System cannot be of the age of the Old Red Sandstone. 123 



sometimes assumes an aspect and character as must probably 

 perplex the advocates of the Old Red liypothesis to suggest 

 a reason why its fish and fossils are all wanting. No. 7 is the 

 first, hitherto, which has afforded the Trilobite, while its drs- 

 proportion to mountain lime fossils is as 153 to 1000. — 

 Phillips's Paleozoic Fossils, p. 177*. 



We are thus introduced in order to the " Carboniferous or 

 Great Mountain Limestone" of Devonshire; it is here divested 

 of its mountain character, of its lithological types, of upwards 

 of four hundred of its animal remains, and of all its usual mi- 

 neral associations. Everywhere on the north and south, and 

 from east to west, it occurs in small elliptical bunches in that 

 most un-English formation the Coddon Hill grit, a formation 

 perfectly sui geiieris so far as my experience has gone. This 

 "Great Carboniferous Limestone" has a maximum thickness 

 of about thirty-five feet, and, instead of its bold elevation in 

 the Mendips near at hand, is posited in holes and contracted 

 hollows, a result which can be shown in some localities to be 

 due to its incapability of resisting atmospheric decomposition 

 in an equal degree with its jaspery and cherty matrix. The 

 coral reef analogy, which has been ascribed to the mountain 

 limestone elsewhere, will by no means obtain here, as corals 

 and encrinites are rarely if ever met with. Altogether we 

 must admire the ingenuity and great powers of imagination, 

 which could detect it under its multifaricus disguises. The 

 same or greater difficulties must have beset the discoverers 

 of the English coal-measures in the floriferous group, when 

 we consider their respective subdivisions, and that, with the 

 exception of a \ew plants, a little impure culm and carbona- 

 ceous mud, they correspond in none. Where is the Millstone 

 grit, where the Pennant, where is the Clay-ironstone, where 

 is the Coal? It is surely strange, and passing strange, that in 

 an assumed identification of three great English yor/wa^/o«5, 

 in such close parallels, they should not correspond in one ; 

 that it should l)e all repulsion and no affinity ; that the dis- 

 cordance should be everywhere and the resemblance no- 

 where ! We have no occasion to draw so profusely on imagi- 

 nary possibilities to determine the New lied Sandstone, the 

 Lias, the Oolites, the Greensand, or the Chalk in Devon- 

 shire ! 



Meeting thus as we do with such an accumulation, such 

 mutual implications of contradiction and denial of this hypo- 



* For the several numbers here referred to, viz. 4,5,6, 7, &c., relating 

 to the author's subdivisions of tlic Devonian System, the reader is re- 

 (juesitcd to sec the section in tiie Phil. Mag. for Jan, 1840, page 60. 



