392 Geological Society, 



implying as great an anomaly as that which he had imagined to 

 occur in Devonshire, and by which he was himself once led into 

 error during an Alpine excursion, about eighteen years since, when 

 he met with coal plants in the schists of the Col de Balme, in 

 Switzerland. He then inferred that the beds belonged to the true 

 coal measures, but M. Elie de Beaumont afterwards proved them 

 to be lias ; that is to say, he identified them with other rocks not far 

 distant in the Alps, which were shown to be lias by containing Belem- 

 nites and other fossils. Mr. De la Beche was at first sceptical on the 

 point, but after revisiting the Alps, he came round to the same opi- 

 nion. Having therefore been in one instance misled by relying on 

 the fossil vegetables of the coal as affording a good chronological 

 test, he naturally attached but small value to the same testimony as 

 a criterion of the age of another set of rocks in Devonshire. Now 

 you will easily understand that a geologist, who is once persuaded 

 that the same plants flourished in European latitudes from the pe- 

 riod of the true coal to that of the lias, will be ready to concede 

 without difficulty the probable existence of the same plants at an 

 era long antecedent to the coal. We know that between the depo- 

 sition of the coal and the lias there were successive revolutions in 

 the races of animals which inhabited the waters, the zoophytes, 

 mollusca, fish, and, as far as we know them, the reptiles having been 

 changed again and again ; so that the fossils of the mountain lime- 

 stone differ from those of the magnesian limestone or zechstein, 

 these again from the organic remains of the muschelkalk, and these 

 last from those of the lias. If we are to believe that the same 

 plants survived on the land, while such fluctuations in animal life 

 occurred in the waters, why should we not imagine the longevity of 

 the same species to have been still greater, so that they began to 

 exist even before the deposition of the old red sandstone ? But let 

 me remind you that botanists have been led to very different con- 

 clusions respecting the laws governing the distribution of fossil ve- 

 getables from the study of undisturbed districts. You are not 

 ignorant that the strata of the Alps are involved in extreme confu- 

 sion and complexity, mountain masses having been completely 

 overturned and twisted, so that the same set of strata have been 

 found at the top and bottom of the same section separated by seve- 

 ral thousand feet of beds belonging to an older formation. So 

 obscure is the order of position in Alpine geology, that the cretaceous 

 and greensand series have been classed by experienced geologists 

 as more ancient than the oolite, under which, in point of fact, they 

 occasionally lie. 



Professor Studer, in his work on the Bernese Highlands, after 

 years of personal investigation, has published a map in which he 

 has given a coloured ground plan without venturing to commit him- 

 self by sections, or a table of the regular order of superposition. 



After devoting a summer to the investigation of the same portion 

 of Switzerland, with the advantage of Mr. Studer's map and work, 

 I was unable to satisfy myself that I had found a key to the classi- 

 fication or superposition of the formations, so enormous is the scale 



