488 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY. 



The sub-divisions ot 1874 certainly introduced several 

 changes for the better ; it cancelled the Lower Cardita strata 

 and Partnach dolomite as independent horizons of deposit. 

 It also recognised the Raibl strata in their true stratigraphical 

 position below the Main Dolomite. In South Tyrol, Mojsisovics 

 in 1874 assigned Raibl strata to a position above the Schlern 

 dolomite and below the Main Dolomite. But in contrast to 

 Giimbel and Emmrich, Mojsisovics expressed himself as an 

 adherent of Richthofen's Coral-reef theory, and regarded it as 

 the chief explanation of the facies differences. The "Schlern 

 Dolomite " in South Tyrol, he said, represented the whole 

 Noric and a part of the Karnic division, and in many places, 

 for example, at the Mendel, at Latemar, and at Marmolata, 

 the " Mendola Dolomite " facies replaced the Muschelkalk. 



Five years later, in 1879, Mojsisovics published his memor- 

 able work on The Dolomite Reefs of South Tyrol, accompanied 

 by six coloured geographical map-sheets (scale, i : 100,000). 

 The general features of interest most prominently brought 

 forward by Mojsisovics in this work were his support of the 

 Coral reef theory, the significance ascribed by him to facies 

 variations within narrow geographical confines, the corrobora- 

 tion which appeared to be given by numerous geological sections 

 prepared in South Tyrol and Venetia to the sub-division of 

 the Trias erected by the author in 1874, and the more definite 

 boundaries ascertained for the Juvavic and Mediterranean 

 provinces of East Alpine Upper Trias. 



The systematic collection of fossils in all parts of the 

 Eastern Alps, which Mojsisovics had been mainly instrumental 

 in initiating, resulted in the accumulation of a vast store of 

 fossil material in Vienna. Again, there was one drawback, 

 that as the atmospheric weathering of fossils is an extremely 

 slow process, the first rich gathering of fossils was in many 

 cases picked up on the spot by the local village collectors, who 

 could not all be equally capable of remembering, amongst the 

 hundreds that were collected, the precise locality for each indi- 

 vidual fossil form. And when the geologists from Vienna after- 

 wards wished to be informed, there were loopholes of error that 

 could not always be controlled. At the same time, in Vienna, 

 numerous monographs of Alpine fossil forms were being pre- 

 pared and published, and displayed such wonderful beauty and 

 diversity in Alpine faunas that the palaeontologists of all lands 

 looked with admiration at the plates in the Vienna monographs. 



