148 



CHAPTER XII. 

 QUATERNARY PERIOD. 



IT is intended in the Plate opposite to sketch the district of 

 Durnten, on the southern frontier of the Canton of Zurich, at 

 the time of the paper-coal or lignite formation. The Speer, the 

 Schaniserberg, the peaked Miirtschenstock, and the chain of the 

 Waggithal mountains, with the snow-clad Glaris Alps, are in 

 the background. These mountains have remained unchanged 

 since the time of the formation of the paper-coals. But in the 

 foreground of the picture the present green covering of the 

 fields has been removed, and the world buried beneath the sur- 

 face has been brought again to life. The plants are riot different 

 from those of our time. It is the common Swiss reed which 

 fringes the pools, the Swiss pine that occupies the foreground, 

 the white birch that spreads over the marshy flat, an oak that 

 grows up into a vast tree on a dry spot, and the common red fir 

 which to the left raises its stately form. 



But the elephant, the rhinoceros, and the urus (Bos primige- 

 nius) } which we see in the picture, are animals quite strange 

 to modern Switzerland ; they give the landscape an ancient 

 character. And where, it may be asked, are the proofs that such 

 strange animals lived in Switzerland contemporaneously with the 

 plants of its existing flora ? and what justified the assumption 

 that at that time the Alps in their present form already made 

 the background of the Swiss landscape ? These questions are 

 answered by the paper coals or lignites. These strata are 

 consequently of great geological significance, and must here be 

 described. In the commune of Diirnten (515 metres, or 563 yards, 

 above the sea) the paper coals, the mode of formation of which 

 has been already explained (see vol. i. pp. 30, 31), occur at a 

 distance of only a few minutes' walk from the village, on the 



