-- of curved strata of the Jura.
-- of dirt-bed in Isle of Portland.
-- of Forfarshire, showing curved strata.
-- of fossil tree, showing texture.
-- of folded and denuded carboniferous beds, Nova Scotia.
-- of the Oolitic strata.
-- of Recent and Post-pliocene alluvial deposits.
-- showing creeps in coal-mines.
-- of slaty cleavage.
-- showing valleys of denudation.
-- showing the Weald formation.
-- of strata thinning out.
-- of superimposed groups at Dundry Hill.
-- of unconformable strata near Mons.

Sections illustrating faults.

Sedgwick, Professor, on the Cambrian Group.
--, on classification of Arenig group.
--, on Devonian series.
--, on position of the May-Hill beds.
--, on protrusion of solid granite.
--, on slaty cleavage.
--, on garnet in altered rock.
--, on concretionary structure.

Sediment, accumulation of, causing a shifting of the subterranean isothermals.

Sedimentary beds of the Carboniferous.

Selsea Bill, erratics at.

Senarmont on action of water in metamorphism.

Sequoia Langsdorfii.

"Seraphim," head of Pterygotus anglicus.

Serapis, marine littoral deposits of.

Serpentine.

Serpulae attached to Gryphaea.
-- attached to Spatangus.
-- attached to Apiocrinus.

Shale defined.
-- of the Lower Ludlow.

Sharpe, Mr. D., on American Silurian fossils.
--, on fossils distorted by cleavage.

Shell-mounds of Denmark.

Shells, Arctic, in Scotch drift.
--, derivative, in the Crag.
--, marine, found at great heights above the sea.
--, proportion of living, in the Crags.
--, value of, in classification.
--, fossil, of Virginia.
-- of the London clay.
-- of the mountain limestone.
-- of the Barton clay.
-- of the Oolite.
--, marine, of Moel Tryfaen.

Sheppey, fauna and flora of.
--, Eocene fish of.

Sherringham, erratic block at.

Shetland, granite of.
--, hornblende-schist of.

Sicily, fauna and flora of, older than the country itself.
--, newer Pliocene strata of.
--, subterranean igneous action in.
--, undulating gypseous marls of.
--, volcanic dikes of.

Sidlaw Hills, trap of.

Sigillaria in coal-measures.

Sigillaria laevigata, coal-measures.

Siliceous limestone defined.

Silurian, derivation of the name.
--, granite of Norway.
--, metamorphic, of North Highlands.
-- rocks, classification of.
-- strata of the continent of Europe.
-- strata of United States.
-- volcanic rocks.

Siphonotreta unguiculata, obolus grits.

Siwalik Hills, fresh-water deposits of.

Skaptar Jokul, flow of lava from.

Skye, hypersthene rocks of.
--, Isle of, Miocene syenite of the.
--, trap dike in.

Slaty cleavage.

Slicken-sides, in opposite walls of veins.
--, term defined.

Smilax sagittifera, Oeningen.

Smith, Mr. W., on White Lias bed.

Snowdon, volcanic tuffs of.

Soissonnais sands.

Solenastraea cellulosa, Brockenhurst.

Solenhofen stone, fossils in the.

Solfatara, decomposition of rocks in the.

Somma, cone and dikes of.

Sopwith, Mr. T., models of outcrop of strata.

Sorby, Mr., on action of water in metamorphism.
--, on glass cavities in quartz.
--, on mechanical theory of cleavage.
--, on ripple-marks in mica schist.

South Joggins, section of cliffs at.

Spalacotherium, Purbeck.

Spatangus radiatus, Chalk.
-- with serpula attached.

Species, gradual change of.
-- older than the land they inhabit.
--, similarity of conditions causing reappearance of.

Specific gravity of basalt and trachyte.

Speer and Rigi, Lower Miocene of the.

Speeton Clay.

Sphaerexochus mirus, Silurian.

Sphaerulites agariciformis, White Chalk.
-- of volcanic minerals.

Sphenophyllum erosum, Coal.

Sphenopteris gracilis, Hastings sands.

Spheroidal concretions in limestone.

Spicula of sponge, Atlantic mud.

Spirifera disjuncta, Devonian.
-- alata, Permian.
-- mucronata.
-- trigonalis, and S. glabra.

Spiriferina Walcotti, Lias.

Spirolina stenostoma, Eocene.

Spirorbis carbonarius, coal-measures.

Spondylus spinosus, White Chalk.

