154 



SilTaims Tancred do Gralet dc Dolomieu, originally a Knight of 

 St. John of ilalta, entered the army, and whilst serving, he 

 studied chemistry and geology. In the throes of the French 

 Kevolution, when they might have expected him to bo attending 

 to other matters, they fontui him writing from Malta in 1791 

 a letter in which he said he had noticed in the Southern Tyrol 

 a certain limestone which did not effervesce with acid as readily as 

 most limestone did, and he hud also seen some similar stone worked 

 into statues in Rome. 



With regard to the geological place of these particular rocks, 

 he might say there were known to be three different layers of 

 them. They had the lowest bed called the " Mendolo Dolomite," 

 but so low down that it only cropped up in the Eisack Valley. 

 Then he believed that, with a little layer of volcanic deposit — 

 volcanic ashes and so forth between, they had what was known as 

 " Schlern Dolomite" or Middle Dolomite. This was the one with 

 whicli they had to deal chiefly that evening. This was scattered 

 about in various parts of South Tyrol. Then they had a very 

 thin intermediate layer of raibl or rubbish, partly volcanic and 

 partly marine, and above that occurred the third or higher 

 Dolomite bed, generally known as the Dachstem Dolomite, although, 

 like its predecessors, it had half-a-dozen nanles in the pages of 

 different geological writers, chiefly Geiman. The Dach stein 

 Dolomite was to be found all over the eastern part of South Tyrol, 

 the "Schlern" chiefly in the western half of that region. They 

 differed in age and also in their fossils. "While in the " Schlern " 

 he found no fossils whatever in the course of a cursory examination, 

 in the Dachstein he could hardly go 100 feet up a mountain side 

 without seeing a fossil. 



It was believed that this "Schlern Dolomite" was formed 

 during a period of shallow depression audit seemed to fill the gap 

 between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic formations in Britain. There 

 were no beds of the same age in Great Britain, although there was 

 a magnesian limestone. York Minster and Westminster Hall were 

 built in part of it, and it might have the same chemical elements 

 as the Dolomite in Tyrol, but it was not of the same age. 



That brought them on to theories of the origin of these rocks, 

 and that was a very interesting subject indeed. How were they 

 formed? Look at the photographs and paintings, see what strange 

 shapes these peaks assumed. They rose np in the most fantastic 

 forms, and, for himself, the first time he saw th('m from an 

 elevation and looked down lie said at once, " Surely these 

 mountains are volcanic." Tiiey had been thrown up into this 

 peculiar form by some igneous agency from below. That theory 

 was held by Leopold Von Buch, who said, in 1822 : " The Dolomite 



