STRATIGRAPHICAL GEOLOGY. 459 



Mesozoic epoch. But in North America and on the Con- 

 tinent there has been an adverse current. The near relation- 

 ship of the floras and faunas of the Permian deposits with 

 those of the Carboniferous seemed to make it injudicious to 

 draw any such sharp line of division at the conclusion of the 

 Carboniferous period as would be indicated if the Permian 

 rocks were transferred to Mesozoic time. And so close had 

 the relationship between the Permian and Carboniferous 

 systems appeared, that A. de Lapparent, in the first two 

 editions of his admirable Text-book of Geology, had united 

 them under the name of " Permo-Carboniferous System." 



F. The Triassic System. The fossils preserved in the older 

 horizons of the Triassic system in Western and Southern 

 Europe afford evidence that the plants and animals which 

 flourished and abounded in these areas during Permian and 

 earlier epochs had largely given place to new forms of life. 

 European geologists therefore sought to give expression to 

 local disconuities of the palseontological chain by regarding the 

 Triassic system as the first of a Mesozoic epoch, when the 

 characteristic forms of life were intermediate between the 

 faunas and floras of the very ancient or Palaeozoic epochs and 

 the younger or Cainozoic epochs. The Mesozoic epoch is sub- 

 divided into three systems or formations Triassic, Jurassic, 

 and Cretaceous. 



In the eighteenth century, Lehmann and Fiichsel recog- 

 nised in Thuringia the Bunter (or variegated) Sandstone and 

 Muschelkalk (or shell limestone) as independent members of 

 the Flotz series, and had separated them from the Red Under- 

 lyer and Zechstein. The characteristic fossils of the Thur- 

 ingian Muschelkalk are admirably described and figured in 

 Schlotheim's Nachtrage zur Petrefaktenkunde (1823). Never- 

 theless, there was for a long time great insecurity in Germany 

 regarding the Bunter Sandstone and the limestone above it, 

 as many geologists, even such travelled observers as Leon- 

 hard, Charpentier, and Voltz, confused the Bunter Sandstone 

 with the North German Underlyer, and the grey limestone or 

 Muschelkalk with the Zechstein, 



Peter Merian, in his first treatise (1821) on the geology of 

 the neighbourhood of Bale, was uncertain about the strati- 

 graphical position of the Bunter Sandstone, but showed that 

 this horizon of rock was succeeded both in the Vosges and in 