Sponge in flint from White Chalk.

Sponges, vitreous, in the chalk.

Springs, mineral of Auvergne.

Staffa, age of columnar basalt of.

Stalactite, origin of, explained.

Starfish in Silurian strata.

Stations of species affecting distribution of fossils.

Stauria astraeiformis.

Stereognathus of Stonesfield.

Sternberg, Count, on insects in coal.

Stigmaria attached to trunk of Sigillaria.
-- in coal-measures.
-- ficoides and surface showing tubercles, Coal.

Stilbite.

Stiper-Stones or Arenig Group.

Stockwerk, assemblage of veins.

Stonesfield slate, mammalia of the.

Strata, term defined, alternations of fresh-water, and shallow and deep-sea.
--, alternations of marine and fresh-water.
--, curved, inclined, and vertical.
--, apparent horizontality of inclined.
--, contorted in drift.
--, contortion of, in Cyclopean Isles.
--, general table of fossiliferous.
--, horizontality of.
--, origin of metamorphic.
--, outcrop of.
--, overlapping.
-- repeated by being doubled back.
--, slow growth of, attested by fossils.
-- of organic origin.
--, tests of age of.
--, unconformability of.
--, vast thickness of, not forming high mountains.

Stratification, diagonal or cross.
--, different forms described.
-- of metamorphic rocks considered.

Stratified rocks, composition of.

Striae, production of.

Strickland, Mr., on thickness of the Trias.

Stricklandinia lirata.

Strike, term explained.

Stringocephalus Burtini.

Stromboli, lava of.

Strophomena depressa, Wenlock.
-- grandis.

Studer, Mr., on gneiss of the Jungfrau.

Subaerial denudation, average annual amount of.

Subapennine beds, proportion of recent species in.
-- strata, older Pliocene.

Submarine denudation.

Subsidence of land must preponderate over upheaval.

Succinea amphibia.
-- elongata.

Suess, M., on fossils of St. Cassian beds.
--, on Vienna basin.

Suffolk, Crag of.

"Sunk country," New Madrid.

Superga, Lower Miocene of the.

Superior, Lake, marl in.

Superposition of deposits, a test of age.
-- a test of age of volcanic rocks.

Sutherlandshire, unconformable Palaeozoic strata in.

Swanage, fossil mammalia found at.

Sweden, Cambrian of.
--, slow rise of land in.
--, small thickness of Silurian strata in.

Switzerland, lake-dwellings of.
--, Lower Molasse of.
--, Middle or Marine Molasse of.
--, Upper Miocene of, at Oeningen.

Sydney coal-field, rain-prints in.

Syenite, composition of.
--, how far connected with trap-rocks.

Syenitic granite.

Symonds, Reverend W.S., on Moel Tryfaen shells.

Synclinal and anticlinal curves.

Table of Botanical Nomenclature.
-- of St. Cassian fossil mollusca.
-- of Cretaceous formations.
-- of Devonian series in Devon.
-- of divisions of Hastings Sand.
-- of English and French Eocene strata.
-- of ages of fossil vertebrata.
-- of Neocomian strata.
-- of mammalia older than Paris gypsum.
-- of marine testacea in the Crag.
-- of Oolitic strata.
-- of volcanic minerals.
-- of Silurian strata of United States.
-- of Silurian rocks.
-- of Triassic strata.
-- of Cambrian strata.
-- of Permian of north of England.
-- of Welsh coal-measures.
-- of thicknesses of Carboniferous limestone.
--, general, of fossiliferous strata.

Table Mountain, granite veins in clay-slate of.

Tails of homocercal and heterocercal fish.

Talcose granite.
-- gneiss.

Tarannon shales.

Tartaret cone, and lava of.

Tate, Mr., on St Cassian fossils.

Tealby series, Middle Neocomian.

Teeth of extinct mammalia.

Tellina balthica (T. solidula).
-- calcarea (T. proxima).
-- obliqua, Crag.

Temnechinus excavatus.

Temnopleurus excavatus.

Tentaculites annulatus, Silurian.

Terebellum fusiforme, Barton.
-- sopita, Barton.

Terebratula affinis, Aymestry.
-- biplicata, White Chalk.
-- carnea, White Chalk.
-- digona, Bradford clay.
-- fimbria, Inferior Oolite.
-- hastata, Mountain Limestone.
-- sella, Neocomian.
-- Wilsoni, Aymestry.

Terebratulina striata, White Chalk.

