and Writings of l^aron Leopold von Buck, 207 



tion itself contains many facts which were then entirely new. 

 Von Buch there directs attention to a peculiar rock which had 

 previously been entirely overlooked, which forms the Zobten- 

 Berg that has a height of upwards of 2000 feet, and which af- 

 terwards, when he had found it in many other parts of Europe, 

 he minutely described in the Magazin der Berliner Gesellschaft 

 naturforschender Freunde^ 1810 and 1813, iv. 128, and vii. 

 234, and termed Gabbro. The facts adduced by him in this 

 description, taken collectively, have reference not only to the 

 principle that the rocks occurring in Silesia, from the oldest 

 to the youngest, are products deposited from water, but also 

 to the opinion that all stony masses, and the inequalities of 

 the surface of the earth, had been formed at the same places, 

 and under the same circumstances, as we find them at the 

 present time. This principle was applied in a very happy 

 manner to the vast conglomerate-formations of the rothe 

 Todte and of the coal-series. He shewed very beautifully 

 how the boulders or rolled stones which these contain, always 

 correspond to the older rocks occurring beneath them at the 

 surface ; further, how these boulders become always smaller, 

 the conglomerates always finer and more like sandstone, the 

 further we remove from the rocks whence they were derived. 

 He was, however, at that time far from believing that the 

 agitation of the waters which separated these masses, and 

 which had heaped up such gigantic masses of fragments, could 

 have been caused by the eruption of the porphyries that had, 

 in such immense masses, partly thrust themselves between 

 these conglomerates, or become enveloped by them. We 

 also find much discussion on the floods which formed the 

 gneiss and mica-slate, and which could only deposit them in 

 particular districts, and in certain directions, because the 

 older mountain-rocks existed in already formed chains. These 

 descriptions, however, are so clear and so distinct, that they 

 are to be regarded as extremely complete even in the present 

 state of our knowledge. 



Observations made in the Alps, and in Italy, — In the year 

 1797, L. V. Buch quitted the field of his investigations in Nor- 

 thern Germany, and directed his course to the Alps, the scene 

 of his most important observations. At Salzburg, a neigh- 



