VI 



Murckison 249 



Alps, bringing back with him at the end of each season a 

 bundle of well-filled note-books from which to prepare 

 communications for the Geological Society. These early 

 papers, meritorious though they were, do not call for any 

 special notice here, since they marked no new departure in 

 geological research, nor added any important province to 

 the geological domain. 



During six years of constant activity in the field, 

 Murchison worked out with Sedgwick the structure of 

 parts of the west and north of Scotland and toiled hard in 

 disentangling the complicated structure of the eastern 

 Alps ; he also rambled with Lyell over the volcanic areas 

 of Central and Southern France. Thereafter he deter- 

 mined to try whether the " interminable grey wacke," as he 

 called it, could not be reduced to order and made to yield 

 a stratigraphical sequence, like that which had been so 

 successfully obtained among younger formations. At the 

 time when he began, that is, in the summer of 1831, 

 absolutely nothing was known of the succession of rocks 

 below the Old Eed Sandstone. It was an unknown land, a 

 pathless desert, where no previous traveller had been able 

 to detect any trace of a practicable track towards order, or 

 any clue to a system of arrangement that would enable the 

 older fossiliferous rocks of one country to be paralleled 

 with those of another. 



Starting with his " wife and maid, two good grey nags 

 and a little carriage, saddles being strapped behind for 

 occasional equestrian use," Murchison made his way into 

 South Wales. In that region, as was well known, the 

 stratigraphical series could be followed down into the Old 

 Red Sandstone, and within the frame or border of that 