Terebrirostra lyra, Chloritic Sand.

Teredo navalis, boring wood.

Tertiary formations, classification of.
-- strata, subdivisions of.
--, term defined.

Testacea. See Shells.

Thallogens.

Thamnastraea, Coral Rag.

Thanet sands.

Theca operculata, Tremadoc beds.

Thecodontosaurus, tooth of.

Thecodus parvidens, Ludlow.

Thecosmilia annularis, Coral Rag.

Thirria, M., on Nerinaean limestone.

Thompson, Dr., on Nummulites of Thibet.

Thomson, Wyville, on Atlantic mud.
--, on sponges in chalk mud.

Thuringia, monitor of.

Thurmann, M., on Bernese Jura Oolite.
--, on structure of the Jura.

Thylacotherium Prevostii, Stonesfield.

Tile-stones of the Upper Ludlow.

Tilgate forest, fossil Iguanodon in.

Till described.
--, mammoth in Scotch.
-- of North America.

Tin veins, age of, in Cornwall.

Titanoferrite.

Torell, Dr., on ice-action in Greenland.
--, on Swedish Cambrian fossils.

Touraine, faluns of.

Tourmaline.

Trachytic rocks.
-- tuff.
-- porphyry.
-- lava, age of.

Trap, term defined.
-- dike, intercepting strata.
-- dikes.
--, intrusion of, between strata.
-- rocks, ages of.
-- rocks passing into granite.
-- tuff described.

Trappean rocks, nomenclature of.
-- rocks, their relation to active volcanoes.

Trass of Lower Eifel.

Travertin, how deposited.
--, inferieur of Paris basin.

Tree ferns, living.

Trees erect in coal, Nova Scotia.

Tremadoc slates and their fossils.

Tremolite.

Trenton limestone, fossils of the.

Trezza, volcanic rocks of.

Trias, beds of passage between Lias and.
-- of England.
-- of Germany.
--, Saurians of the.
-- of the United States.

Triassic mammifer, North Carolina.

Triclinic feldspars.

Tridymite, crystallised silica.

Trigonellites latus, Kimmeridge clay.

Trigonia caudata, Neocomian.
-- gibbosa, Portland stone.

Trigonocarpum ovatum, and T. olivaeforme, Coal.

Trigonotreta undulata, Permian.

Trilobites of Bala and Caradoc beds.
--, metamorphosis of.
-- of primordial zone.

Triloculina inflata, Eocene.

Trimmer, Mr., on contorted strata.
--, on shells of Moel Tryfaen.

Trinucleus concentricus, T. Caractaci.

Trionyx, carapace of, Bembridge.

Tripoli composed of diatomaceae.

Trochoceras giganteus, Ludlow.

Trophon antiquum (Fusus contrarius).
-- clathratum, Scotch drift.

Tuff defined.
--, shelly, of the Grand Canary.
--, trappean, of Llandeilo rocks.
--, shelly, of Gergovia.

Tupaia Tana, recent.

Turner, Dr., on chemical decomposition.

Turrilites costatus, Chalk.

Turritella multisulcata, Bracklesham.

Tuscany, mineral springs of.

Tylor, Mr., on amount of subaerial denudation.

Tyndall, Dr., on slaty cleavage.

Tynedale fault.

Tynemouth cliff, brecciated limestone of.

Typhis pungens, Barton clay.

Uncites Gryphus, Devonian.

Unconformability of strata.

Underlying, term applied to plutonic rocks.

Unger on American forms in Swiss Miocene flora.
-- on Miocene plants of Croatia.

Ungulite, or Obolus grit of Russia.

Unio littoralis.
-- Valdensis, Hastings Sands.

United States, Cambrian of the.
--, Cretaceous rocks of.
--, Devonian of.
--, Eocene strata in the.
--, footprints in Carboniferous of.
--, Lower Miocene of.
--, older Pliocene and Miocene formations of.
--, Silurian strata of.
--, Trias of the.

Upheaval of land more than counteracted by subsidence.
--, power of denudation to counteract.

Upper Greensand, or Chloritic series.

Upsala, erratics on modern marine drift near.

Ural Mountains, auriferous alluvium of.

Uralite.

Ursus spelaeus, tooth of.

Urville, Captain de, on size of icebergs.

Val d'Arno, Newer Pliocene of.

Valleys, origin of.

Valorsine, granite veins in talcose gneiss in.

Valvata piscinalis.

Vanessa Pluto, Lower Miocene, Croatia.

