246 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



that limit, everything betokened disorder. It appeared 

 well-nigh hopeless to expect that rocks so broken and 

 indurated, generally so poor in fossils, and usually so 

 sharply cut off from everything younger than themselves, 

 would ever be made to yield up a connected and con- 

 sistent series of chapters to the geological record. 



And yet these chapters, if only they could be written, 

 would be found to possess the most vivid interest. They 

 would contain the chronicles of the earlier ages of the 

 earth's history, and might be expected to reveal the 

 geography of the first dry land, the sites of the most 

 ancient seas, the positions of the oldest volcanoes, the forms 

 of the first plants and animals that appeared upon the 

 planet. There was thus inducement enough to attack the 

 old rocks that contained within their stony layers such 

 precious memorials. 



It is not that the Transition rocks were entirely 

 neglected. The keen interest awakened in fossils led to 

 renewed search among the fossiliferous members of that 

 ancient series. A large number of organic remains had 

 been collected from Devonshire, Wales, the Lake District, 

 Ehineland, the Eifel, France, Sweden, Norway, Bussia, 

 as well as from New York and Canada. These fossils 

 were distinct from those of the Secondary formations, and 

 they were obviously distributed, not at random, but in 

 groups which reappeared at widely separated localities. 1 



1 The amount and nature of the information in existence regarding the 

 Transition rocks or Greywacke, at the time when Murchison entered upon 

 their investigation, may be gathered from the summaries contained in the 

 contemporary general treatises on Geology. Even as late as the spring of 

 1833, Lyell, after devoting about 300 pages to the Tertiary formations, 

 dismissed the Palaeozoic series in twelve lines (Principles of Geology, vol. 

 iii. (1833), p. 326). One of the fullest descriptions of the older fossiliferous 



