480 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY. 



Leymerie, and afterwards strongly advocated by Jules Martin in 

 several able treatises (1860-65). 



The next important advances in the knowledge of Alpine Trias 

 were those made by Giimbel in the northern zone of the Alps. 

 The volume cited above by Gtimbel on the Bavarian Alps was 

 accompanied by five geological map-sheets surveyed on the scale 

 of 1:100,000, and by forty-two sections elucidating the geology 

 of the Bavarian Alps. It was the work of a resourceful man with 

 inexhaustible energy, an iron frame, complete mastery of the 

 latest information in his subject, an unquenchable thirst for 

 new facts, new discoveries, and withal possessed of a 

 genius for stratigraphical problems. For fifty years C. W. 

 Giimbel occupied a pre-eminent position amongst European 

 geologists. As Director of the Bavarian Geological Survey 

 he controlled a wide sphere of geological, mineralogical, and 

 palaeontological activity, and his own individual achievements 

 are amongst the most remarkable in the history of Alpine 

 geology. 



Even in this first large volume by Giimbel, he unfolded his 

 novel conception that there had been at one time a mountain- 

 chain to the north of the present Alps, stretching from the 

 south-west edge of the mountains and uplands of the Bavarian 

 Forest westward as far as the central French plateau. Giimbel 

 called this supposed earlier mountain-range the Vindelic Chain, 

 and upon the hypothesis that it separated Lower Bavaria and 

 the adjoining areas from the region of the existing Bavarian 

 Alps, he explained the differences between the deposits of the 

 Alpine and extra-Alpine Trias. Again, upon the hypothesis 

 that the disappearance of the Vindelic Chain was in some 

 way associated with the vast upheaval of the eastern Alps in 

 Cretaceous and Tertiary epochs, Giimbel thought many of the 

 complicated questions regarding the lithological composition 

 and peculiar surface distribution of the " Flysch " and pebble- 

 beds of the north Alpine slopes might find an explanation. 

 Be that as it may, Giimbel's " Vindelic Chain " has received 

 more countenance in the Alpine literature than usually falls to 

 the share of the more daring flights of geologists. 



A favourite theire with Giimbel was the determination of 

 time-equivalents in the faunal succession displayed in the rocks 

 of Lower Bavaria and those of the Bavarian Alps, and this 

 tendency to emphasise the comparative aspect of Alpine and 

 extra- Alpine deposits is apparent even in the nomenclature 



