266 Address to the Lincolnshive Naturalist’s Union. 
land continued to sink, would come the want of drainage, then 
the morass, then the tidal wash, and, last of all, the full open sea. 
It was the work of ages. 
The Rheetic beds,—which owe their name to the Alps of 
Lombardy (the ancient Rheetia), the Grisons, and the Tyrol, 
where they attain a considerable thickness,—-had not been found 
further to the north in England, in 1866, than at Coptheath near 
Birmingham, and at Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire; when, in 
that year, as the gradients of the line between Gainsborough and 
Lincoln were lowered, I had the satisfaction of meeting with them. 
Since that time they have been discovered, in a nearly continuous 
line, across England from north to south, wherever the junction of 
the Trias and Lias is exposed. 
Some geologists place these beds at the top of the Trias, 
others at the base of the Lias, or Jurassic system. ‘This, however, 
is a matter of smallimportance. They are the passage beds from 
one great system to another, from the deposits of the upper 
Keuper lake to those of the great Liassic sea; beds which go far 
to unlock the hidden story of the land we are considering. 
About the origin of the bone beds referred to much specula- 
tion has taken place. 
Mr. Jukes Browne, in his work on ‘the Building of the 
British Isles,’—to which I am indebted for several of the facts 
stated in my paper,—speaks of the irruption of the sea water 
being prejudicial to the inhabitants of the Triassic lake, “so that 
most of them died, and their bones, scales and teeth were drifted 
into layers on the sea floor ;” but this I think could hardly have 
been the case, as, apparently, the concentrated saltness of the 
lake had, to a great extent, prevented the possibility of life,—no 
trace of it, except in a few localities, being met with throughout 
the system,—and this view Mr. Jukes Browne himself bears out, 
when, in another part of his work, speaking of the Triassic lake, 
he says, “the sheet of water being apparently as salt, as clear, 
and heavy and as nearly lifeless as the modern waters of the Dead 
Sea, or of the great salt lake of Utah.” May not these beds be 
rather due to the fishes, which the Liassic sea brought in, being 
