86 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY. 



from the dry details his mind would sweep with easy relief 

 to the consideration of the broader truths of the science. 



The following passage may be quoted as an example of Von 

 Buch's style of writing. It describes his idea of the origin of 

 the Carboniferous series of rocks: "First the conglomerate 

 falls, a mixture of great stones that could not be carried far 

 from their parent mass, even by an angry flood; and they 

 tear away with themselves the mantle of vegetation which 

 had formerly reposed in security upon their surface. Woods 

 are overthrown, buried beneath the irresistible rush of jagged 

 and broken rock, again and again the floods rise and pour 

 over the land, renewing this drama of destruction. Countless 

 fragments are rolled from the heights into the narrow moun- 

 tain basins and valleys ; there in the hollow they are dashed 

 against one another, gyrated and rounded into pebble form. 

 After the surface has been denuded of its vegetation and 

 the force of the flood diminishes, the finer, lighter grains 

 begin to subside and the newer fine-grained sandstone accu- 

 mulates." 



Von Buch was particularly interested in the conglomerates, 

 and on the basis of the lithological features he traced the 

 pebbles and larger fragments included in the conglomerates 

 very carefully to their place of origin. He demonstrated 

 that the pebbles are smaller the more remote they are 

 from the rock from which they have been broken, and by com- 

 parative studies he tried to determine the direction that had 

 been followed by the transporting floods. 



From a strictly scientific point of view, Leopold von Buch's 

 geological researches were less successful than those of Voigt 

 or Freiesleben, which marked a distinct note of advance in 

 stratigraphical inquiry. The geological data given by Von 

 Buch in his Silesian papers are sketchy in comparison, and 

 there is no serious effort to draw up a definite succession of 

 the rock deposits upon either stratigraphical or palseontological 

 grounds. 



During his Norwegian journey, Leopold von Buch had 

 drawn attention to the position of granite above the "transi- 

 tional" limestone in the neighbourhood of Christiania. 

 Soon after, in 1811, a work on the Syenite Formation in 

 the Erz Mountains^ written by Raumer and' Engelhardt, 

 aroused great interest. These authors stated that the 

 granite and syenite on the north-east edge of the Erz 