Vegetation of the Coal.
-- of the Devonian of America.
--. See Plants.

Veins, chemical deposits in.
--, granite rocks altered by.
--, different kinds of minerals.
--. See Mineral veins.

Vein-stones.

Venericardia planicosta.

Venetz, M., on Alpine glaciers.

Ventriculites radiatus, Chalk.

Verneuil, M. de, on Russian Silurian.
--, on Permian flora.

Vertebrata, progress of discovery of fossil.

Vertical strata.

Vesuvius, Recent and Post-pliocene volcanic rocks of.
--, basaltic lavas of.
--, tufaceous strata of.
--, dikes of.

Vicarya Lujani, Punfield.

Vicentin, columnar basalt of the.

Vienna Basin, Upper Miocene beds of.

Vine in Upper Miocene beds at Oeningen.

Virginia, eighty miles of fault in.
--, coal-field of.

Virlet, M, on corrosion of rocks near Corinth.
--, on Cretaceous traps of Greece.
--, on fossils in veins.
--, on volcanic rocks of the Morea.

Volcanic ash or tuff.
-- breccia.
-- dikes.
-- force and denudation opposing powers.
-- mountains, structure and origin of.

Volcanic rocks defined.
--, mineral composition of.
--, Recent and Post-pliocene.
--, Pliocene.
--, Miocene.
--, Eocene.
--, Cretaceous and Liassic.
--, New Red, Permian and Carboniferous.
--, Old Red Sandstone.
--, Silurian, Cambrian and Laurentian.
-- of Auvergne.
--, columnar and globular, structure of.
-- of Grand Canary.
-- of Silurian age.
--, special forms of structure of.
--, tests of age of.

Volcanoes, extinct.
-- of Auvergne.

Voltzia heterophylla, Bunter.

Voluta ambigua, Barton clay.
-- athleta, Barton.
-- Lamberti, coralline and Red Crag.
-- Lamberti, faluns.
-- nodosa, London clay.
-- Selseiensis, Bracklesham.

Von Buch, Leopold, on "elevation craters."
--, on Silurian plutonic rocks.

Wacke described.

Wagner, M., on Miocene of Greece.

Walchia piniformis, Permian.

Wales and England, glaciation of.

Wallich, Dr., on Atlantic mud.

Water, denuding power of running.
--, action of, in metamorphism.

Watt, Gregory, on fusion of rock.

Weald clay and its fossils.

Wealden area, thickness of the.
-- formation.
-- flora.

Webster, Mr. T., on Tertiary strata.

Wellington Valley caves.

Wenlock formation, fossils of the.
-- limestone.
-- shale.

Werner on mineral veins in Saxony.
-- on isomorphism.

Westwood, Mr., on Lias beetles.

Wexford, veins of copper at.

Whitaker, Mr., on subaerial origin of escarpments.

White or coralline crag.
-- sand of Alum Bay.

Whymper, Mr., on Arctic Miocene plants.

Williams, Mr., on Cornish lodes.

Williamson, Professor, on Conifers of the Coal.
--, on structure of calamite.

Wind, denuding action of the.

Wood, Mr. Searles, on Bridlington shells.
--, on Chillesford and Aldeby beds.
--, on shells of the Crags.
--, on shells of Crag and faluns compared.
--, on fish of Headon series.
--, table of marine testacea of the Crag.
--, on thickness of coralline crag.

Woodward, Dr., on St. Cassian fossils.

Woodward, Mr. H., on Pterygotus.

Woolhope beds.

Woolwich and Reading series.

Wright, Dr., on Barton shells.
--, on zones of the Lias.

Wunsch, Mr. E.A., on trees in volcanic ash.

Wyville Thomson. See Thomson.

Xiphodon gracile, Paris basin.

Xylobius Sigillariae, Nova Scotia coal.

Yoredale beds, thickness of the.

Yorkshire, Oolite of.

Young, Mr., on seeds washed out of mammoth tusks.

Zechstein of Germany.

Zeolites, secondary volcanic minerals.

Zeuglodon cetoides, Eocene, United States.

Zircon-syenite.

Zoantharia rugosa and Z. aporosa.

Zones of the Lias.

Zonites priscus, Coal.

Zoological provinces, great extent of.

Zoophytes, fossil.
--. See Corals, Bryozoa, etc.

Zurich, lake-dwellings in Lake of.


End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Student's Elements of Geology
by Sir Charles Lyell