538 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PAL/EONTOLOGY. 



land or a marginal swamp, an estuary or an inland sea. The 

 conditions which prevailed over any one area during a definite 

 period were often transferred during the following period to 

 some neighbouring area, so that faunal similarities of a mis- 

 leading character were bound to arise. This seems to be the 

 explanation of the increasing difficulty that is experienced in 

 determining the precise stratigraphical equivalents in adjoining 

 districts ; the Synchronous Tables become more and more 

 complicated as the knowledge of stratigraphical data becomes 

 more specialised. 



The newer researches in Hungary, the Balkan lands, Greece, 

 Roumania, Russia, India, and other parts of the world, have 

 certainly succeeded in establishing the parallelism of the great 

 divisions (Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene), but the 

 zonal sub-divisions are extremely diverse. In North and South 

 America, the recognition even of the main divisions is very 

 uncertain, and it is impossible to apply any of the European 

 zonal classifications. It would, however, occupy too much 

 space to record the gradual progress of researches on the 

 Tertiary formations outside Central Europe; or to indicate the 

 debatable stratigraphical complexities that are associated with 

 the history of crust-movements during Tertiary epochs. 



J. Quaternary Formations. Whereas the beginnings of the 

 present sub-division of the Tertiary formations extend as 

 far back as the first decades of the nineteenth century, 

 the detailed investigation of the youngest geological system 

 was reserved for the last three decades of the century. Buck- 

 land, in 1823, described the deposits between the Tertiary 

 series and the sediments at present in course of formation. 

 He regarded these post-Tertiary deposits as the discharge from 

 a universal flood, and applied to them the name Diluvium in 

 contradistinction to Alluvium, the name given to all modern 

 accumulations of deposit. Lyell, in 1839, proposed to use the 

 term Pleistocene for the Diluvium of Buckland, and in 1854 

 Morlot suggested Quaternary, changed by Bronn to Quartary 

 (Quartar), a term which appears very often in the German litera- 

 ture, although never in the English form. 



The varied constitution of the Pleistocene deposits (pebble, 

 sand, clay, loess, bone breccias, boulder accumulations, erratic 

 blocks, moraines) and the frequent absence of organic remains 

 made it very difficult to determine the age of the different 



