Secondary and Tertiary Fossil Plants. 223 



professors, Meneghini and Savi, have detected near Volterra 

 anthracitic schists containing coal plants like those of the 

 Alps, such as Pecopteris arborescens and Annularia longifolia, 

 on which beds of lias with the ordinary marine shells repose. 

 These schists belong to the Verrucano or oldest conglome- 

 rate of Italy, which, so long as no fossils were obtained from 

 it, had been regarded in Tuscany as the base of the lias, but 

 which will henceforth be classed as a carboniferous conglo- 

 merate and schist supporting the Jurassic series. Such facts 

 seem to have a direct bearing on the enigmatical question of 

 Petit-Coeur, from the circumstance that in many parts of the 

 Alps, as in the well-known instance of the Valorsine, which 

 I have myself examined, the plant-bearing schists are asso- 

 ciated with a conglomerate doubtless analogous to the Ver- 

 rucano. This fact Sir Roderick Murchison and Professor 

 Heer have remarked, when commenting on the statements of 

 Signori Meneghini and Savi.* We have merely then to 

 imagine, that in the Tarantaise Alps, as in Tuscany, Jurassic 

 strata were first thrown down on horizontal coal-measures, 

 and that in the Tarantaise these were afterwards crumpled 

 and folded together by more than one series of movements, 

 which extended in the central Alps, as we know, even to the 

 cretaceous and eocene deposits. When we consider that oc- 

 casionally the Permian group is wanting in England, and the 

 Muschelkalk universally, we ought not to be surprised at the 

 omission in another part of Europe of all the beds between 

 the cokl-measures and the lias ; and it seems clear that if we 

 assent to the doctrine that the Verrucano of Volterra is a 

 palaeozoic rock, we are simply required to transfer to Tus- 

 cany the flexures and inverted position so characteristic of 

 the beds in many parts of the Alps, and we should have the 

 enigma of Petit-Cceur repeated. 



Having offered these observations on the fossil plants of 

 the palseozoic strata, a few words may suffice for the flora of 

 the secondary and tertiary eras, for in these all botanists 

 seem to agree that some highly developed families of mono- 



* Quart. Jom-n. Geol. Soc, vol. vi., p. 382 ; and Ileer, Mittheilungen der 

 Naturf. Gesellsch. in Zurich, January 1850. 



