486 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY. 



which, if less ambitious, were based upon accurate strati- 

 graphical investigation of the locality taken as the type in each 

 case. But in the new sub-division Mojsisovics assumed the 

 most important palaeontological limit to pass through the 

 middle of the masses of limestone and dolomite where it was 

 an impossibility to find any stratigraphical evidence of it. 

 Nevertheless, the swing of the pendulum of Austrian research 

 from the stratigraphical to the palaeontological aspect of the 

 succession was not without a distinct advantage. All through 

 the Eastern Alps, in the villages and valleys, there were local 

 collectors enthusiastically engaged in seeking and disinterring 

 the booty of fossils for the Imperial Museum in Vienna ; rocks 

 were even quarried, and the greatest precaution taken to pro- 

 cure the Cephalopods in as complete a state as possible from 

 the limestone and marble of the Salzkammergut. 



New surveys were conducted by Mojsisovics in the Inn 

 valley, the Kaiser mountains, and Karwendel mountains during 

 1869 and 1870, and the results of those induced him to make 

 many important alterations on his former sub-division of Upper 

 Trias in North Tyrol. Now the Lower Cardita or Partnach 

 strata were placed by him beside the Partnach Dolomite as 

 the representatives of the Noric division ; then came Cardita 

 strata again as the equivalent of St. Cassian strata ; above that, 

 the Wetterstein limestone ; then a third horizon of Cardita 

 strata corresponding to the Lower or Upper Raibl beds ; and 

 finally, the Main Dolomite as the Rhaetic division. In the year 

 1873 Mojsisovics identified the Arlberg limestone in Vorarl- 

 berg with Partnach dolomite in North Tyrol and Bavaria, 

 and contested the occurrence of Wetterstein limestone in 

 Vorarlberg. 



In 1874, after Mojsisovics had become personally acquainted 

 with the South Alpine Trias, he contributed a memoir to the 

 Austrian Jahrbuch, in which he developed his ideas regarding 

 biological provinces in the Alpine seas during Upper Triassic 

 eras, and the consequent local variations of rock-facies. He 

 began by demonstrating the narrow geographical limits within 

 which the Cephalopod fauna of the Noric division was con- 

 fined between Berchtesgaden and the Leitha mountains, and 

 explained the existence of a special fauna on the assumption 

 that the area in question during the deposition of the Lower 

 Hallstatt limestone and Zlambach strata had been almost com- 

 pletely shut off from the other parts of the Alpine Triassic sea. 



